by HanBin Lim 

In today’s world, a semiconductor fab’s performance isn’t only measured by wafer output and yields, but also by how efficiently and sustainably it uses natural resources, and how effectively it minimizes the impacts of manufacturing on its neighborhood.

Nowhere are those considerations more important than on the small island nation of Singapore, which is one of the most densely populated nations and has a limited supply of water and other natural resources. GlobalFoundries (GF) has long operated in Singapore, benefitting from the nation’s skilled and dedicated workforce, forward-thinking policies of the government, outstanding universities, and strategic location. Because of these advantages, and thanks to GF Singapore’s world-class team and operational performance, GF is in the midst of a significant expansion on our Singapore campus. We broke ground on the expansion in July 2021, and a year later moved the first production tools into the new building.

The new expansion will be GF’s most advanced semiconductor fab in Singapore, and state-of-the-art environmental performance and sustainable operation have been priorities from the very start of its design process. They are essential, not only because GF is a large, prominent company with diverse stakeholders who expect nothing less than excellent performance, but also because our campus is adjacent to highly populated residential areas. In fact, many of our employees reside nearby in the town of Woodlands.

Among the major design elements that will make this performance possible are innovative water solutions enabling a high level of water recycling and reuse; new abatement technologies that can much more effectively remove greenhouse gases from our exhaust; and the complete replacement of fossil fuel burning boilers with electric heat pumps.

The new building is also solar-ready so that we can reduce the use of fossil fuels in our electricity supply. The necessary cabling, switch rooms, inverters and other required infrastructure have been designed into the facilities, and once production tools have all been installed in the facility, the rooftop solar panels will be put in place and connected.

Reusing and Recycling Water  

Water conservation is a key concern in Singapore, and once complete the Singapore expansion will be GF’s most water-efficient fab. Taking a long-term perspective, the new facility even features the space and flexibility needed to enable future advances in water technology and incorporate these future systems into the operation of the fab.

GF’s water journey in Singapore is more than a decade long and we continue to lessen our facility’s impact on our country’s limited water resources. One way we are doing that is with rainwater-collection systems to capture the rain so that we can use it onsite. While rainwater isn’t potable, it’s suitable for such tasks as flushing toilets and washing floors.

We are also focusing on wastewater treatment, going above and beyond what Singapore regulations require. For example, we have technology and processes that are new to GF’s Singapore fabs, which eliminate certain chemicals from the new fab’s wastewater. This not only reduces our potential impact on downstream water treatment systems, but because we are part of the local community here and want to be a good neighbor to our community.

Treating the Air for Lower Greenhouse Gases 

At the fab expansion, we are installing a new generation of abatement systems which can much more effectively treat the greenhouse gases emitted from our manufacturing operations. This state-of-the-art capability enables our Singapore site to substantially reduce its overall emissions, even as we expand our capacity, in line with GF’s Journey to Zero Carbon goal.

We are also building a thermal oxidizer system to treat volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the exhaust, reducing the concentration of any VOCs by 90–99.5% and minimizing the impact of the new expansion on neighboring communities.

Electrification and Phasing Out Fossil Fuels 

To further enhance the environmental performance of the new fab is to electrify wherever possible. We are replacing fossil-fuel-burning combustion boilers with electricity-driven heat pumps to heat water for manufacturing operations, and using local on-demand water heaters for other needs. Not only does this eliminate any exhaust smoke emitted into the air, it is also much more energy-efficient, decreasing overall energy demand and providing an avenue for our hot water needs to be rigorously optimized.

The Human Dimension 

As important as all of this work is, it also has a human dimension which transcends the technical details.

The APAC Environmental Team is relatively young for our industry, with an average age of about 30 years old. The way we see it, we aren’t just building a fab to meet today’s needs and requirements, we’re building a fab for the future. This fab is made to beat tomorrow’s challenges and to last beyond the duration of our careers.

So our challenge, or rather our opportunity, is to build this fab not just according to today’s rules, but according to our vision of the future.

HanBin Lim is an Environmental Manager for GF in the APAC region. He has a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from National University of Singapore, and also leads the global Circularity Work Group in SEMI.

As 2022 draws to a close, GlobalFoundries® (GF®) concludes its first full year as a publicly traded company. Foundry Files takes a look back at key GF news, announcements and themes from 2022. 

Recognition for ESG and Corporate Responsibility 

Throughout 2022 GF received several awards and ratings for our environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) efforts, the latest recognitions of our commitment to corporate responsibility.  

We were honored to receive an Environmental Merit Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for conservation efforts at our facility in Essex Junction, Vermont. In addition, both our Vermont site and our Malta, New York, site received Most Valuable Pollution Prevention awards from the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable. 

GF was also named to Newsweek’s “America’s Most Responsible Companies 2023” list, received a “Low Risk” ESG rating from Morningstar Sustainalytics, and recognized for “Prime” corporate ESG performance by rating agency ISS with a rank in the top 10% of companies in the semiconductor industry. As John Toy, chief of ethics and sustainability at GF, said: 

“We recognize there is still much work to be done. Just as the chips we manufacture are vital to the innovations that are leading to a cleaner, healthier future, we are committed to minimizing our impact on the environment, driving positive change, and creating value through corporate responsibility.” 

Closer Partnership with the U.S. Government 

GF is proud to be a longstanding partner and supplier to the U.S. government, and over the year we saw this relationship continue to deepen. 

In October 2022, GF and U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy announced the award of $30 million in federal funding to advance the development and production of next-generation gallium nitride (GaN) on silicon semiconductors at our manufacturing facility in Essex Junction, Vermont. 

The new award moves GF and its Vermont site closer to the large-scale production of GaN chips, which have a unique ability to handle significant heat and power levels. Thanks to this ability, GaN chips are positioned to enable game-changing performance and efficiency for smartphones, electric vehicles, power grids, and many other applications.  

At the event to announce the funding, Sen. Leahy said: “This funding is an investment in U.S. leadership in improved technology for chips that connect everything around us and power our handheld devices—with GlobalFoundries and Vermonters leading the way.” 

Earlier in the year, GF and the U.S. Department of Defense announced a $117 million agreement for GF to provide a strategic supply of U.S.-made semiconductors critical to national security systems. These chips, to be securely manufactured at GF’s facility in Malta, New York, will be used in some of the nation’s most sensitive defense and aerospace applications. Click here to read more. 

U.S. CHIPS and Science Act 

Semiconductors made headline news throughout 2022, and a major focal point was the development, progress, and passing of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. GF was a vocal supporter of the legislation. 

On Tuesday, August 9, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the $52+ billion CHIPS and Science of 2022 into law. GF CEO Dr. Thomas Caulfield attended the signing ceremony on behalf of GF. The law will have a profound impact on the U.S. semiconductor industry for years to come. 

In his remarks, President Biden cited GF’s new agreement with Qualcomm to supply an additional $4.2 billion in U.S-made chips, to be manufactured at our facility in Malta, New York. 

The announcement was made a day earlier, coinciding with a CEO summit in Washington co-hosted by GF, Ford, and Applied Materials. The summit brought together CEOs and leaders from across the semiconductor supply chain to discuss U.S. technology leadership, competitiveness, supply chains, national security, and more. Click here to read a Reuters report on the summit. 

Closing out the historic week for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, GF was proud to join New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Senate Majority Lead Chuck Schumer, Congressman Paul Tonko and others in Albany for the signing of New York’s Green CHIPS legislation. 

Leadership and Partnership in Europe 

In July 2022, GF and STMicroelectronics announced a partnership to create a new, jointly-operated 300mm semiconductor manufacturing facility in Crolles, France, to support the demand for chips from customers in Europe and across the globe. 

GF CEO Dr. Thomas Caulfield and ST CEO Jean-Marc Chery announced the partnership together in Crolles, alongside President of France Emmanuel Macron and other officials. ST and GF will receive significant financial support from the State of France for the new facility, which will be built as an expansion of ST’s existing facility in Crolles and leverage the site’s infrastructure. 

Through the agreement, GF and STMicroelectronics are committed to building manufacturing capacity for chips used in the automotive and industrial markets, as well as Internet of Things and communication infrastructure applications.  

With a focus on our differentiated 22FDX platform, which has shipped more than one billion chips, the new facility in Crolles will expand GF’s presence within Europe’s dynamic technology ecosystem while reinforcing our position as the leading semiconductor foundry in Europe. 

Read the article “Chip Giants to Build Factory in France as Global Supply Race Rolls On” from The Wall Street Journal, as well as news coverage from Financial Times, Agency France-Press, Reuters, and EETimes. 

First Tool-In at Singapore Expansion 

Moving the first manufacturing tool into a new facility is always an exciting moment for a chipmaker. In June 2022, GF we celebrated the arrival of the first tool at the newest facility on our Singapore campus. 

The milestone was reached only one year after breaking ground on the first phase of our Singapore expansion, and was achieved in partnership Singapore Economic Development Board and co-investments from committed customers. 

In a ceremony at the newly constructed building, GF leaders were joined by Singapore officials, and executives from Lam Research, Exyte, and many other key partners and suppliers. Together they watched as the first tool — a market-leading etch tool made by Lam Research — was moved into GF’s newly commissioned cleanroom. 

The milestone brought GF closer to expanded manufacturing capacity at our Singapore site, and fulfilling global demand in the marketplace for GF-made chips used in automobiles, smartphones, wireless connectivity, internet of things (IoT) devices, and other applications. 

Click here to watch GF CEO Dr. Thomas Caulfield discuss the first tool-in with CNBC, and click here to watch a video of the GF’s Singapore Expansion First Tool-In Event. Read news coverage from The Straits Times here. 

Building a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion 

GF knows the best ideas come from a diverse team being inclusive, and that our success rests on empowering employees to bring their whole person — with all of their unique talents and distinctive qualities — to our company. 

Throughout 2022, we further leaned into our strategic partnerships with AfroTech, FairyGodboss, Society of Hispanic Engineers, Society of Women Engineers, iRelaunch, and other organizations to create new opportunities and expand outreach in our industry and beyond.  

For example, read this blog article to learn more about the ways GF’s Global Journey Re-Entry Program has provided individuals with an extra layer of support when rejoining the workforce after a voluntary break, such as raising a family, serving in the military, caring for a loved one, pursuing education, or other reasons. 

For further reading on diversity, equity, and inclusion at GF in 2022, check out: 

• Inspiring the Next Generation of Women in Manufacturing: Q&A with 2022 STEP Ahead Award Winner Sylvia Chan 
• Celebrating Black Success and Development at GF 
• First European Network Meeting of Female GlobalFoundries Employees 

• Pride@GF represents GF at the Burlington Pride Parade 
• GlobalFoundries signs ‘Partnership for Your Success’ (PaYS) agreement with Army 

Connecting the World with GF Connex 

GF continues to lead the way in radio frequency (RF) innovations, and in May 2022 we announced GF Connex^tm — our feature-rich RF portfolio designed for next-gen wireless connectivity. We’re collaborating with industry leaders like Broadcom, Fujikura, MediaTek, Orca Systems, Skyworks and others to address varied RF needs across a range of applications. 

GF Connex products are pervasive in daily life. From smartphones that stay connected longer on a single charge, to cellular and satellite communications that deliver more reliable connections. From innovative and power-efficient Internet of Things devices, to more responsive, extended range, high resolution imagery for more powerful and sensitive automotive radars. 

Our GF Connex portfolio exemplifies our feature-rich approach: we work in lockstep with our customers to develop innovative process features that enhance and elevate capabilities for RF communications, efficient conversion and delivery of power, and precision analog for sensing. GF’s laser focus on select end markets means these solutions are differentiated and purpose-built for automotive, smart mobile, IoT, communications infrastructure, and data centers. 

To read more, check out “GlobalFoundries Advances RF Leadership with GF Connex Portfolio and Customer Collaborations” as well as the blog post “Expanding the Possibilities” by GF Chief Business Officer Mike Hogan. 

GF Labs Engaging with Academia 

Semiconductor innovation is essential to the growth and development of technology megatrends that are reshaping the global economy — from the Internet of Things to 5G and 6G wireless, from artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing to next-generation vehicles, and beyond. 

In May 2022 we announced our GF Labs program to expand and accelerate the momentum of this innovation. GF Labs leads our company’s research and development efforts and provides the framework for advancing GF’s differentiated technology portfolio in partnership with leading academic, government, and industry collaborators. 

In addition to joining the American Semiconductor Innovation Coalition this summer, GF and Purdue University announced in November 2022 a new strategic partnership to strengthen and expand collaboration on semiconductor research and education, with a focus on joint R&D. 

Through GF’s University Partnership Program, a part of GF Labs, research teams at more than 50 leading universities have unique access to GF and our technologies. Don’t miss “A Look into the Future of Automotive Radar” and “GF Aims for Energy-Efficient Artificial Intelligence” to hear how GF is collaborating with these world-leading academic researchers to advance critical technologies. 

The Future is Bright for GF Fotonix 

Reports show that more than 42 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things are generating around 177 zettabytes of data every year. Energy is consumed as this data moves from devices to data centers and back again. 

In March 2022, GF proudly announced GF Fotonix^tm, the next-generation, first-of-its-kind silicon photonics platform that addresses the clear need for innovative solutions to handle the ever-growing volumes of data in a way that is highly reliable, faster, and more energy efficient.  

GF has active design wins with major customers, and a significant share of today’s optical networking modules market. Click here and scroll down a bit to see what our customers and partners are saying about GF Fotonix and our leadership in silicon photonics. 

GF Fotonix monolithically integrates high-performance radio-frequency (RF), digital, and silicon photonics circuits on the same chip, while leveraging the scale, efficiencies and tight process controls of 300 millimeter semiconductor manufacturing at our facility in Malta, New York. 

Read more about the innovative GF Fotonix platform at: 

• Silicon Photonics are here and GlobalFoundries is Innovating 
• GF Collaborates with Fabrinet on Fiber-Attach Capability for Silicon Photonics Platform 
• Making Electronics-Photonics Integration a Reality 

• More Compute Power, Better Connectivity: Combining Proven CMOS Chip Fabrication with Silicon Photonics to Move Data at the Speed of Light 
   

Resource Conservation and Sustainable Manufacturing 

We recognize climate change is an unprecedented global challenge, and we continue along our Journey to Zero Carbon. As part of GF’s longstanding commitment to environmentally responsible manufacturing and operations, we are constantly looking for new ways to minimize our impact on the environment. 

This spring, GF announced the results of our three-year (2019-2021) resource conservation goals. Using a wide variety of innovative strategies, our team successfully met or exceeded goals for realizing annual savings in electricity use, water use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, as well as chemical use and waste generation. 

These annual savings include: 

• GHG emissions roughly equivalent those from 5,000 U.S. homes in an average year 
• Electricity roughly equivalent to the amount used by 8,000 U.S. homes in an average year 
• Enough water to fill 136 Olympic-sized swimming pools.  
• Chemical use and waste generation roughly equivalent to the weight of a herd of 1,600 elephants 

Read more on the GF blog: GF Surpasses Key Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Water Conservation Goals; GF Achieves Savings in Electricity, Chemical Use, and Waste Generation 

In March 2022, GlobalFoundries announced GF Fotonix^TM a new platform that monolithically integrates high-performance RF, digital CMOS and silicon photonics (SiPH) circuits on the same chip, while leveraging the scale, efficiencies and tight process controls of 300 millimeter silicon manufacturing. 

GF has qualified this innovative technology to meet the demands of today and tomorrow’s most urgent, complex and difficult challenges in areas such as data center interconnect, optical networking, photonic computing, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), and co-packaged optics. What’s the next step to getting silicon photonics into the hands of manufacturers and ultimately customers? 

Creating an end-to-end ecosystem for silicon photonics is critical to expanding GF’s photonics technologies in the market. GF is working with industry leaders in packaging, EDA tools and other critical categories for its silicon photonics portfolio, helping to create this end-to-end ecosystem enabling its customers to develop and build innovative chips. 

One such industry collaborator is Fabrinet, a leading provider of advanced optical packaging and precision optical, electro-mechanical, and electronic manufacturing services to original equipment manufacturers of complex products, such as optical communication components, modules and subsystems, automotive components, medical devices, industrial lasers and sensors. Fabrinet has combined GF expertise to enable high fiber count, passively aligned fiber arrays for light input and output from our silicon photonics die. This development leverages Fabrinet’s existing proven manufacturing expertise in optical components and assemblies, and co-packaged optics that eliminates the need for transceivers by packaging silicon switch circuitry with optics in the module or package. 

Using silicon photonics samples from GF and sharing its process technology expertise, Fabrinet has now demonstrated fiber-attach capabilities for the 90 nm silicon photonics process. This showcases the full manufacturability and viability of the GF Fotonix technology. 

The two companies are also collaborating to bring fiber-attach to GF’s 45 nm platform technologies, including GF Fotonix silicon photonics wafers, and anticipates those being fully tested and qualified by end of 2022. 

Wafers with fiber-attach developed by Fabrinet with GF support will be fully qualified to the Telcordia industry standard by end of 2022. 

Why is this collaboration to enable fiber-attach significant? silicon photonics has been heralded as a major breakthrough in silicon chip production. The process of getting highly advanced chips from production into products is extremely complex. This process starts with availability of the silicon, and relies on an ecosystem that provides EDA tools, design kits, software, packaging innovations, testing tools and other elements to result in a complete silicon solution. 

As chips based on silicon photonics start to become available in volume later this year, the industry is expecting to see significant uptake in applications that include: 

• High-performance computing 
• Optical quantum computing 
• Artificial intelligence 
• Telecommunications 
• Networking 
• Virtual and augmented reality 
• Defense and aerospace 

Fabrinet offers a broad range of advanced optical and electro-mechanical capabilities across the entire manufacturing process, including process design and engineering, supply chain management, manufacturing, advanced packaging, integration, final assembly and testing. Fabrinet focuses on production of high complexity products in any mix and any volume. Fabrinet maintains engineering and manufacturing resources and facilities in Thailand, the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China, Israel and the United Kingdom. For more information visit: www.fabrinet.com. 

GF is growing its silicon photonics ecosystem and will be reporting here on this and other silicon photonics developments to accelerate time-to-market for customers. Watch for news around laser-attach, stacking chips and enabling on-chip copper connectivity and more.

Researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara push the limits with GF Fotonix™

by Gary Dagastine 

In previous posts, we’ve profiled some of the collaborations GlobalFoundries (GF) conducts with leading academic researchers through its University Partnership Program (UPP). These collaborations are important because they lead to proof points and reference designs for new applications of GF’s differentiated technologies. They complement the work of GF’s internal research and development teams. 

The recently introduced GF Fotonix™ platform benefits from academic research in many ways, as we’ll learn later in this blog post. GF Fotonix integrates high-performance CMOS, radio frequency (RF) and photonic components monolithically on the same chip and has the potential to disrupt many existing technologies. 

With GF Fotonix, customers can create innovative electro-optical solutions while taking advantage of the scale and efficiency of GF’s 300mm silicon manufacturing processes, enabling innovative packaging solutions, and the design tools needed for first-pass success. 

New electro-optical solutions are urgently needed because data volumes are increasing exponentially, driven by society’s digital transformation. Electronics-based solutions alone can’t keep up with the needs for more capacity, speed and energy efficiency in data centers and in the overall communications infrastructure. Photonic, or light-based, solutions offer many advantages, but getting electrons and photons to work in a highly integrated, reliable and cost-effective fashion has been difficult. 

No longer. “GF Fotonix is a very large step in systems integration, because for the first time millimeter-wave (mmWave) circuits and digital systems are integrated with photonic building blocks on the same piece of silicon. This opens up many new system and product alternatives, initially to develop next-generation optical interconnects for data centers, eventually leading to the disaggregation of the datacenter,” said Ted Letavic, GF Corporate Fellow, who leads GF’s Silicon Photonics Technology Solutions team and provides innovation and technical leadership to GF Labs. 

“As you can imagine, getting 300 GHz-class control electronics and photonic elements to play well together has been a difficult challenge,” he said. GF’s integration efforts have been aided by the real-world testing and benchmarking work performed by Professors James Buckwalter and Clint Schow at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), among others. 

Free-Form Design in Silicon 

Beyond its usefulness for next-generation optical interconnects, Letavic said that GF Fotonix incorporates novel photonic elements which will lead to the design of new photonic solutions directly in silicon. 

“A different set of our university partners is exploring the use of mathematically driven design techniques to increase photonic performance and to open up entirely new applications,” Letavic said. “These techniques are variously called inverse design, optical transform design or subwavelength design. Essentially, you decide how light needs to travel in your photonic system to perform a needed function, then you create a series of mathematical expressions – similar to back propagation in neural networks – which solve for a set of physical coordinates which are mapped to a physical shape in silicon that delivers the desired performance.” 

GF and its university partners have made good progress in proving the accuracy of structures built using this approach. “In fact, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re beginning to optimize our process design kits (PDKs) and other design tools to implement these ‘inverse’ techniques into our design flow.” 

“It’s really an entirely new way to think about how to design things in silicon, challenging traditional photonic design at its core,” Letavic said. “It moves us toward what we’re calling free-form design, where you can design any structures that you desire and as long as it complies with our ground rules, we can build it. It’s a game-changer that will open up our customers’ creative floodgates, and it’s cost-effective, too, because we don’t have to change our foundry flow.”  

GF is working with still other university partners to explore entirely new photonic frontiers, such as photonic computing, photonic quantum computing, and biomedical applications. “These research teams are conducting studies to answer blue-sky questions like, ‘What are the elements needed to enable photonic quantum computing in silicon?’ ‘What would a COVID-19 sensor look like if it were photonic-based? We are collaborating to understand how to use GF technologies to address these new frontiers,” he said. 

Longstanding Academic Partners 

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a hotbed of research in RF and mixed-signal technologies, and nobody better exemplifies that focus than two of GF’s partners there, Professors James Buckwalter and Clint Schow. Each has a long-standing relationship with GF, and they are partners on certain GF-related projects as well. 

Buckwalter, an IEEE Fellow, researches high-frequency devices at the intersection of RF, mmWave and photonics, for front-end interfaces, signal processing and mmWave communications at 140/220 GHz. Among the technologies he has used for many years are GF’s FD-SOI (GF FDX™) and SiGe processes. “I’ve graduated more than 30 Masters and Ph.D. students over my career, all of whom have used GF’s technologies, and they take that knowledge with them to their employers,” he said. 

Schow, meanwhile, has more of a photonics background. An IEEE and OSA Fellow, he worked at IBM twice, where he gained deep familiarity with technologies that are now part of GF’s portfolio, such as the 90WG silicon photonics platform and SiGe BiCMOS. He also worked for a tunable laser startup in Santa Barbara, which gave him the desire to teach at UCSB. “I’ve been a believer in GF’s technologies forever,” he said. 

Greater than the sum of its parts 

Buckwalter said that in their research, they don’t look at photonic devices and electronic circuits as two separate things, but rather as elements in a toolbox that can be put together in various ways to solve problems, and GF Fotonix helps them advance that approach. 

“We’ve been driving toward this co-design where we break apart the photonic elements and incorporate them, for example, as small segments inside of electronic amplifiers,” he said. “We don’t treat them as separate entities, we just break everything apart, mix them up and put them back together again. Ultimately, I think in five or 10 years this hybridization of photonic and electronic elements is how design will be done in the high-frequency realm. It’s bringing two things together to get something that’s greater than the sum of the parts.” 

Schow said GF’s design manuals are a great help in this regard. “They’ve always been fantastic, and help us so much in figuring out what the ground rules are so that we can explore within those guidelines. They’ve helped us build things like custom heaters, which might sound like low-tech devices but are key to tuning circuits, as well as custom phase-shifters to optimize performance. From the standpoint of understanding the physical design space as we pursue hybrid designs, it’s been a great experience,” he said. 

Low-power coherent optical communications 

A good example of their hybrid approach is a project the two are conducting which involves broadband waveform generation and detection for the use of coherent optics in data centers. Coherent optics technology is seen as a way to dramatically increase the amount of data light can carry through a fiberoptic cable in a data center, by modulating (i.e., changing) the amplitude and phase of the light, and by transmitting it across two different polarizations.

It involves digital signal processing at both the transmitter and receiver, and the researchers are using GF Fotonix for this work. “While coherent optics is already used in long-haul data transmission, that requires a lot of energy. What we’re trying to do is to make it low-powered enough to be used in short-reach communications links in data centers, to improve networking architectures,” Schow said. 

“But building complete coherent link subsystems is really difficult. On the electronics side you need very efficient high-swing drivers integrated with photonic modulators to generate signaling waveforms, and then on the receiver side, you need a full photonic hybrid to separate the waveforms and to interface with high speed electronics,” he said. “So, there are very highly integrated circuits on both sides; very highly integrated photonic integrated circuits in the middle which must be designed to work with the receiver/transmitter subsystems; and they must also function as the full link which brings everything together. 

“This forces us as faculty advisors, and also our students, to have a broad view. I think it produces students who are well-equipped to go out there and make a big difference in the industry, and of course, all of them will be familiar with the GF technologies that make it possible,” Schow said. 

Looking forward 

Buckwalter said that silicon photonics integrated with mmWave electronics will play an increasingly important role in many areas going forward. One is the relentless march of mmWave wireless communications to frequencies of 200 GHz-300 GHz and above. 

“There’s a gulf between the upper reaches of the mmWave spectrum and the wavelengths of infrared and visible light. Silicon photonics is going to play a very important role here because the losses become so great at these frequencies that there will need to be some combination of photonics and electronics as a low-loss way to send information,” he said.

“And while there are going to be a lot of interesting applications for mmWave-enabled photonics, it will work the other way around, too, with photonics enabling mmWave. For example, for the cellular networks of the future we’re going to need to show higher and higher dynamic range over extremely wide bandwidths, and electronics alone can’t ever meet those challenges,” Buckwalter said. 

Schow said the integration of electronics and photonics is inevitable, whether it is a hybrid type of integration where things are positioned close to one another and densely packaged together, or a monolithic approach. 

“The incumbent way of doing things never wants to die. But I think we’re seeing that play out right now,” he said.