According to a report by Free Times, major chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will set up R&D centers in Tainan and Kaohsiung to establish R&D teams focusing on silicon photonics, artificial intelligence (AI) and heterogeneous integration. AMD's investment is expected to drive a cluster effect in Taiwan's silicon photonics industry.
With the current rapid development of AI applications, silicon photonics technology is regarded as the key to high-speed computing and data transmission in the future, so major semiconductor manufacturers are actively investing in development. Since Taiwan has advantages in the semiconductor industry, AMD has developed its energy in Taiwan. Moreover, in order to expand its research and development energy, AMD has also jointly invested in silicon photonics research with domestic industry, academia and research units such as Sun Yat-sen University.
According to reports, this major investment case was applied for through the Ministry of Economic Affairs' "Global R&D Innovation Partnership Program" (Project A+). AMD's total investment in Taiwan exceeds NT$8.64 billion. This includes NT$3.31 billion subsidized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and NT$5.33 billion raised by AMD itself. This project focuses on the development of AI software and hardware forward-looking technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs stated that AI The competition is not limited to computing power, heat dissipation technology has also become a key battlefield. Since about 40% of the energy consumption of AI servers is converted into system waste heat, AMD has launched technical cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs to ensure that its new generation of high-power AI chips can maintain optimal performance.
In addition, in order to effectively solve the heat dissipation problem of high-power chips, AMD has joined hands with the Ministry of Economic Affairs to successfully break through the bottleneck of traditional cooling technology through the "dual-phase immersion cooling technology" developed by the Industrial Research Institute with subsidies from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, increasing the heat dissipation capacity to more than 1500W, and greatly improving the computing stability and energy efficiency of AI chips. This technology has been verified in the AMD field to ensure that the new generation of high-power AI chips remain stable in high operating environments and accelerate the training and inference of large language models.