Frictionless networking, virtualization, and hierarchical AI are three technological megatrends that will transform how we live and work. This article on frictionless networking is the first in a series examining how GlobalFoundries solutions enable each of these megatrends.

Although the transistor debuted nearly three quarters of a century ago, paving the way for solid-state integrated circuits and ushering in the electronics revolution, the last two years may have been the most momentous ones ever in the industry’s history.

In 2019, geopolitical tensions brought a sharp focus to the strengths and vulnerabilities of the global semiconductor supply chain. Because of the need for a reliable supply of chips for all manner of products, semiconductors suddenly became a flashpoint for industrial, commercial and foreign-relations policies.

Then, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, awareness of the raw power of the world’s digital infrastructure grew, as people began to depend on it more heavily than ever before to fight the contagion, to run companies remotely, to educate students, to socialize, and for many other things large and small.

GlobalFoundries (GF) CEO Tom Caulfield said that ever since society realized supply chain issues and the pandemic weren’t short-term crises, there’s been a deepening awareness of the importance of digital technologies and how they will forever change our lives.

“It’s amazing to see not only how pervasive and resilient the digital infrastructure had become over the last decade, and yet how little of its full potential was exploited until COVID-19,” he said. “We started to imagine not a new normal, but a better normal. This better normal will come from exploiting the capabilities of our pervasive, expanding and improving digital infrastructure. …. This is not just an opportunity for our industry, it’s our calling.”

As a result, GF sees three megatrends and one enormous hurdle that have emerged, Caulfield said, and GF solutions are critical to all of them. The first is frictionless networking – a ubiquitous “always-on, seamless, intelligent and secure connection, 24 hours, seven days a week” – which we’ll explore in greater depth below in this blog.

The second megatrend is pervasive deployment of virtualization. “Network function virtualization (NFV) is a great example,” Caulfield said. “This is where network processing is done in the cloud, and data is transported from dumb access points to the cloud for processing. This results in significant scale advantages similar to the value proposition of cloud storage and computing we enjoy today. NFV significantly improves bandwidth and speed, and it does it at a much lower cost and power point. Also, given the flexible nature of a virtualized network, the time and effort to deploy new services can be enhanced, as the new feature will come via a software push versus a hardware upgrade to the user.”

The final megatrend is hierarchical artificial intelligence (AI), or “AI Everywhere,” from devices to sensors, from the edge to the cloud. “Data is the new gold, but it is only ore if we can extract it from a raw, unstructured format and use it to gain insights, take action and make decisions,” Caulfield said. “The amount of structured and unstructured data generated in just the last two years alone is greater than all of the data generated before, yet we only use 3% of all this data. Hierarchical AI is the key to extracting value from immense, unstructured data by parsing it to extract important information, then compressing it for more efficient transport to compute and storage.”

While each megatrend has its own hurdles and challenges, and reducing power consumption is a make-or-break issue for all of them, the move to a digital future is unstoppable.

Frictionless Networking is Coming

“Our vision for future network connectivity is that you’re not even going to know what network you’re connected to, your device will automatically find it, authenticate it and optimize it for bandwidth, latency and other critical attributes,” said Peter Gammel, Vice President and CTO of GF’s Mobile and Wireless Infrastructure Business Unit. “We call this frictionless networking because when we talk about how we see connectivity playing out in the years to come as wireless systems make use of increasingly fast RF and mmWave spectrum, we don’t want to get lost in the details of 5G, 6G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or some other network protocol.

“Instead, the key point is this: No matter how you connect, the last hop between a network and your device is always going to be wireless,” he said, “and that means even though there’s already been a virtual explosion of radio frequency (RF) content in all sorts of devices, the trend is only going to accelerate.”

Gammel said it isn’t just smartphones, tablets and PCs that will depend on frictionless networking capabilities. A universe of diverse products will need it to function, in applications as varied as Industry 4.0 (i.e., smart, automated manufacturing); the Internet of Things (IoT); wearables for health and wellness; automotive systems like advanced driver assistance (ADAS); and others too numerous to mention.

The challenges are enormous. Data traffic at key network hubs is on a steep incline – up to 40% in some cases – and those rates are only going to increase in the coming years, Gammel said in a keynote address at the 2021 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium. “Future networks will require extreme capacity and data rates, much higher spectral efficiency, ultra-low latency, much higher reliability and robust security.”

The Best RF Technology Will Carry the Day

That’s all well and good, but anyone who has experienced difficulty in connecting to a network might wonder how we will ever reach a state of frictionless networking. What will it take to get there?

“I’ve been in this industry for 40 years, and the way you measure success has never changed: It always comes down to leadership in RF technologies, which are essential to the performance and power consumption of front-end modules (FEMs) and power amplifiers, the most critical elements of a wireless communications system,” Gammel said.

He said that to maximize the use of available spectrum, the push is on to drive output power as close to reliability limits as possible. That plays to GF’s strengths as the longstanding leader in many different RF technologies, including RF-SOI (RF silicon on insulator), FD-SOI (fully depleted silicon on insulator) and SiGe (silicon germanium) solutions.

“Our RF SOI solutions are the go-to choice for integrated FEMs and beamformers in 5G base stations and smartphones,” Gammel said. “Meanwhile, because our 22FDX™ FD-SOI solution combines RF, analog, embedded memory, and advanced logic in one chip, they offer unmatched peak performance and energy efficiency for the integration of FEM elements like data converters, LNAs, power amplifiers (PAs) and switches with a transceiver.”

In addition, he said, GF’s SiGe solutions are widely used in Wi-Fi and cellular power amplifiers, and SiGe technology provides a path to the terahertz frequencies needed for future network architectures.

“The Best is Yet to Come”

Gammel laid out what he sees as the other necessary ingredients for frictionless networking. “Turnkey assembly and test capabilities are going to become more important as the industry moves to terahertz frequencies, because the interface between circuits and packaging becomes more critical to performance. Do you put the antenna on the package or on the die, and what is the best configuration?” he said.

Open interfaces are another requirement. “Proprietary interface protocols never win. Open interfaces are critical in building an ecosystem, and we’re seeing this already in network infrastructure and in standards-setting activities,” he said. One example is the 5G Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN) initiative.

Also, non-terrestrial networks that make use of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations are key to delivering connectivity to underserved geographies. “The commercial deployment of LEO constellations isn’t science fiction, it’s happening. The Starlink constellation from SpaceX is an example,” he said.

“Much work remains to be done and many technology innovations are still required to leverage the vast, untapped spectrum from 100 GHz to 1 THz, but we have made great progress already and the best is yet to come,” Gammel said.

The next article in this series will focus on the virtualization megatrend.

by Gary Dagastine

In an earlier era, the way forward for semiconductor companies was to spend fortunes and untold hours of labor on finding ways to scale semiconductor devices to smaller sizes, because scaling produced dramatically greater performance that opened up many new applications.

But the advances the industry has made in recent decades have brought about many technology platforms that are already quite powerful, and new features and capabilities can be added to them cost-effectively to adapt them to new requirements. As the world’s leading specialty semiconductor manufacturer with an ever-expanding offering of differentiated solutions to evolving applications, GlobalFoundries (GF) exemplifies this approach to technology development.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the company’s push to be a leader in 6G wireless communications technology. GF offers a number of platforms and solutions that have not only been proven in the most demanding communications applications, but whose full potential remains untapped. They include GF’s 22FDX™ platform and 22FDX+ solutions, and GF’s families of RF SOI and SiGe (silicon germanium) solutions.

They represent a compelling pathway to 6G, the next generation of wireless communications technologies, anticipated to make its debut toward the end of this decade.

In our recent blog on GF’s push for leadership in 6G technology, we described the company’s University Partnership Program. Through it, GF provides access to technology to more than 35 university teams, who work collaboratively with GF’s R&D staff in various areas such as 6G. They share their research results that support the addition of new features and capabilities to GF’s platforms, publish research results at technical and academic conferences, discover new application possibilities, and introduce students to these technologies, who will then have familiarity with them throughout their careers.

We profiled one of our research partners, Gabriel Rebeiz, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego. A pioneer in integrated phased arrays for communications and defense systems, he directs a broad set of research projects ranging from wideband systems in 45RFSOI to 140GHz phased arrays.

In this blog, we’ll highlight three more high-profile university partners, who will tell us about their research, how they use GF’s technologies, and what working with GF has meant for them and their students. Their diverse experiences and research interests will illustrate GF’s commitment to 6G and show how the company’s strategies and technologies are helping to make advances in 6G possible, better, faster and more cost-effectively than otherwise:

• Einstein Prof. Friedel Gerfers, Ph.D., is the Chair of Mixed-Signal Circuit Design at Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), where he has been awarded an Einstein Fellowship to pursue his work in the area of mixed-signal circuit design for 5G/6G communication systems. The Einstein Foundation Berlin, founded by the regional government to sponsor cutting-edge science and research, funds his cost- and staff-intensive high-frequency laboratory, one of only two laboratories in Germany with the capability to fully test and characterize electrical and optical systems up to D-Band (up to 170GHz).
• Prof. Aarno Parssinen, Ph.D., is in the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of Oulu in Finland. Prof. Parssinen is a major figure in the university’s 6G Flagship initiative and is a key collaborator with Finland-based Nokia, one of the world’s leading telecommunications and networking companies.
• Prof. Hua Wang, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center of Circuits and Systems (CCS) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His team has been collaborating closely with many semiconductor companies. Prof. Wang is the recipient of several highly prestigious academic awards, including the DARPA Director’s Fellowship. He is recognized for his contributions to wideband energy-efficient RF/mmWave circuits, novel transceiver array architectures, and antenna-electronics co-designs, which have had a major impact on the direction of the industry’s R&D activities.

Turning Ideas Into Silicon

Prof. Gerfers at TU Berlin directs currently 15 Ph.D. students on research into 5G/6G architectures and solutions, mainly using the 22FDX platform, and also pursues research into high-speed communications technologies such as automotive Ethernet and optical communications. One current project is research into the world’s first monolithically integrated 6G transceiver, the goal being to determine what other technologies can be integrated with 22FDX technology to achieve 10-15GHz bandwidths all the way from the antenna to the digital bit.

He has a background in corporate research at Philips, Intel, Inphi and Apple, and in two startups, Alvand Technologies and Aquantia. He joined TU Berlin in 2015 and began to work with GF in the same year. The successful collaborations with GF have grown in number and intensity since then, he said.

Prof. Gerfers said that energy efficiency and robust performance in high-frequency applications are critical unmet needs for future 6G wireless communications systems. “Not only in Germany but also globally, the increasing sense is that microelectronics is becoming a bottleneck in many socially and technologically relevant areas. That’s why the program GlobalFoundries has set up is so important. It is a key enabler for continued progress in microelectronics, in that it gives us access to a cutting-edge technology we need to turn our ideas and innovations into silicon,” he said.

“Also, the exceptional performance and features of 22FDX technology addresses a wide application space. We use it to build high-bandwidth transceivers, and there are few planar transistors to achieve the target power efficiency while maintain the stringent noise and phase noise budget. We believe 22FDX technology has the potential for use well beyond 250GHz, and is therewith optimal for our technologies and applications we want to address. In addition, German carmakers, for example, are using FDX-based ICs not only because they are power-efficient but also because the technology is robust enough to handle the stringent automotive requirements.”

Prof. Gerfers also noted that compared with FinFETs, FDX-based circuits are simpler and easier for students to design and lay out, and that without the University Partnership Program, “We’d be stuck using planar transistors at 28nm or even older nodes, and it would be practically impossible to prove the power efficiency of our circuit solutions.”

Bridging The Gap Between Academia And Industry

Finland boasts a long and distinguished history in the development of mobile communications. It’s where GSM (the 2G standard) was developed and first deployed in 1991; where the industry powerhouse Nokia is based; and where the 6G Flagship initiative, one of the world’s first and largest 6G research programs, was launched in 2018.

Prof. Parssinen at the University of Oulu said academic engagement with industry is necessary for continued progress. “In Finland, we in academia helped drive this rising industry right from the beginning. Our role has always been to bridge the gap between classical academic studies and corporate product development activities, and we have been at the very heart of things with 2G, 3G, then 4G and we’re helping the world implement 5G,” he said.

“Now, we have built a substantial program here at Oulu around 6G technology. It’s true that 5G is only beginning to be launched and there are many challenges that go with it which we are working on. However, the time to look forward is now because however long it takes to do fundamental studies, it takes even longer to bring that knowledge to the point where industry can use it effectively,” he said. “The university’s task is to look forward, to try to do things that we don’t yet know how to do. That is the very purpose of science.”

Prof. Parssinen’s expertise is in cellular circuits and transceivers up to 5G and beyond. In graduate school he led the team which produced the first 3G circuit on a single die, and later he was one of the contributors to the Bluetooth LE (low energy) standard. He was with the Nokia Research Center for 10 years and was on the company’s CEO Technology Council, and also served in key technology development roles at Renesas and Broadcom.

At Oulu he leads a team of about 20, split between Ph.D. students and other professors who seek to understand future application requirements and develop circuits and systems to address them. Their research encompasses phased arrays, antenna design, efficient beamforming and other relevant topics. The team is also developing a sophisticated laboratory to measure the over-the-air performance of radio systems.

“We work with GlobalFoundries’ 22FDX and 45RFSOI technologies, and the differences between the two are intriguing. The integration capability of 22FDX technology is superior and we are still learning about its capabilities, which means that for our students who are doing IC design, the opportunity to work with it is a unique advantage,” he said. “We have used a lot of 45RFSOI technology over the years, and because we have more experience with it, we use it for our larger chips.”

“The access to silicon and the freedom to explore innovative ideas are major advantages of our relationship with GlobalFoundries, and it is wonderful to be able to share our work through the program with other professors who are also on the leading edge,” he said. “We’re competing with them, in a sense, but our work also benefits from their knowledge and the interactions which take place.”

A Dream System for Future Wireless

The Center of Circuits and Systems (CCS) at Georgia Tech is at the core of the university’s efforts to develop high-frequency electronics for communications, radar and healthcare applications, said its Director and GF partner Prof. Hua Wang, Ph.D. The Georgia Tech CCS center hosts eight core faculty members, more than 90 Ph.D. students, and 12 post-doctoral scholars. 

Prof. Wang has been with Georgia Tech since 2012, and prior to academia worked at Intel and Skyworks Solutions, where he led the development of novel solutions for mm-Wave circuits and systems as well as low-cost cellular front-end modules (FEMs).

Among the key focuses of the GT CCS center are the exploration of RF/mmWave/THz integrated circuits and systems for beyond-5G and 6G communication and sensing. Other wireless related research topics include antenna/electronics co-design; power amplifiers; and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted adaptive RF/mmWave circuits and MIMO systems. The CCS center also has a wide research portfolio in high-performance computing, cryogenic electronics, bioelectronics and biosensors, physical-layer security, and AI-based design automation.

“We are focusing extensively on innovating wireless circuit/system designs; in particular, pushing the output power, bandwidth, and the reconfiguration of RF/mm-Wave FEM electronics,” he said. “All of these are really important for 5G and beyond because the higher the frequency, the higher the signal path loss, and to overcome it, each circuit element just needs to be more powerful. Also, because more of these mm-Wave systems are going to arrays, heat management becomes difficult, and energy efficiency has never been so critical.”

“For future wireless communication, a major priority for us is to find optimum ways to transmit and receive information at a massive data-rate with high linearity, given the increasing use of complex spectrally efficient modulations,” he said.

Prof. Wang said there is a growing need for antenna/circuit co-design as well, because at higher frequencies wavelengths are shorter and they’ve now reached the point where they are at the same dimensions as planar electronic circuits. “This opens up intriguing possibilities for power combining, filtering, noise cancellation, and even STAR communications directly at the antenna domain, but everything must be considered holistically,” he said. “For example, now we really have the opportunities to re-architecture the wireless frontend systems and consider how distributed electronics and radiation structures can together modulate, transmit, and receive complex electromagnetic signals. And we can explore their use for communication, imaging, and sensing. But many innovations here must rely on co-designs with different domain knowledge at different levels of abstraction. Co-design is important at the package level, too – to put the antenna on the package, or on the chip, that is the question.”

Prof. Wang said GF’s technology platforms offer many advantages in this regard. “45RFSOI platform has high resistivity in the substrate, and you can use it to make highly efficient mmWave frontend circuits and antennas. For 5G, we’ve been using it and 22FDX platform because they are perfect for high mmWave applications. Furthermore, we see prospects for SiGe devices based on various studies which indicate that their Fmax – a measure of transistor speed – can be pushed to 700GHz and above, and the technology lends itself to high yields and efficient manufacturing.”

Prof. Wang cautions that speed is only one critical requirement for future high-frequency wireless systems. The ability to handle signal complexity in unknown or dynamic environment with low latency is just as important.

“My dream system would integrate advanced SiGe devices with high-performance CMOS technologies to help me achieve the required configuration for the next-generation wireless electronics. Fortunately, both of these are available to me and my students, thanks to GlobalFoundries.”

By Emma Cheer
Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Leader, GlobalFoundries

Women’s History Month has been a time of inspiration and empowerment at GlobalFoundries (GF), with colleagues at our sites around the world joining in the celebration. I would like to share some highlights of the many Women’s History Month events and programs GF held throughout March.

The month started on an exceptionally high note with International Women’s Day (IWD). GF has participated in IWD for several years, and each year it centers around showcasing GF’s commitment to women and celebrating women’s achievements.

This year’s IWD theme was “Choose to Challenge,” and GF colleagues from around the globe participated in a photo campaign to pledge their support and share how they, personally, would challenge themselves and others to challenge gender bias and inequality.

Our GlobalWomen employee resource group hosted virtual IWD celebrations at our sites around the world. As part of those celebrations, GF Board Member Glenda Dorchak joined CEO Tom Caulfield for a fireside chat. They discussed leadership, Glenda shared stories about her remarkable career, and they spoke about the imperative for companies to embrace diversity and inclusion, among many other topics.

Here are two clips from their conversation:

This month, we also launched a video campaign featuring women leaders across GF discussing their experiences as women in the semiconductor industry. In addition to generously sharing their perspective and insight, these women leaders highlighted what “Choose to Challenge” meant to them. Below are excerpts from some of these powerful videos:

To close out Women’s History Month, GF and partner Fairygodboss – the largest career community for women in the United States – collaborated on a special podcast and webinar. GF’s Emily Reilly, our senior vice president, and chief human resources officer, virtually sat down with Romy Newman, president, and co-founder of Fairygodboss, for an episode of Fairygodboss Radio. The podcast series is dedicated to conversations with accomplished female professionals to discuss life lessons and how women can support one another, drive change, and shatter the glass ceiling.

Listen to the full episode here.

As a follow-up to the podcast, Emily hosted Romy at a virtual event attended by GF employees from across the world. The event included a presentation by Romy and a Q&A session where employees asked questions of both Emily and Romy.

In addition to empowering women within our organization, we believe in taking action to help women in our communities and across the world. For Women’s History Month, in partnership with our GlobalGives philanthropy program, GF chose to highlight and match employee donations to several nonprofit organizations dedicated to women’s causes – from advancing women in business leadership to inspiring girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math, to other gender equality efforts.

It is critical to note the above efforts were made possible through a collaboration between GF’s Diversity and Inclusion team and GlobalWomen, the largest of the company’s employee resource groups. GlobalWomen was established in 2013 and has grown into a thriving network of more than 1,500 GF employees around the world.

At GF, we continue to double down on our commitment to growing representation within our own team as well as throughout the semiconductor industry. We are investing in diversity and inclusion. Not only is it the right thing to do, we know our success depends on it.

At GF, one of our core values is “Embrace” — a reminder of the strength that comes from a culture of inclusivity, empathy, and respect. Our company and its culture are the sum of each and every employee. We are ONEGF, and the path before us is more diverse, more inclusive, and more successful than ever before.

At GlobalFoundries, the title of Master Inventor is reserved for colleagues with at least 20 issued U.S. patents and who have a demonstrated track record of technical accomplishments and intellectual property (IP) asset creation. 

The program is a powerful platform for honoring prolific employees as well as motivating other employees who may have been thinking about submitting their inventions for patenting.

Along with inspiring and mentoring their colleagues, Master Inventors serve as advisors and are a resource for GF’s technology leaders and legal team on a range of technical, strategic, and IP topics.

We spoke with GF Master Inventor Yan Ping Shen, on our Malta team, to learn about the process of inventing and get a closer look at the spirit of innovation at GF.

Q: Yan Ping, please give a brief introduction about yourself. 

Yan Ping: I am currently a Senior Member of the Technical Staff with the Integration Team. I have been with GlobalFoundries for 16 years.  I started with GF in Singapore in 2005. I moved to Dresden for a one-year training and then came to Malta in 2011. Since being with GF, I have always been in Process Integration.

How did you feel when you found out about becoming a Master Inventor?

It is my honor to be one of the Master Inventors! It certainly motivates me to work harder.

What role does patenting play in your career?  How has it changed you?

My technical leadership. It motivates me to think more about generating more ideas. I am also a patent reviewer on GF’s FinFET Patent Development Committee.  Since joining, I think about why and how submitters come up with these ideas.  Different people have different and brilliant ideas to resolve the same issue.

How do you come up with ideas?

I am actively involved in discussions with fellow inventors and think about alternative technical solutions. We find issues, and form a team to discuss alternative solutions.

What do you think is a critical component of being an inventor?

Having novel ideas, willing to have active discussions with peer inventors, encouraging others to participate in discussions. Everyone needs to be involved. The more experienced inventors can encourage juniors to be involved also.

What advice would you give to new inventors?

No matter what stage of your career you are in, don’t be afraid to speak up, lack of experience doesn’t mean anything.  Be involved, no matter what. Take an active role in discussions. Also, it helps to do lots of article research, to try to solve a problem.

When you are not submitting patents or reviewing patents, what do you do for fun?

I enjoy marathon running.  I train every day and look forward to being able to race in marathons again.

Strategic partnership between GF and Compound Photonics will lead to more powerful, smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient AR/MR glasses.

by Gary Dagastine

Augmented- and mixed-reality (AR/MR) technology is at an historic inflection point, and the strategic partnership recently announced by GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) and Compound Photonics (CP, also known as CP Display) is driving it forward.

The two companies will work together to transform the workings of near-eye microdisplays, which are at the heart of AR/MR systems. CP’s IntelliPix™ platform will be manufactured using GF’s best-in-class 22FDX™ semiconductor solution, creating the world’s first real-time AR/MR specific single-chip microdisplay enabling pixels as small as 2.5µm. The result will be the industry’s most advanced light modulation agnostic backplane/video pipeline with the ability to span a roadmap of current amplitude liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) thru microLED all the way to holographic while providing the required performance for real-time AR/MR systems.

The scalable and flexible single-chip solution will support CP’s existing LCoS technology as well as CP’s forthcoming microLED display technology.

With IntelliPix, the idea is to turn on only the pixels which need to be active in order to render the desired image, rather than to continually refresh all of the pixels in a display. This not only conserves power in the inactive pixel regions, it also results in higher image quality and brightness, faster refresh rates and, ultimately, AR glasses with more advanced features and performance, smaller and lighter form factor and which last much longer on a single charge.

The IntelliPix architecture integrates CP’s proprietary video pipeline that reacts in real-time compensating for head motions and other environmental conditions; a software-programmable backplane to control the pixels dynamically; and driver circuitry to deliver the necessary power. Until now this has required multiple chips, but the next generation of AR glasses requires a single-chip design that is simpler, higher-performance, smaller and less power-hungry.

A Natural Choice

“GF’s industry-leading 22FDX solution is a natural choice for many reasons,” said Ed Kaste, Vice President of Industrial and Multi-Market at GF. “Its ultra-low power capabilities are a major advantage, but that’s only the beginning. 22FDX technology has a higher SRAM density than other planar technologies, and SRAM density correlates directly with pixel density, enabling IntelliPix to significantly shrink the pixel size. This results in a high performance, highly integrated solution which helps enable sleeker, lighter AR glasses. Also, the ability to turn pixels on and off, while leveraging body bias control, leads to far better on and off states, so that when a pixel is on, it’s brighter and when it’s off, it’s really off, further conserving power and reducing thermal effects.”

The adaptive body bias (ABB) feature of 22FDX technology affords designers significantly more precision when fine-tuning the transistor threshold voltage of a circuit, enabling them to more effectively optimize the performance, energy efficiency, area, and reliability of a chip to meet the needs of a specific application.

“22FDX technology also enables CP to easily integrate intellectual property (IP) specific to its customers into the design, as well as higher-voltage devices that some microdisplay architectures require. Our existing reference designs and ecosystem resources make this development process far less challenging than it would be with other technologies,” Kaste said.

Tapeout is anticipated by the end of this year, with samples delivered to CP’s customer in the first quarter of 2022.

Lessons Learned from Nature

CP started to focus its microdisplay development effort in AR/MR and heads-up displays since 2016 by leveraging its wealth of IP portfolios in LCoS display and advanced electronic drive architecture. Based on its current generation platform, CP’s displays have been known in the industry for the smallest pixel pitch, highest optical efficiency, lowest display latency and highest frame rate performance compared with other display providers. 

“We had the industry’s best microdisplay sub-system – light modulator, backplane and driver – at that point, which served us well to gain traction,” said Edmund Passon, CP’s co-CEO. “But more recently, I began to think about how our optical system functions given we feed directly into it. The optical signal from the retina is split into multiple channels and is pre-processed there before it reaches the brain, The processing is similar to compression without the need to resend information the brain already has received,” he said. “I realized that to achieve the performance we were seeking for next-generation AR/MR glasses, we’d need to do something similar in reverse to reduce bandwidth and associated power consumption while maintaining performance. It allows us to send only data that is changing, while providing high performance to active objects/pixels, all at the lowest power consumption possible.”

The IntelliPix architecture feature set partitions the processing between the SOC and the display sub-system, he said. CP’s customers who build compatible rendering pipelines can take full advantage of the feature set completely optimizing for real-time AR/MR systems. But the 28nm semiconductor technology CP initially turned to wasn’t up to the task for IntelliPix’s breakthrough design using smart pixels, which can be achieved with 22FDX technology.

“Our current, multi-chip backplane architecture consisted of a one-bit pixel with an appetite for bandwidth. We started our work at 28nm, but to achieve the desired pixel size with the amount of logic IntelliPix required under the smart pixel, we needed GF’s 22FDX solution with its best-in-class high-performance, power efficiency and broad feature integration capability,” Passon said. “Also, looking toward the future, while our pixel size is 3.015µm right now, we’ve found that the IntelliPix architecture will enable us to get it down to as small as 2.5µm depending on the feature set. That opens up the possibility of designing microLED-based displays with a bayer like pixel grid that supports fewer required pixels. and again partitioning properly between the microdisplay and SOC video pipeline/rendering will result in the optimal power/performance balance. So the scalability of any single-chip solution is critical, and 22FDX technology fits the bill.”

A Unique Partnership

“We chose to partner with CP not only because they are technically innovative with respect to both hardware and software, but because they’ve been around a while as a company and have demonstrated the value of what they offer through an extensive network of corporate relationships,’ said Ran (Ruby) Yan, GF product manager for wearables, smart home and machine vision products.

 “What we especially like about CP is that they always target the most difficult challenges, and it is exciting and rewarding to be involved in such endeavors, which can bring about not only industrial progress but significant positive change in our daily lives,” she said.

Yan said GF brings to the partnership a great deal of experience with display drivers, both integrated with backplanes and as standalone ICs, for applications including smartphones, automotive and medical devices. “We are using the baseline 22FDX platform for this work and it is also an extension of what we are already doing,” she said. “For example, the required customization will impact the backend of the line process, to add some unique features to the optical interconnect.”

The Future of Display

Kaste said that displays overall are a key focus for GF because they span a growing number of applications across all of the company’s business units. The demonstrated performance and lessons learned from this engagement could revolutionize display technology and the display value chain going forward, he said, and he asked CP’s Passon what he thinks 22FDX technology can bring to applications beyond AR/MR glasses.

“It’s a great question,” Passon said. “Ever since we started to work with 22FDX technology, new ideas just seem to pop out of the woodwork. For example, we can see how it would be possible to use 22FDX technology to make improved performance video walls. The size of the LEDs is quite different, but their care and feeding is the same with the ability to reach the highest duty cycles that IntelliPix can provide – you could put together any number of display tiles to make a wall-based television of any size.”

“Also, over the years we’ve done a lot of work with holography, and the IntelliPix platform along with the high performance capabilities of 22FDX technology serves this very well” Passon continued. “We think there’s a fantastic opportunity in automotive AR heads-up displays to place holographic objects in 3D space for better driver awareness and responsiveness. In fact, the automotive sector is particularly appealing for holographic applications in the near term, given the current computer-generated hologram (CGH) compute/power required. Work in the CGH algorithm area is showing promise to reduce this power, and IntelliPix will be ready to integrate easily with those systems to produce the highest fidelity holograms.”

Passon said that while the future holds many new and exciting opportunities, there are still technical challenges that must be overcome on an industry-wide basis to get there. “For microLED-based displays to become truly practical both technically and economically, the industry must find ways to commercialize the pixelated epitaxial fabrication processes currently used in manufacturing. For holography, meanwhile, we must find ways to reduce the required compute power,” he said.

Nonetheless, right now AR/MR technology is on the brink of major change, and the partnership between CP and GF is playing a key role in making it happen.