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.

 

By Emma Cheer
Global Diversity & Inclusion Leader, GLOBALFOUNDRIES

As Black History Month draws to a close, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon the incredible month of celebration, learning, and engagement we had at GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF).

To kick off our celebration of Black History Month, GF was proud to welcome back Dereca Blackmon, CEO of Inclusion Design Group, to speak about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and how his life offers us a blueprint for unity and justice in building community.

In her amazing presentation, Dereca said:

“This conversation is about: how do we build something together that creates a space for everyone to be honored? That creates a space for a true meritocracy? Because meritocracy is based on the idea that there’s a level playing field for people to start … What we want to agree to is removing any obstacles that have ever been in place that create less opportunity for women in the workplace, or less opportunity for people of color, or less opportunity for people who spoke different languages or didn’t go to elite colleges. 

Whatever those barriers are that created less opportunity, well, then we really didn’t have a meritocracy. Now, as we remove those barriers, now everyone can start on a level playing field, and we can consciously create that playing field. That’s what I see happening at so many corporations now. 

That the consciousness has been raised to say, “Hey, maybe we have actually been giving preference to people who are like us … And here’s an opportunity for us to open up the doors, open up our mindset, and open up the possibility of engaging with folks who are different than us.

That’s what the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement is.”

One way GF fosters diversity and inclusion is through employee-led resource groups. Our newest group, Black Resource Affinity Group, or BRAG, is dedicated to promoting the recruitment, retention and professional advancement of Black employees. BRAG co-sponsored Dereca’s presentation in partnership with GF’s Diversity & Inclusion team. This month, BRAG also hosted an excellent and impactful mentorship panel discussion for GF employees, with several black colleagues and BRAG members sharing stories of how mentorship has played a positive role in their career journeys.

Advancing Opportunity and Community

This month, GF announced a new partnership with the Jackie Robinson Foundation (JRF). This partnership focuses on advancing higher education opportunities for underrepresented minorities, by providing multi-year scholarship awards to highly motivated college students with an interest in STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math. In addition to scholarships, the JRF Scholars Program provides these talented young people with mentorship, networking, and leadership development opportunities.

GF is proud to support the JRF, a national nonprofit organization founded to perpetuate the memory of Jackie Robinson, a pioneer and civil rights activist, who broke the color barrier, becoming the first African American in professional baseball. As the JRF says:

“When we overlook the talent, skills, and efforts of some, we impede the progress of all of us. Jackie Robinson demonstrated the transformative power of inclusion.”

GF believes strongly in philanthropy, and our employees around the globe make a difference by volunteering their time and donating money and goods to support a wide range of causes. For Black History Month, GlobalGives and BRAG collaborated to showcase several nonprofit organizations that offer opportunities and resources for Black Americans in different aspects of their personal and professional lives. The nonprofits support programs include computer science education and training for young Black men; providing mental health support for women of color; and offering support to Black cancer patients.

Black Leadership at GF

At GF, we embrace diversity and inclusion as a competitive advantage. Leveraging the unique perspectives and talents of our employees allows GF to better compete in the global marketplace and better serve our customers. We are committed to expanding the diversity of our team, which will only lead to greater success.

That is why, last year, GF partnered with McKinsey Black Leadership Academy. McKinsey’s program acknowledges the unique skills of Black leaders and the challenges they face. The Academy offers two programs, a three-month Black Executive Leadership Program with a focus on real-world challenges and driving transformation, and a six-month Management Accelerator to build foundational skills for early- to mid-career leaders.

So far, more than 30 outstanding Black leaders at GF have participated or are currently participating in these programs. One GF colleague, Amin Glass, senior section manager of Factory Automation Engineering, and a co-founder of BRAG, had this to say of his experience participating in the McKinsey Black Leadership Academy:

“The program has been great so far.  One area in particular is on the technical side regarding problem solving.  The class has taught and provided me with tools to approach and solve problems in a variety of different ways.”

Looking Ahead

Even as GF’s celebration of Black History Month draws to a close, our company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is expanding. We are taking a bold approach to the recruitment, development, and advancement of minority professionals at our U.S. facilities, with a focus on growing representation both within GF and more widely in the semiconductor industry. We are investing in our team and our future.

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.

By Michael Mullaney

10. PDKs Get the Spotlight

Computer chips in automotive, aviation, smartphones, and other applications must be unquestionably reliable and perform exactly as expected. Developing and manufacturing these chips requires the ability to accurately model, simulate, and verify their designs. The process design kit (PDK) makes this possible.

The humble PDK found itself in the spotlight in 2020. Our blog post, PDKs: Powerful Enablers of First-Pass Silicon Success tells the story of how GF PDKs help our customers effectively create designs on 22FDX™, 12LP, and our many other differentiated platforms.

In 2020, we also announced some new ways in which we’re improving and enhancing GF PDKs. One is launching support of Open-Access based Interoperable PDKs, or iPDKs, for our 22FDX platform. Expanding our support to iPDK provides customers greater flexibility to use the design suite tools of their choice. Another great story highlighting PDKs was working with our ecosystem partner Mentor to add machine learning enhancements to the PDK of our 12LP+ solution.

9. GTC 2020 Goes Virtual

GF’s signature annual series of events, the Global Technology Conference (GTC), went virtual this year. With thousands of attendees, and nearly 125 guest speakers – including renowned visionaries, leaders, and technologists – sharing their unique insight and perspective on 5G, AI, IoT, and other topics, GTC was a big win for GF and for the semiconductor industry.

This year’s GTC was held in a virtual conference center. While of course not the same as a face-to-face conference, the immersive environment allowed for rich interaction and communications. We received great feedback from attendees both on the content of our 100+ sessions, as well as the virtual setting.

Click here to read top technology analyst Patrick Moorhead’s recap of GTC 2020 North America.

8. GF Raises a SHIELD

It’s no secret that semiconductors are highly sensitive, and GF is trusted every day with information regarding our customers’ proprietary intellectual property and products. 

This year, we launched GF SHIELD. The comprehensive platform embraces GF’s years of experience manufacturing the world’s most secure semiconductor solutions for the U.S government, the defense and aerospace industry, as well as manufacturing in accordance with the international Common Criteria standard. 

GF SHIELD extends these world-class security capabilities to all of our customers. From the initial meeting, through development, design, fabrication, delivery, and even disposal of scrap – and every step between – GF SHIELD is in place to ensure a customer’s products and sensitive information remain secure. Click here to read more about GFShield.

7. 5G Gets a Boost

So much of what you love about your smartphone – reliable connectivity, great sound, sharp display, and more – is enabled by GF silicon. Mobility and 5G are always on our minds and this year was no exception. As our very own Dr. Bami Bastani said: 

“Eight out of ten smartphones on the market today include GLOBALFOUNDRIES manufactured silicon, and the demand for our differentiated RF solutions continues to skyrocket as the industry transitions to 5G … The 5G revolution would not be possible without GLOBALFOUNDRIES and our industry-leading specialty RF solutions.”

In 2020, we blogged about GF being the world’s only foundry with in-house mmWave testing capabilities, and how this and other post-fab turnkey services are accelerating 5G by helping customers bring their products to market faster and more cost-effectively. 

We were also excited to announce the arrival of 22FDX+, the next generation of our best-in-class FDX platform, to meet the ever-growing need for higher performance and ultra-low power requirements of connected devices. The first specialty solution to be available on the 22FDX+ platform will 22FDX RF+, optimized to boost the performance of front-end-module (FEM) designs for 5G smartphones.

Check out this video of GF CEO Tom Caulfield having a conversation with Robert Donahue, CEO of 5G customer Anokiwave.

6. Accelerating AutoPro

In 2018, mid-sized cars contained an average $410 worth of semiconductors. By 2030, that figure is forecast to be nearly $1,100 per car. GF is uniquely positioned to support and accelerate this growth, thanks to our rich experience and expertise in the auto space, and the peerless performance and flexibility of our 22FDX platform.

We are pedal-to-the-metal on auto at GF, and our blog post, GF’s AutoPro™ Solutions Drive Automotive Electronics Forward, details how our broad portfolio of differentiated solutions and our AutoPro Solutions service package uniquely support all automotive technical, packaging/testing, sourcing and quality requirements.

Said GF’s Michael Brucker:

“AutoPro enables us to pull resources from every relevant area of our organization in an integrated fashion to ensure that the design is capable and robust enough for the intended use, producible on the required timeline, and that it will lead to a quality part. If not, we work with the customer to change it, based on our decade-plus experience serving automotive customers.”

5. Making AI Smarter

Across all industries and technologies, the scope, complexity, and promise of artificial intelligence, or AI, increasingly came into focus in 2020. As outlined in our blog post, The Challenge and Opportunity of Reducing Power on AI Processors, the power requirement of AI is central to shaping its future.

GF has embraced this challenge as an opportunity, with the credo “build smarter, not smaller chips.” This strategy was captured in a white paper by The Linley Group, titled Building Better AI Chips. It was also evident in our July story announcing a new AI chip created in partnership innovation hub Imec, built on 22FDX using a promising new architecture, which demonstrates incredible power efficiency. 

Arguably our biggest AI story of the year was the announcement that GF’s 12LP+ solution completed technology qualification is ready for production. GF’s most advanced FinFET solution, 12LP+ is optimized for AI accelerator applications, and builds upon our successful 12LP platform. 

GF’s own Amir Faintuch sums it up artfully:

“Artificial intelligence is on a trajectory to become the most disruptive technology of our lifetime … It is increasingly clear that the power efficiency of AI systems – in particular how many operations you can wrest from a watt of power – will be among the most critical factors a company considers when deciding to invest in data centers or edge AI applications.” 

Our new 12LP+ solution, Faintuch said, tackles this challenge head-on and is optimized, “obsessively so,” with AI in mind.

4. IoT Continue to Push the Edge

Many of us may not realize how much we rely on the Internet of Things, or IoT, on a daily basis. Have you ever asked your smart speaker about the weather? Or checked who was at your front door with your smart camera? Maybe adjusted the heat with your app-controlled thermostat, or checked your heart rate with your smart wristband? Then you’re connected with the IoT.

GF enables the connectivity of IoT devices and our expertise in RF, 5G and AI helps improve the battery life of IoT devices, by allowing them to process data efficiently, without the need for spending power to send that data to a network or the web. 

Our 22FDX platform, with its incredible performance and ultralow power requirements, is perfectly suited for IoT application. (Its just-announced successor, 22FDX+, will extend this IoT leadership far into the future.) In 2020, we announced two exciting new IoT applications built on 22FDX. 

First, GF is partnering with Movano Inc. to advance the commercialization of Movano’s wearable, non-invasive continuous glucose monitor, which is currently in development. Additionally, GreenWaves Technologies announced its new hearables platform, which enables state-of-the-art features such as scene-aware active noise cancellation and neural network-based noise reduction.

In another story about 22FDX’s unique Adaptive Body feature, Steve Tieg, CEO of GF IoT/AI customer Perceive, said:

“GF’s 22FDX platform has a tremendous amount of horsepower, and its power advantages, low leakage, and adaptive body bias feature make it an excellent choice for IoT applications like ours.”

For more on this topic, check out this series of videos for a great conversation with Tieg and GF’s own Mike Hogan.

3. Tech Giving Back

This year, with all of its unprecedented challenges, also saw the tech and semiconductor industry come together to make real impacts in their communities.

Through our GlobalGives initiative, GF donated critical masks, gloves, and other personal protection equipment to those who needed it most. Globally, GF donated more than 130,000 facemasks in our communities. In the U.S., our employee-driven facemask donation program fulfilled more than 1,750 requests, shipping out 85,000 masks to health care workers, first responders, and other high-risk individuals. Our tremendous Fab 8 logistics team went above and beyond to make this possible.

GF also gave $1.6 million in corporate donations, plus an additional $500,000 contributed by employees, to 27 charities across 11 GF sites. Most of these charities were local/regional, and chosen specifically by our employees for making an impact in the local community.

To keep spirits high amidst the pandemic, a group of GF employees wrote and performed this song to share with colleagues around the world.

2. Innovating Ahead

It is impossible to overstate the importance of innovation to our industry. While innovation may mean different things to different companies, for GF it means making smarter chips with rich features, optimized for specific applications, and as power-efficient as possible. As our CEO Tom Caulfield said at our GTC 2020 event, this is all on the path to accelerating the digital transformation that is already underway:

“GF has focused our entire company on building a number of innovative solutions that can flatten the curve and significantly lower the power consumption of the digital infrastructure … We are redefining the leading-edge of innovation.”

Within GF, we promote a culture of innovation and inventiveness. Our blog post, “Master Inventors” Driving Innovation and Differentiation at GLOBALFOUNDRIES, dives deep into the importance and impact of our Master Inventor program. Through the program, GF bestows the coveted title of Master Inventor upon a select colleagues with at least 20 issued U.S. patents and who have a demonstrated track record of technical accomplishments and IP asset creation. To date, more than 50 GF employees have been honored with the title Master Inventor.

Another way GF innovates is by collaborating with many of the world’s leading academic researchers. 

Through our University Partnership Program, GF benefits from the expertise of these thinkers and experimentalists, while providing them with access to our technology to demonstrate innovative designs. Read about some of our R&D on 6G technology in the blog post, GF Partners with Leading Researchers on 6G Technologies.

1. Specialty Goes Mainstream

With so many exciting announcements this year, it’s been a challenge to narrow them down into a curated selection. Here are a few final quick-hit pieces of good news: 

GlobalFoundries Has Quietly Become A Player In Silicon Photonics Manufacturing: “Through strategic acquisitions … and fruitful partnerships … GlobalFoundries quietly became a force in silicon photonics. It’s already captured 10% of the foundry business—if it continues at this rate, it will soon be impossible to overlook.”

22FDX For the Win: “To date, GF’s 22FDX platform has realized $4.5 billion in design wins, with more than 350 million chips shipped to customers around the world.”

28HV Solution Accelerates GF Leadership in OLED Display Drivers for Mobile Devices: “With more than 75 million units shipped to leading smartphone suppliers, GF’s 28HV solution is optimized to enable faster, brighter, sharper, and more power-efficient OLED displays.”

55 BCDLite Solution Positions GF for Continued Leadership in Audio Amplifiers for Mobile Devices: “With more than 3 billion units shipped, GF’s 55 BCDLite solution is featured in five of seven of today’s leading top-tier premium smartphones.”

GLOBALFOUNDRIES Delivers Industry’s First Production-ready eMRAM on 22FDX Platform for IoT and Automotive Applications: “GF’s eMRAM allows designers to extend their existing IoT and microcontroller unit architectures to access the power and density benefits of technology nodes below 28nm.”