March 26, 2025 By Kevin Soukup Senior Vice President, Silicon Photonics Product Line GlobalFoundries (GF) first introduced our revolutionary GF Fotonix™ platform in 2022 with a focus on optical interconnects. The platform was rated up to 100 gigabits per second per wavelength (100G/λ) via PAM4 signaling. With an extremely fast data rate and up to 10,000x improvement in system error rate, our first-generation GF Fotonix platform was an important step forward in enabling optical chiplets that deliver faster, more efficient data transmission. These achievements proved successful and have established GF as a leader in the silicon photonics space, but we didn’t stop there. Let’s take a look at some of the latest advancements that we’ve made on our GF Fotonix platform, including increased design flexibility, bandwidth upgrades and full turnkey support with the development of our newly announced Advanced Packaging and Photonics Center. Extreme flexibility The GF Fotonix platform has been developed to allow customers the extreme flexibility to address various application and market segment design requirements: Process flexibility: The GF Fotonix process can be run as an integrated photonics + RF CMOS flow or a photonics-only flow as required by the customer’s application and system requirements. Free Form Designs: The technology allows for free-form passive component design as long as the custom devices meet the design rules. Support for custom photonic device designs is provided natively in the process design kit (PDK) through the support of technology files for the industry’s leading device simulators. “Slow and wide” vs. “Fast and narrow”: GF Fotonix offers design flexibility by supporting the implementation of both course wave (CWDM) and dense wave divisional multiplexing (DWDM) to optimize beachfront density (bandwidth density along the edge of the chip). Components needed for wave division multiplexing such as athermal muxs/de-muxs and banks of micro-ring and coupled ring resonators are available in the PDK. From high-traffic AI data centers to next-generation advanced driver assistance systems, we are continuously working with our customers across all end markets to understand their design requirements and add the features and advancements that will take their chips to the next level. Doubling the bandwidth The second generation of GF Fotonix supports 200G/λ, doubling the bandwidth speed from the previous generation to support “fast and narrow” architectures. We’ve also made upgrades to all the active photonic devices such as modulators (micro-ring, Mach Zehnder and Ring Assisted Mach Zehnder), photodiodes and transistors to support monolithic integration. Groundbreaking progress has been made on the yield of modulator banks to support multi-lambda “slow and wide” architectures. The IOSMF (v-groove based passive fiber couplers) have been upgraded in two meaningful ways. First, a decrease in pitch of the individual v-grooves from 250μm to 127μm will support higher optical beach front density by 2x. Second, we’ve added support for silicon nitride (SiN) spot-size converters to improve the power handling capacity by >4x. With a view of the co-packaged requirements, we have been working with several vendors on wafer-level and die-level detachable fiber attach solutions. Several demos of these solutions will be showcased at the 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC) in San Francisco this April. Finally, we have added support for thru-silicon vias (TSV) through the photonic IC (PIC). This feature allows for the 2.5D/3D stacking of the Electrical IC on top of the PIC. These TSVs can be used for high speed signaling, power delivery and heat sinking. Advanced Packaging and Photonics Center Earlier this year, GF announced a first-of-its-kind center for advanced packaging and testing at our manufacturing facility in New York. This new center will allow us to process, package and test the chips manufactured in our New York facility entirely onshore in the United States, helping us meet the growing demand for secure supply chains for our essential chips in critical end markets like automotive, communications infrastructure and aerospace and defense. Through this new center, GF is now able to provide a turnkey solution for our silicon photonics chips, with advanced packaging, assembly and testing services to transform chips into individual packages ready for end-product use. On the IP side, we continue to grow our GlobalSolutions ecosystem with verified and silicon-proven IP solutions from industry experts that can be easily integrated onto GF Fotonix to build your state-of-the-art, custom IC. To find out more about GF Fotonix and how our silicon photonics process technologies can support your next generation fiber-optic communication designs, we’ll be attending the OFC 2025 on April 1-3 in San Francisco. Join us at booth #3220 to speak with our technical representatives and view samples of packaged ICs built on GF Fotonix. We hope to see you there! Kevin Soukup is the senior vice president of GF’s silicon photonics product line, leading the company’s silicon photonics business that enables customers to transport enormous volumes of data through high-speed, power-efficient electro-optical systems.
