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Tower Semiconductor Teams up with Oriole to Advance AI Infrastructure and Networking with Nanosecond Optical Circuit Switching
Tower’s advanced silicon photonics platform enables optical networking innovation with high-speed optical circuit switching and transceivers for AI
About this update from Tower Semiconductor Ltd.
[{"type":"text","content":"Tower’s advanced silicon photonics platform enables optical networking innovation with high-speed optical circuit switching and transceivers for AI infrastructure MIGDAL HAEMEK, Israel, and Palo Alto, March 16, 2026 - Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ/TASE: TSEM), the leading foundry for high-value analog semiconductor solutions, and Oriole Networks, developer of the PRISM (Photonic Routing Infrastructure for Scalable Models) and PRISM Ultra networking platforms, today announced their collaboration to deliver ultra-low, deterministic-latency networking for scale-up and scale-out AI architectures, built on Tower’s mature silicon photonics platform. As AI models continue to scale, requiring increasingly large clusters of processors, achieving high-radix networks with massive bandwidth and low latency becomes increasingly challenging. Leveraging Tower’s advanced silicon photonics platform, Oriole’s edge-switching architecture enables nanosecond optical circuit switching and a passive network core designed to deliver low and predictable tail latency with improved resiliency. Based on market reports by Dell’Oro and LightCounting, the AI Networking market is expected to surpass $80B by 2030. Tower Semiconductor’s silicon photonics platform enables the integration of lasers, optical amplification, switching, high-speed modulation, and high-speed detection on a single platform, supporting Oriole’s nanosecond optical circuit switching with fast tunability and high bandwidth for AI networking. “We are excited to expand our silicon photonics applications beyond traditional data center transceivers and into the network fabric itself,” said Dr. Ed Preisler, General Manager of RF Business Unit at Tower Semiconductor. “Our joint work with Oriole is a key step toward bringing AI back-end networking to market that can scale clusters and break through today’s latency wall.” The collaboration combines Oriole’s networking technology with Tower’s silicon photonics manufacturing platform to commercialize nanosecond optical circuit switching as a foundational building block of Oriole’s network architecture. “The exponential growth of AI is forcing the industry to rethink traditional electrical, packet-switched network infrastructure,” said James Regan, CEO of Oriole. “Together with Tower Semiconductor, we’re developing nanosecond optical circuit switching t...