Europe and Taiwan: Complementary Strengths for Scaling Photonic Chips

Across Europe, integrated photonics is moving into a new phase. Alongside world-leading research and innovation, the Netherlands and wider European ecosystem are building the design, fabrication, packaging, and integration capabilities needed to manufacture photonic chips at industrial scale.

At the same time, integrated photonics is becoming increasingly global. Taiwan has developed complementary strengths in silicon photonics, semiconductor manufacturing, and electronics integration: alongside deep connections to global technology markets. 

Collaboration between the two creates opportunities to share expertise, combine technologies, and develop new applications – while strengthening their respective capabilities.

Florian Federer, PhotonDelta’s Asia Business Development Manager, sees international collaboration as the way forward. 

Why Collaboration Matters

Unlike traditional semiconductors, the photonic chip value chain is still maturing. Scaling the industry requires expertise across multiple domains: advanced design, specialised material platforms, packaging, testing, manufacturing, and application development. Different regions have developed particular strengths across these capabilities, creating significant opportunities for international collaboration.

At the same time, the industry’s largest commercial opportunities are increasingly global. AI infrastructure is driving unprecedented demand for faster and more energy-efficient data movement. Hyperscalers are investing heavily in next-generation computing architectures. Telecommunications networks continue to evolve. At the same time, new opportunities are emerging across healthcare, sensing, automotive, and quantum technologies.

Meeting this demand will require strong regional ecosystems alongside international partnerships that combine complementary technologies, expertise, and market opportunities. As the industry matures, international collaboration can accelerate technological development, access, and adoption.

Why Taiwan Matters

Taiwan occupies a unique position within the global technology landscape. The country has spent decades building one of the world’s most sophisticated semiconductor ecosystems. For Europe’s photonics ecosystem, this creates a natural opportunity. 

The Netherlands and wider European ecosystem have established leadership across a range of photonic chip platforms, while Taiwan has deep expertise in silicon photonics and semiconductor technologies. As photonic systems increasingly combine different materials and functions, these capabilities become highly complementary.

However, Taiwan’s importance extends beyond manufacturing. Many of the supply chains supporting the world’s largest technology companies and hyperscalers are already embedded within its ecosystem, creating opportunities for European photonic chip companies to connect with major technology customers and develop new international markets.

That potential is already becoming visible. A recent collaboration between PhiX, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Ligitek, and Liverage brings together Dutch expertise in photonic chip packaging with Taiwanese strengths in optoelectronics, system integration, and manufacturing. Together, these organisations are developing next-generation optical engines and energy-efficient optical transceivers designed to support the growing demands of AI and high-performance computing.

Similarly, another partnership between Dutch company, QuiX Quantum, and Taiwanese photonics specialist, Artilux, aims to integrate advanced light-detection technology into next-generation quantum computers.

These projects demonstrate the potential of collaboration built around complementary technologies and expertise. Each ecosystem retains and develops its own capabilities while creating opportunities to combine strengths in areas where working together can accelerate new products and applications.

AI Is Accelerating The Opportunity

Artificial intelligence is creating a powerful new catalyst for integrated photonics. As computing demands continue to grow, current interconnect technologies face increasing challenges around bandwidth, energy consumption, and performance. Photonic technologies offer a pathway to overcome many of these limitations.

This shift is creating significant momentum throughout Taiwan’s technology ecosystem. Organisations that historically focused on electronics are now actively exploring photonics, including co-packaged optics, as they position themselves within the next generation of AI infrastructure.

Europe is simultaneously developing manufacturing capacity across complementary photonic platforms. Collaboration can therefore focus on combining technologies, developing new architectures, and addressing shared opportunities in rapidly growing AI markets.

Connecting Ecosystems Through Partnership

PhotonDelta plays an active role in helping turn these opportunities into long-term collaborations. Its focus is not simply on facilitating individual business transactions; but building lasting connections between ecosystems: enabling knowledge exchange, joint innovation, and commercial partnerships. This includes connecting Dutch photonic chip companies with Taiwanese manufacturers, foundries, system integrators, research organisations and technology leaders.

One important initiative in 2026 is TechBridge, a bilateral funding programme that supports market-driven innovation projects between organisations in the Netherlands and Taiwan. By encouraging companies to develop solutions together, the programme helps create stronger relationships while accelerating commercial outcomes.The programme also supports collaboration across design, packaging, integration, and manufacturing, while encouraging the development of new technologies and commercial applications.

PhotonDelta also supports regular inbound and outbound delegations, creating opportunities for organisations from both ecosystems to build relationships, explore partnerships, and identify new routes to market. In addition, events such as SEMICON Taiwan and PIC Summit Europe have become important platforms for strengthening these connections, bringing together companies, researchers, investors and policymakers from both regions.

This ecosystem-to-ecosystem approach reflects a broader reality: scaling photonics requires collaboration across borders, disciplines, and supply chains.

Where Collaboration Is Creating Momentum

One of the clearest opportunities lies in bringing together the different technology platforms developed by each ecosystem. Europe has established leadership across InP, SiN, TFLN and Al₂O₃, while Taiwan has deep expertise in silicon photonics. As heterogeneous integration becomes increasingly important, combining these platforms could enable new levels of performance and functionality.

Beyond the technology itself, both regions are exploring how integrated photonics can unlock new applications. Today, much of the industry’s attention is focused on AI, datacom, and telecommunications. Beyond today’s focus on AI, datacom, and telecommunications, integrated photonics could play an increasingly important role in healthcare, industrial automation, automotive systems, energy infrastructure, and environmental monitoring, while also enabling advances in quantum technology.

In addition, emerging materials and manufacturing techniques continue to open new possibilities for improving performance, increasing yields, and reducing costs. As these innovations mature, collaboration between research organisations, manufacturers, and commercial partners will play an increasingly important role in accelerating adoption. These efforts support many of the industry’s most important objectives: faster time-to-market, lower production costs, improved reliability, and scalable manufacturing.

For Europe, international collaboration and technological sovereignty go hand in hand. Building and scaling photonic chip manufacturing capacity within Europe remains central to that ambition. Partnerships with Taiwan can support that ambition through knowledge exchange and complementary technology development, while opening opportunities for joint applications and new markets.

The faster the industry can scale, the sooner those benefits can be realised.

Building The Future Together

Integrated photonics is entering an increasingly interconnected phase, with strong regional ecosystems forming the foundation for international collaboration.

Europe is building a complete photonic chip ecosystem, with the ambition and infrastructure to manufacture at scale within the region. Taiwan has built its own highly developed semiconductor and photonics ecosystem, with complementary strengths in silicon photonics, electronics integration and global technology markets.

The opportunity lies in connecting complementary technologies, expertise and markets in ways that strengthen both ecosystems. Through joint R&D, heterogeneous integration, knowledge exchange, and commercial partnerships, Europe and Taiwan can accelerate the global adoption of integrated photonics while continuing to develop their own strategic capabilities.