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 Shesh Mani Pandey, from our Malta team, to learn about the process of inventing and to get a closer look at the spirit of innovation at GF.

Q: What is your role at GF?

Shesh: I am currently a senior member of the technical staff with the Fab 8 device team in Malta, New York. I’ve been in the semiconductor industry for more than 25 years, in various management and technology development roles. I have experience working at all of GF’s fabs – in Singapore, Germany, and the U.S. – and moved to Fab 8 from Dresden in 2012. My technical expertise is in TCAD (technology computer-aided design) and device design for bulk CMOS, FinFET, FD-SOI, nanowires, and other platforms

Can you tell us about your Master Inventor experience?

I was named a Master Inventor in 2019. It was a dream come true, as this was on my mind for a long time. I saw the title “Master Inventor” in someone’s email signature many years ago, and never forgot it. When GF started its Master Inventor program in 2018, it clicked with me again. I started working hard to achieve this title and join GF’s elite group of inventors.

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

It helps in all personal, professional, and financial aspects. Personally, you get all the satisfaction that you are one of the few people in our company who has this title. It reflects your expertise in your day-to-day work, and your experience.

Professionally, it may help you to grow in your career. Financially, GF has many incentives for inventors.

How do you come up with ideas?

I often get ideas for inventions from challenging issues that arise in the projects I am working on, and from other projects that interest me. I love to be close to issues. When there are problems, we think about possible solutions to address those problems, and that leads to possible inventions. Be close to problems, and challenge yourself to learn new things.

What do you think are the critical components of being an inventor?

For me, the first thing is passion. One has to be passionate about it. I feel that is true for everything. One has to be creative and think outside the box. Other than that, there should be a clear understanding of the subject and process. Working as a team helps significantly, as you may not be the expert of all the topics needed to solve a particular problem. Also, you need enough experience and time invested in your area of interest, in order to see the big picture.

What advice would you give to new inventors?

Your first idea is always the most difficult hurdle. GF has a well-established process to help you. Have an idea, but don’t know what to do next? Please contact any IP Legal team member, inventor, or Master Inventor and it will be smoothly executed. Be passionate, curious, creative and competitive!

By Milad Mahpeykar, Peter Hallschmid, Ted Anderson, and Vikas Gupta

Ansys has teamed up with GLOBALFOUNDRIES^© (GF^©), the world’s leading specialty semiconductor manufacturer, to address the needs of the digital world through integrated photonics design.

GF enables designers to leverage the power of light for advanced optical applications with a high-performance monolithically integrated photonics solution in an optimized footprint that requires only half the area of discrete solutions. This monolithic solution integrates a high performance RF CMOS and photonics components in a single chip to deliver higher bandwidth between data center servers and faster connections between data centers along the telecommunication infrastructure.

Click here to read the full blog post, on the site of our ecosystem partner Ansys.

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.