Is It Finally Time for Silicon Photonics to Shine?

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A new silicon-photonics process developed by GlobalFoundries has the backing of Ayar Labs, Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, and NVIDIA.

www.electronicdesign.com, Jul. 13, 2022 – 

GlobalFoundries believes there is a bright future for chips that harvest the potential of photons, the building blocks of light, instead of electrons to propel data faster at a fraction of the power and cost.

To get there, the U.S.-based foundry giant is banking on its second-generation silicon-photonics platform, called GF Fotonix. It has landed design wins with leaders in server networking chips such as Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, and NVIDIA, as well as startups Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum, and Ranovus to make chips that move data at the speed of light.

The contract chip maker is doubling down on silicon photonics after falling behind more generally in the chip sector when it stepped out of the race with Intel, Samsung, and TSMC to make the most advanced processors.

GlobalFoundries has pivoted, with a new focus on feature-rich chips for everything from smartphones to cars that are based on mature technology nodes. Business is booming. But it believes silicon photonics is its ticket back to the leading edge.

The executive leading this effort is Anthony Yu, vice president in its Wired and Computing business unit. While it could take years for silicon photonics to make a serious dent in the data center, he said, GF is hoping to get a foot in the door with companies betting on the technology to power up artificial intelligence and even quantum computers.

GlobalFoundries is hoping to hit it big with GF Fotonix following its IPO last year. It is pointing to early wins with companies that plan to use the platform as a sign that silicon photonics is ready for mass deployment.

Yu said GF Fotonix will open the door to the next generation of silicon photonics called co-packaged optics, which promise power and cost savings when used in switch chips that call the shots in data centers. Even chip-to-chip interconnects will have to use silicon photonics to limit the share of the processor's power budget wasted on I/O. Yu noted some customers want to use GF Fotonix to create chiplets that fit the bill.

"We wanted to announce that silicon photonics has arrived, and that may sound strange given all the virtues of silicon photonics," said Yu. "But it has been in the lab for a long time, and people have doubted it."

A Long Time Coming

Tech giants have used the power of photons to send data between geographically distant data centers over fiber optics and even undersea cables for decades. But they are also increasingly using light to move data within colossal data centers, hauling it between tens of thousands of server racks. To do so, they are utilizing optical networking modules that can be plugged directly into switches to convert light into electricity and vice versa.

Shorter distances between servers and various chips inside them are still spanned with electrical interconnects that move data via copper wires. "The data center is the foothold for silicon photonics right now," said Yu.

Today, moving data at the speed of light means using specialty materials. These include indium phosphide (InP), the gold standard in lasers and other technologies that can propel photons over optical fibers, and silicon germanium (SiGe), which is widely used in the high-speed mixed-signal electronics that keep the light under control.

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