On her first day with GlobalFoundries (GF), Sylvia Chan was a team of one, faced with the challenge of leading over 5,000 employees in Lean Six Sigma (LSS). Not only did she meet the challenge, but she has also redefined training and development in GF Singapore. Today, she is an LSS Master Black Belt with 25 years of experience in various manufacturing industries. She has built LSS teams and cultures, personally trained and coached thousands in LSS, and empowered individuals and teams across enterprises.

As the head of Operations Training and Development at GF Singapore, her passion for people development has greatly strengthened the company’s talent pool. Chan is also the lead of the Singapore chapter of GF’s GlobalWomen employee resource group, as well as mentorship and development programs. She holds a master’s degree in statistics from the National University of Singapore and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Newcastle University in the UK. Chan’s inspirational leadership was integral to her being selected to receive a 2022 STEP Ahead Award from The Manufacturing Institute.

The STEP Ahead Awards honor women who have demonstrated excellence and leadership in their careers and represent all levels of the manufacturing industry, from the factory floor to the C-suite. STEP Ahead aims to foster a 21st-century manufacturing workforce by empowering and inspiring women in the manufacturing industry through recognition, research and leadership, as well as by motivating alumnae to pay it forward by mentoring the next generation. The goal of the program is to build networks for women to have support in their industry and to elevate the role models who can inspire the next generation.

“The 2022 STEP Ahead Honorees and Emerging Leader awardees are excellent representatives of the exciting opportunities available in manufacturing,” said Denise Rutherford, 2022 STEP Ahead chair. “These remarkable women and the leadership they show help inspire the next generation of female leaders to consider careers in manufacturing.”

Chan’s achievement was applauded by GF leadership.

“Congratulations to Sylvia on winning the STEP Ahead Award! I thank her tremendously for her hard work training and mentoring others within GF,” said KC Ang, GF SVP and GM Fab Management.

Joseph Chia, GF VP and GM Fab Management, said “this is a clear recognition of Sylvia’s enormous contribution to GF, and we rejoice with her immensely in receiving this prestigious award.”

We sat down with Chan to discuss her career, her love of engineering, the STEP Ahead Award, and more:

Can you tell me about your path to GF?

I chanced upon this amazing opportunity to join GF Singapore in 2015. Single-handedly, I led, successfully deployed, and implemented Lean Six Sigma. Today, we have built a culture of continuous improvement, with a capable team of over 100 LSS practitioners who are actively involved in driving continuous business improvements that bring value to GF’s customers.

My journey at GF is full of excitement and every day is a new adventure!

You’ve had a very successful career at GF. Can you tell me about your current role and responsibilities?

I am currently leading the Singapore Operations Training and Development. I am very excited to be given this opportunity to strengthen the building of the company’s talent pipeline, focusing on attracting, developing, and retaining our talent pool.

We have transformed our Technical Induction Program – from revamping content and mode of delivery, including virtual and online learning options, to upskilling our trainers. This makes the training more interactive, engaging, and effective.

Another major role I have is working on improving our employee skills framework. We firmly believe strong foundational training coupled with a clear, defined skills map is the basis to facilitate seamless integration of every employee. In turn, this enables individuals to understand the job roles, core skills, competencies, and career pathways, as well as how to contribute to the organization more effectively, which directly impacts employee retention.

We recently embarked on the enhancement of internship programs that aim to help develop students’ professional aptitude, strengthen their personal character, and provide a greater door to opportunity. We have followed the three Es to strengthen the program: hands-on Experience, Educational opportunities and Engagement with management and senior leadership on a regular basis. We are still working on employee skills framework, with an emphasis on helping employees map their career progression.

What attracted you to semiconductor manufacturing?

What is rewarding and satisfying to me is knowing that what we produce enables and enhances the lives of many. It is exciting that manufacturing continues to evolve, adapt, and drive innovation. This is made possible with STEM, and I am proud to be a part of it.

Tell me about winning the STEP Ahead Award. Why do you think it’s important for women to be recognized in this field?

I am humbled and honored to be recognized especially since my entire career has been in manufacturing. I am grateful for my mentors and the incredible team around me who forms my support system.

It is important for women to be recognized in this field as it acknowledges the skills we have developed, that we are equally capable and competent in an industry that is largely male dominant. It affirms the positive impact we create in our company, industry, and community. In addition, it helps elevates role models that can inspire future generations to join them.

I think it’s also a privilege to be able to receive the award in person.

Are there any misconceptions or biases you’ve encountered as a woman in our industry?

I have heard this many times: “Oh, it is very rare to have a woman Master Black Belt as the role is very demanding and requires high interaction and engagement with the senior leaders.”

I would just smile politely and say, “Today is your lucky day, as you are looking at one!”

I am glad the situation today has improved significantly. At GF, we have a very strong diversity and inclusion culture that promotes and works to build equality across the workplace. I have been blessed to have an equal seat and voice at the table. Fifteen to twenty years ago, women had to work much harder to have success like that of their male counterparts.

How has mentorship impacted your career (having a mentor, being a mentor)?

I am fortunate to have had great mentors throughout my career. They have guided, inspired, and shaped me into who I am today. I am thankful they are always there, willing to help me navigate through the “maze” by imparting invaluable wisdom and advice. They give me confidence by telling me “I can do it.” They have cheered me for the whole time and watched me grow.

Now I am a mentor to a couple of people, and that is also valuable for me because I get to hear other perspectives.

How has your involvement with GlobalWomen impacted your career, and how has it been tied to mentorship?

First, I try to understand what women at GF want. Most of the time, the answer is to learn and grow. I also try to inspire confidence in other women. Just having the courage to raise your hand to ask a question or make a comment is very important.

And for our mentorship program, we try to make it easier by having group mentoring. That way, those who are quieter can take time to build their confidence slowly to ask a question. It’s all about helping other women grow, and not leaving anyone behind.

According to the Manufacturing Institute, women make up nearly half of the labor force, yet they represent less than 30% of the manufacturing workforce. In your opinion, what steps does the industry need to take to attract and retain more women?

Personally, I feel it is the exposure and it needs to start with education and the mass media. I think there is a strong stigma against women working in manufacturing, even among parents and educators, that this work is laborious, unattractive, working mostly with men in dirty and in an uncomfortable environment. We need to address this perception bias as this is not the case, especially at GF.

There are many opportunities and varieties within manufacturing, and many women have made successful careers in manufacturing. By promoting opportunities and inspiring girls from an early age, we will significantly increase the talent pool in long term.

Another important step is to ensure there are seats for women at every level, including the management and executive table. This makes it clear that there are opportunities for everyone to progress and grow with the organization.

In our previous blog, we looked at the rapidly shifting landscape for semiconductors. The explosion of data to be created, shared and connected demands more efficient chips that consumer less power.  

To satisfy these demands in the data center as well as in emerging sensing and computing applications including artificial intelligence (AI), the metaverse, streaming, gaming and social media, hardware designers and customers are looking for an almost-fantastical list of requirements: flexibility to mix and match chip capabilities in a variety of chip sizes and packages, more compute power with less power consumption, affordability and faster data transmission.  

As part of the acquisition of IBM Microelectronics in 2015, GF acquired photonics know-how and IP from IBM Research, and has since refined and developed ways to bring it to volume production as the market demand grew for more capability, better power efficiency and higher bandwidth.  

Now, GF has added two new high-performance solutions to its portfolio: the GF FotonixTM photonics platform and new, improved features to our already available silicon germanium (SiGe) 9HP platform.   

GF Fotonix, available from the GF Fab 8 in Malta, New York, monolithically integrates RF, digital and silicon photonics circuits on the same chip, while leveraging the scale, efficiencies and optimization of 300 millimeter silicon manufacturing. GF’s high-volume silicon manufacturing—combined with innovative 2.5D and 3D stacking—enables ultra-high integration of electrical, optical and communication capabilities into a single monolithic design. This solution lets customers integrate more product functions on-chip and simplifies the bill of materials.  

 Key features include:  

• Low loss passive components (such as SiN and Si WGs, tapers, MMIs)  
• High performance active photonic components (such as MZM, MRM and GePDs)  
• High performance active and passive RFCMOS components 
• Digital standard cell library 
• V-grooves supporting passive fiber attach  

For customers needing discrete high-performance component solutions for optical transceivers, GF is also announcing new features for the GF SiGe (9HP) portfolio. High-performance silicon germanium (SiGe) solutions from GF are designed to deliver the speed and bandwidth required to transport information through fiber optic high speed networks.  

This new feature set enables customers to integrate higher performance digital and RF functionality and exploit silicon economies of scale. This option will enable 800Gbps data rates to reduce power consumption of data center optical connections. This new feature set is also ideal for 5G and future 6G and similar telecom and cellular applications.  

GF’s SiGe platform offers maximized bandwidth and functionality, while minimizing power consumption and costs.  

GF is providing an Electro-Optical Process Design Kit (PDK) that includes p-cells for photonic and electrical components to help its customers get started designing for the speed of light. Reference designs, design services and post-fab services will be provided as well, along with a digital standard cell library.  

GF is collaborating with industry leaders including Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Inc, Marvell and NVIDIA, along with breakthrough photonic computing leaders including Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum, Ranovus and Xanadu to deliver innovative, unique, feature-rich solutions to solve some of the biggest challenges facing data centers today. Learn more here.  

To help customers get their designs to market more efficiently, EDA leaders Ansys, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Synopsys, Inc. are offering design tools supporting integrated silicon photonics- based chips and chiplets. More info is available here. 

Almost five billion Internet users are using, creating and sharing ginormous amounts of data. 

Even as the amount and types of data increase, the number of opportunities to create and share data has exploded across devices ranging from home security systems, appliances, gaming systems, computers and phones to huge data centers that handle social media, streaming content, games and enterprise applications. A study by Ericcson notes there will be more than 42 billion connected IoT devices generating ~177 ZB of data (by 2026). 

One report notes that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day and 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. Much of that data has been driven by increases in almost four billion users of social media sites worldwide.

Not surprising, given remote learning and work-from-home, the ongoing pandemic has only further increased the world’s hunger for more data -and more bandwidth to share the data. According to one industry report, home data usage increased 38 percent from March 2019 to March 2020. The same report found that work-from-home increased during the pandemic from an average of 17 percent of workers to 44 percent, putting increased strain on networks and increasing data usage.  

Covid-19 also resulted in an increase of 138 percent in a group called power users consuming more than 1 terabyte of Internet data quarterly. Google alone counts more than 63,000 searches every second, or 5.6 billion daily searches.  
 

Amir Faintuch, SVP & GM, Computing & Wired Infrastructure SBU at GF explains why silicon photonics is a vital technology platform for the data revolution.

These factors do not begin to comprehend potential impacts of the emerging metaverse, which will demand the creation, storage and connectivity of even more data – data that will need to be transmitted with very low latency at high speeds. The metaverse joins AI, machine learning and virtual reality as well as the continued expansion of connected devices in driving data creation and transmission. 

In the data center, power consumption has become a key consideration along with bandwidth.  

Historically, the chip industry has relied on electrical connectivity over metal (copper) connections for interconnects between systems. Electrical SerDes (serial deserializers), the most common form of electrical I/O, is reaching its limits and there is no attainable roadmap beyond 112 Gb/sec because the large signal losses in copper-based interconnects at a board level make it difficult to transmit data further than a few centimeters at such a high data rate.  

The next wave of high-performance computing architectures requires a new form of I/O that avoid the bottlenecks created by electrical I/O. By 2028, most data center short-distance physical interconnects will be optical instead of electrical.  

The pluggable module has been the key widget that converts electrical signals to optical signals and vice versa i.e. it is the electro-optic interface. 

There have been two key advantages of pluggable modules: 

• Standardization and interoperability – data center operators can source modules from multiple vendors which has driven down the “per Gbps” cost through innovation and competition. 
• Modularity – data center operators can use short range optics to traverse to the end of a row of racks in a data center, and long-range optics to go longer distances to a different data center. 

This modularity has also driven the form factor and standardization of the switch boxes and the box faceplates into which these pluggable modules are plugged into. In a typical switch box at the top of a data center rack, multiple pluggable modules are plugged into the faceplate. The conversion from optical to electrical signals occurs at the faceplate with high-speed electrical signals having to traverse the Cu traces on the board to the switch ASIC. 

Optical communications solutions are poised to enable new levels of performance in hyperscale data centers, cloud computing and 5G-driven network transformation. The silicon photonics technology, used for optical communications, will also become the foundation for rapidly emerging compute and sensing applications. 

Look for our next installment in this series to understand the role of new options to combine the proven benefits of CMOS technology with new capabilities for more powerful chips based on silicon photonics.