GlobalFoundries unveiled its next generation silicon photonics platform and active design wins with major customers, including collaborations with Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Marvell, NVIDIA, Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum, Ranovus and Xanadu. The platform enables a high level of integration onto a photonics integrated circuit (PIC). It also supports innovative packaging solutions, such as the passive attachment for larger fiber arrays, support for 2.5D packaging, and on-die lasers.
GF Fotonix is a monolithic platform, the first in the industry to combine its differentiated 300mm photonics features and 300GHz-class RF-CMOS on a silicon wafer. The company says its new platform consolidates complex processes that were previously distributed across multiple chips onto a single chip by combining a photonic system, radio frequency (RF) components and high-performance complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) logic on a single silicon chip.
GF is the only pure-play foundry with a 300mm monolithic silicon photonics solution that has demonstrated the industry’s highest data rate per fiber (0.5Tbps/fiber). This enables 1.6-3.2Tbps optical chiplets, which deliver faster, more efficient transmission of data, more efficiently with better signal integrity. In addition, the up to 10,000x improvement in system error rate enables next generation artificial intelligence (AI).
GF Fotonix solutions will be manufactured at the company’s advanced manufacturing facility in Malta, N.Y., with the PDK 1.0 available in April 2022. EDA partners Ansys, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., and Synopsys provide design tools and flows to support GF’s customers and their solutions. GF provides customers with reference design kits, MPWs, testing, pre- and post-fab, turnkey and semiconductor manufacturing services to help customers get to market faster.
In addition, for customers needing discrete, high-performance RF solutions for optical systems, GF also announced it is adding new features onto the GF SiGe platform. High-performance silicon germanium (SiGe) solutions from GF are designed to deliver the speed and bandwidth required to transport information through next generation fiber optic high speed networks.
“As one of our trusted semiconductor partners across a broad range of technologies and process nodes, we are happy to see Global Foundries extend their investments for enabling a photonics ecosystem across components and integrated solutions,” Liming Tsau, vice president of Foundry Engineering, Broadcom Inc.
“The demands of today and tomorrow’s networking and communications infrastructure are requiring higher performance technologies for the design and manufacture of our optical transceiver modules,” said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of Optical Systems and Optics Group, Cisco Systems, Inc. “Our heavy investment and leadership in silicon photonics, combined with GF’s feature rich manufacturing technology, allows us to deliver best in class products.”
“Marvell continues to lead the industry with the highest performance transimpedance amplifiers and modulator drivers for next-generation optical connectivity solutions for the cloud data centers and carrier markets,” said Dr. Loi Nguyen, executive vice president, Optical and Copper Connectivity Group, Marvell. “GF’s latest silicon germanium (SiGe) technology enables us to achieve the high bandwidth speeds and power efficiencies that our customers require to meet their ever-increasing data demands.”
“Since our earliest days, Ayar Labs and GlobalFoundries have partnered on the development of GF Fotonix, from incorporating our PDK requirements and process optimizations to demonstrating the first working silicon on the platform,” says Charles Wuischpard, CEO, Ayar Labs. “The combination of our leading monolithic electronic/photonic solution and GF Fotonix unlocks a tremendous market opportunity for chip-to-chip optical I/O and sets the stage for us to deliver substantial volume shipments by year end.”
“Silicon photonics is now recognized as a necessary technology for the datacenter revolution, and our leading semiconductor manufacturing technology platform accelerates adoption into the mainstream,” said Amir Faintuch, senior vice president and general manager of Compute and Wired Infrastructure at GF. “GF Fotonix is a feature-rich platform that addresses the most urgent, complex and difficult challenges in areas such as optical networking, super and quantum computing, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), 5G networks, aeronautics and defense.”
