By Gary Dagastine

From smartphones, wearable devices and automotive electronics to technology for schools and hospitals, digital technologies now are pervasive in virtually all aspects of modern life. They have brought unprecedented change to how we work, learn, travel, access healthcare and otherwise live our lives.

Semiconductors, as the building blocks of digital technologies, enable users to create innovative products which are more functional and energy-efficient, and less resource-intensive, than ever before. As a result, the health, safety and prosperity of individuals and society is tightly tied to feature-rich semiconductor technologies.

GlobalFoundries (GF) is one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, with advanced manufacturing facilities in the United States, Germany, and Singapore. GF delivers the feature-rich process technology solutions that are pervasive in our lives and vital to the innovations leading to a greener, more sustainable, better connected, and healthier world.

A Critical Resource for Humanity

Companies worldwide are striving to develop cleaner, more efficient and more environmentally preferable technologies for smart mobile devices; automotive systems; computing and artificial intelligence (AI); the communications and data center infrastructures; and a multitude of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, among others.

While these applications differ greatly in their functional requirements, what they all have in common is a need for chips that not only provide the high performance and specialized features required, but do so in an efficient, reliable and resource-sensitive manner.

GF offers an array of feature-rich, high-performance and power-efficient semiconductor platforms and related services that help customers build such systems. GF’s differentiated technology platforms such as RF-SOI (silicon-on-insulator), FD-SOI and silicon photonics – coupled with design enablement and application-specific features like analog/RF, embedded memory and advanced packaging – create solutions tailored to customers’ specific needs and markets.

A quick look at GF’s three core markets shows how GF’s existing platforms and development work are aimed at helping customers achieve their sustainability goals, with power efficiency running through all of the units as a key objective.

In each target market, GF semiconductor platforms are accelerating innovation and leading to a positive impact on humanity.

More Efficient Technologies for Mobile and Wireless

Nearly every wireless call, text, email, social media post, and streaming video passes through chips manufactured by GF. The company’s leading RF platforms were vital to making possible widespread telework and remote education, and are unlocking the power of 5G and future 6G networks.

Peter Gammel, VP and CTO GF’s Mobile and Wireless Infrastructure Business Unit (MWI), said that GF’s platforms for imaging, displays, security and power management in mobile and wireless systems are good examples of the company’s commitment to help customers build products in a more sustainable fashion.

“For imaging functions, the more you can do to reduce the amount of data needing to be processed, the faster an operation can be carried out and the less power required. By going from an analog imaging architecture to a digital one, the potential exists to reduce the amount of data by 100,000x. We are investigating how to do that using GF’s 22FDX™ platform because its ability to toggle between high-performance and energy-efficient operation offers unique advantages,” he said. “The 22FDX platform will make possible stacked image signal processors for higher performance, and low-power, low-leakage and ultra-small memory bitcells. 22FDX will also lead to reduced power consumption in sensors by enabling compute-near-data and imaging-to-action (rather than to pixels) architectures, and by reducing interface power consumption.”

In displays, Gammel said the 22FDX platform will also enable display architectures that keep the 100,000:1 data compressed as much as possible for as long as possible for higher efficiency, until it is expanded to match the human visual system. He also described how GF’s technologies can be used for microLEDs (Light Emitting Diodes), an emerging flat-panel display technology. “MicroLEDs can be enabled by GF’s GaN (gallium nitride) technology, currently in development, integrated with an 22FDX backplane. The combination will enable low-leakage, low-power operation, small size using stacking solutions, and co-design of analog and digital circuit functions to achieve the best compute/power/brightness tradeoff,” he said.

For enhanced security for mobile/wireless systems to protect user privacy, Gammel said that GF’s 55 BCD Lite® platform makes possible the integration of silicon LEDs and SPAD (Single-photon Avalanche Diode) sensors on the same chip. This may lead to quantum random-number-generating, low-power, ultra-small form-factor mobile quantum cryptography solutions to keep data safer and more secure. GF is developing these in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).

GF’s 55 BCD Lite platform also enables highly efficient power management circuits that lead to longer battery lifetimes in mobile/wireless devices, reducing the amount of batteries sent to landfills.

Novel Automotive Connectivity, Electrification, Safety and Automation

From radars for assisted driving, to connectivity, to boosting the efficiency of electric vehicles, GF semiconductor technology enables automotive customers to produce vehicles that are safer and more efficient than ever before.

In addition to accelerating more energy-efficient smart factories and industrial IoT applications, GF semiconductor platforms are enabling customers to develop and bring to market increasingly complex IoT devices that are more innovative, more energy-efficient, and can run longer between charging.

Pirooz Parvarandeh, VP and CTO of GF’s Automotive, Industrial and Multi-market (AIM) strategic business unit, said that GF’s BCD technologies offer state-of-the-art figures of merit leading to increased efficiency in the supply and distribution of power in automotive, smart factory and data center applications. “This performance reduces power loss and dissipated heat, enabling customers to reduce the size/weight of their products and to save on cooling costs and energy,” he said.

GF’s 22FDX platform, meanwhile, enables industry-leading automotive radar solutions that bring many advantages to people and to the environment. “The 22FDX platform allows customers to build radar systems offering lower power for a given level of performance, along with lower overall vehicle energy consumption and increased automotive imaging range and resolution,” Parvarandeh said. “This performance enables higher levels of car safety, potentially saving lives and reducing the number of collisions. The societal value of reducing death and injury is incalculable.”

The GF automotive team is also pursuing unique technologies optimized for battery management systems. In vehicles, these systems optimize the use of stored energy in the batteries, which leads to more power-efficient driving. Additionally, GF technologies are used for making the actuators in vehicles more energy efficient.

Battery management systems will enable systems such as battery-operated vehicles, machinery and robots that operate longer on a charge and offer more functionality than at present. “We are also pursuing ultra-low-power technologies for a range of other battery-operated equipment for IoT, compute/control, human-machine interfaces and other applications,” Parvarandeh said.

Longer-term, the GF team is focused on a variety of other sustainable technologies, including platforms optimized for LED driver circuits, with the goal of reducing the amount of power used in lighting applications in homes, cities, and vehicles. as are energy-harvesting solutions that draw power from heat, vibration and other environmental inputs, for remote applications where batteries are impractical, such as IoT sensors. These energy-harvesting solutions can prolong battery life – requiring less energy use – and hold the potential to become significant drivers of efficiency as the number of IoT devices continue to rapidly increase.

Energy Efficiency for Computing, Data Centers

GF semiconductor platforms are directly addressing the known “power bottleneck” hampering the explosive growth of AI, and enabling customers to meet the power efficiency targets demanded by the industry and society. GF is also the industry leader in next-generation silicon photonics technology, which is positioned to significantly reduce the unsustainable growth of electricity needed to power data centers.

Ted Letavic, Vice President and CTO of GF’s Computing and Wireless Infrastructure (CWI) business unit, highlighted energy efficiency for computing and data center applications as a key sustainability goal for GF. Letavic pointed to GF’s multi-faceted efforts to increase energy efficiency in data centers, a huge and fast-growing consumer of the world’s electric power in the aggregate. “We’re using GF’s 12LP+ FinFET and 22FDX platforms with low voltage logic and memory to develop AI accelerators that can drastically reduce the amount of power required for data-centric workloads within data centers. Additionally, GF is applying the 55 BCD Lite and 22FDX platforms to address next-generation power delivery systems for heterogeneous compute solutions.

Letavic also said GF is working on other solutions for data centers that will enable customers to offer more sustainable products, and to take the next step on the sustainability curve. One example is the 45SPCLO silicon photonics technology platform, which uses photons instead of electrons to move data rapidly and efficiently from chip-to-chip and across datacenter networks. Photonics enables the reconfiguration of data centers to increase total overall energy efficiency of data transport. GF is enabling new ultra-low-power photonic compute paradigms, Letavic said, including wafer-scale photonic neural network processors and photonic quantum computation. Both paradigms offer substantial energy reduction per compute task, he said, and fuel the scale-out of traditional compute systems.

Solutions to Deliver Sustainability

GF’s differentiated semiconductor platforms offer compelling advantages to customers and to society at large. Furthermore, our investments in sustainable manufacturing practices provide tangible evidence of our commitment to making the world a better place.

Click here to read more about GF’s sustainable manufacturing and operations.

If you counted the number of electronics, appliances, and products connected to the internet in your home 18 months ago, the number would have been pretty small.  

But in the last year and a half, the number of “things” in our homes and day-to-day lives that are connected to the internet, known as IoT, has exploded. In 2020, for the first time in history, the number of IoT devices surpassed non-IoT-connected devices.1 By 2025, the number of IoT-connected devices is expected to reach nearly 31 billion.2  

We can be thousands of miles away from home and use our smartphones to open or close our garage door or adjust the temperature inside our house. Like smartphones, once we see the initial opportunities of what’s possible with IoT in our personal and work lives, we want more.  

Today’s IoT devices have higher levels of intelligence making it easier to connect them (which drives more usage) and makes it easier for devices to interact with us. IoT devices are becoming more sophisticated to support the growing demand for smart features like face, speech, and object recognition. And improvements in processing and intelligent reaction – the different things a device can do based on reacting to commands or recognition – will make it possible for devices to anticipate our needs and act without even being asked.  

The first generation of products connected to the internet required that data they collected to be sent to the cloud for processing. This year, it is expected that more than 30 billion devices will send data to the cloud, consuming precious power resources3. Without another solution, data centers will require massive expansion to handle the rise in the volume of data being created and stored. 

The Internet of Things is presenting incredible commercial opportunities, too: 

• Manufacturers will be able to track the real-time usage of equipment and anticipate failures before they even occur.  
• In health care, earbuds or smartwatches may evolve to monitor and send our heart rate and other biometrics. IoT could revolutionize diabetes care through non-invasive blood glucose monitoring.  
• Retailers and warehouse managers will have more accurate, real-time inventory data.  

The possibilities are endless. 

Technology driving IoT acceleration 

New technologies are helping drive IoT acceleration. Older “legacy” technology infrastructure for sending data did so at a higher cost, consumed more power, had slower response times, and was not as secure. 

In the future, IoT products will need to always be switched “on,” seamlessly connected, have a higher degree of intelligence, and be more secure – all things that existing devices are unable to provide in an energy-saving or cost-effective way.  

That’s where GlobalFoundries® (GF®) innovation is delivering in a big way. New architecture and innovations developed by the company enable longer battery life, reduce the cost of ownership, allow computing to be done at the device itself and help deliver secure wireless software updates. That’s right, if our garage door opener or thermostat is part of the Internet of Things, it needs updates, but GF is helping that happen effortlessly, behind the scenes. 

GF innovation is helping build, expand and improve IoT 

There’s a lot more to IoT than connecting a device to Wi-Fi. A great deal goes into making the Internet of Things possible, and the more products connected, the more IoT needs to run smoothly.  

“GlobalFoundries’ solutions are purpose-built specifically for IoT and are not a one-size-fits-all-purposes type of retrofit,” said Ed Kaste, vice president of Industrial and Multi-Market at GlobalFoundries. “While semiconductor chips are very small, they are packed with big, tangible, innovative benefits that are making the Internet of Things work better — and smarter — than ever.” 

GF technology offers superior capabilities in connecting with IoT through: 

• Better power solutions: For a smart speaker, doorbell camera or appliance to be connected, it has to be turned on in some way, and that drives a need for lower power solutions that enable connectivity but involve minimal battery consumption and minimal power “leakage.” In addition, the transceivers involved need to be effective enough to connect reliably yet consume very little power during the connection. 
• Seamless connection: To connect things that weren’t before, consumers expect the connection process to be simple, fast, and enduring.  
• Intelligence: Connecting a car, bike computer, light bulb or driverless vehicle to the internet is not an end in itself. Once connected, it has to do something for the user — the item needs to respond to commands, provide information and send alerts, as well as anticipate the user’s needs. The IoT “brain,” which is inside the chip itself, also needs to be smart enough to know what data it should pay attention to and what it shouldn’t. 
• Security: If an individual’s personal information or a business’ proprietary data is being communicated, it needs to be secure, and the privacy of that data fully protected. Attacks on IoT devices can occur in as few as five minutes after a connection is made, so security needs to be built in and effective from the start. 
• Sensing: GF technology can sense situations such as someone approaching a door in the dark and has the intelligence to turn on a nearby light and call the homeowner’s mobile phone. 

The GF FDX™ platform portfolio includes the development and fabrication of state-of-the-art semiconductor chips that are providing significant performance advantages in intelligence, security, and sensing.  

The GF 22FDXTM platform helps address the challenges being created by more than 30 billion connected devices. GF’s innovative solution combines high-density, low-power digital processing required for edge artificial intelligence (AI) with precision analog needed to enable high-performance radio frequency (RF) and sensing, providing the reliable communications that users expect.  

GF’s enabling of “AI inference” in semiconductor chips is relieving pressure on data centers and increasing the ability of edge devices to compute and store data, as well as take helpful actions on their own. 

At its annual GF Technology Summit, held virtually on Sept. 15, 2021, GF tech leaders discussed the company’s advances that are elevating the IoT, smartphone, auto and data center industries. 

At the event, the company announced that GF’s microdisplay solutions for IoT include new features that enable smaller and lighter augmented reality (AR) glasses to last longer on a single battery charge. GF’s microdisplay solutions are based on the 22FDX+ platform, which is seeing broad industry acceptance including more than $7.5 billion in design wins around the world. The platform has been optimized to improve process speed and reduce leakage while enabling enhanced pixel driver functionality. 

“As more devices are connected, more is needed to develop low-power, low-leakage solutions, as well as facilitate smooth connections, provide more intelligence and capability, protect information and facilitate ease of use,” Kaste added. “GlobalFoundries continues to develop innovative solutions for the growing and evolving needs of the Internet of Things, which is going to improve our daily lives for the foreseeable future.” 

To learn more about GF’s solutions powering home and industrial IoT, please click here.  

Two hours and fifty-five minutes. That’s how long the average American spends on their mobile phone every day. And the amount of time is only expected to increase.

That doesn’t mean we actually spend almost three hours talking on the phone. Because our smartphones aren’t just compact and lightweight telephones. They are also an incredibly powerful computer, a sophisticated camera and accompanying photo album, a music player that can store a massive catalog of songs, a video monitor that can stream live meetings, news, and sporting events, a personal address book, a piece of news, encyclopedia and research center, a control panel for appliances and cars that may be thousands of miles away, and a whole lot more.

And all of this is consolidated into a single device that we can fit in our pocket weighing less than half a pound.

In the last 10 years, the share of Americans that own a smartphone has more than doubled from 35% to 85%.¹ 

We want more, now

The more our phones can do, the more we want them to do. And we want our mobile phones to perform all of these functions and more, but do it better with faster speeds, better image, video, and sound quality, and fewer dropped calls and video meetings, all while consuming less battery power.

Adding new functions and improving upon the features and apps our phones already have requires stronger connections to data, such as video. For example, we have quickly come to expect the same phone and video call quality and reliability in places like a stadium, arena or on a beach as we have while working in an office or at home.

We want our credit card and bank information protected, especially when making $3.56 billion in mobile purchases last year, more than triple the $1 billion in purchases made just four years earlier.2

And we want this without having to carry any back-up batteries, or without our smartphones getting any bigger or heavier.

Is it possible to fulfill these competing expectations?

Because of the innovators at GlobalFoundries® (GF®), the answer is yes. GF has been helping smartphone manufacturers overcome the toughest challenges necessary to meet consumers’ growing expectations for years. In fact, nearly every wireless call, text, email, photo, or video, either taken or watched on smartphones in the last few years, was made possible through GF semiconductor chips inside.

GF solutions making more possible with smartphones

At its annual Tech Summit, held virtually on Sep. 15, 2021, GF introduced a series of innovations in connectivity, display, imaging, audio, security and power management that will bring “a new era of more” to life in smartphones.

Connectivity

“Connectivity is the oxygen of the mobile device user experience,” said Shankaran Janardharan, vice president for Mobile Radio and Wi-Fi at GF. “The connectivity enhancements being introduced today build on GlobalFoundries’ leadership in developing innovative solutions to meet consumers’ growing expectations for consistent connection quality, no matter where they are or the number of devices around them competing for connectivity.”

At the GlobalFoundries Technology Summit on Sept. 15, GF announced the addition of new switch and low noise amplifier (LNA) features as part of its existing RF (radio frequency) – SOI (silicon on insulator) solutions so RF chip designers can provide a stronger and more reliable 5G connection. The new features show that GF is already developing solutions to meet future sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G requirements.

The market for 5G mmWave-enabled handsets, which use frequency bands in the 24 GHz (gigahertz) to 47 GHz range, is expected to grow ten-fold between 2020 and 20253. Last year, many of the newest smartphones sold in the U.S. were equipped with 5G mmWave technology.

Sales of 5G-enabled smartphones are expected to more than triple from $108 billion this year to $337 billion in 2025, when 5G-compatible devices will represent a majority of smartphone sales for the first time.4

At the GlobalFoundries Technology Summit, GF also announced that its FDX™-RF process design kit (PDK) 22FDX™-EXT version 1.0_3.0 PDK now includes a new generation of RF mmWave functionality with a best-in-class, fully integrated power amplifier (PA).

Enhanced GF Wi-Fi solutions based on its 12nm and SiGe (Silicon Germanium) PA platforms were also announced. Both PDKs are available now.

For smartphone users, it will mean fewer dead zones that result in phone calls disconnected in the middle of a conversation, smoother video streaming and the speed made possible by a stronger connection.

New features include better RF and PA features and functionality for the latest Wi-Fi 6 and 6E so that chip designers can provide a higher-performing, stronger Wi-Fi connection for the newest generation of Wi-Fi-enabled products for more coverage and more connections.

GF announced that its unique RF (radio frequency) – SOI (silicon-on-insulator) Solutions on its 130 nm (nanometer) platform are now available in PDK (platform developers kit) CSOI8SW version 1.3.

The new version includes low and ultra-low voltage and low latency (the amount of time between a user’s request and a response) options, another way designers can integrate features that optimize the device for user preferences and habits.

“With accelerating demand for RF front-end products in a 5G world, robust low-power semiconductor solutions are critical,” said Christian Block, senior vice president and general manager, RFFE, QUALCOMM Germany RFFE GmbH. “Our collaboration with GlobalFoundries, and their leadership in RF-specific, feature-rich foundry solutions, helps to ensure that we’re able to meet the high-performance requirements of our cutting-edge 5G products.”

To learn more about GF’s agreement with Qualcomm Technologies, please click here.

Display

GF is taking smart device displays to an entirely new level. The company’s recently launched display solutions feature enables “variable refresh” that identifies the type of content being viewed by the user.

The feature improves the user experience for applications such as gaming, which require a higher rate of refreshing, while saving battery power through a lower refresh rate for the display of static or slow content. The user’s viewing experience is also superior by providing a “stutter-free” refresh rate for faster gaming content, and a “flicker-free” refresh rate for static or slow content.

GF Display Solutions are available in the GF HV platforms at 28nm, 40nm and 55nm, and the new features are offered in 28HV-25V PDK versions 0.5 available to customers now.

Successful prototyping at high yield – meaning the silicon is proven – has been demonstrated with this latest PDK. GF has already shipped more than 60,000 wafers in total from production-qualified 28HV technology.

Imaging

The proliferation of 5G-enabled mobile phones and the more reliable, responsive connectivity that comes with it is making major advances in mobile imaging, such as how content is captured and created, possible. Innovations such as 3D sensing and hyper-spectral sensors, 8K resolution, higher frame rates and new compression formats are making more immersive experiences possible for smartphone and smart device users.

In 2019, the average smartphone had between one and three sensors. By 2025, it is expected to grow to four to five. GF’s image sensor technology is being embraced throughout the smartphone industry.  The company’s imaging solutions now offer new features that allow image sensor designers to enable stacked complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors with more than 200 pixels of resolution, high-dynamic range, slow motion and lower power for the newest generation of smartphone cameras.

GF Imaging Solutions are available as both a general foundry offering in the 28nm platform and as custom offerings. The 28nm image signal processor (ISP) platform Version 1.0 PDK is available now. To date, GF has shipped 120 million units for mobile smartphones.

PDK version 1.0 is available for users to design the logic of die of stacked complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors in 28SLPe technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D sensors are the key feature to enable touchless control, face identification (ID) and future augmented reality (AR). GF’s 22FDX platform with embedded AI is designed for fast and power-efficient local decision-making used in this type of application.

Audio

In the second quarter of 2022, GF Audio Solutions PDK version 1.0 will be offered, adding embedded flash (eFlash) to its 55BCD (binary-coded decimal) Lite platform for audio amplification and haptic (touch) response.

The addition of this feature will provide smartphone users with improved audio quality with minimal noise or distortion, as well as virtual buttons with touch sensing (technology sensing human touch on a smartphone) and haptic feedback (the transmission of data or a response as a result of that touch) for gaming applications.

Today, five of the top seven smartphone manufacturers use GF audio amplification solutions, and the company has shipped more than three billion high-end audio amplification units.

Security

GF has been the leader in technology enabling secure mobile payment and protecting the privacy of consumer information, including innovations such as touchless transactions and tap-and-pay. In fact, more than two billion smart phones have been shipped with GF security solutions inside.

The company unveiled the next generation of GF Secure Solutions features including embedded resistive random-access memory (eRRAM) with a test-chip capable PDK (0.5) available in the fourth quarter of 2021. Embedded memory will provide users with the highest level of security without the vulnerability of external interfaces.

GF has shipped more than two billion units of secure near-field communication (NFC) chips to customers to support premium smartphones.

Power management

GF is also the smartphone industry leader in developing innovative solutions to extend battery life and maximize the user experience on a single charge.

At the Tech Summit, GF introduced the industry’s most advanced power management platform – 28BCDLite – which enables analog functions in the digital domain with integrated high-voltage and eRRAM. Platform version 0.5 will be available for test-chip design in the second quarter of 2022.

Users will benefit from longer battery life, faster charging and smaller form factors.

“All of the new features being announced today are a product of collaborating with our customers and building an understanding of the market and their business in ways we haven’t before,” said Jamie Schaeffer, vice president of Mobile and Wireless Infrastructure at GF. “The innovators at GlobalFoundries are developing unique solutions that improve the user experience, extend battery life and bolster data security without making smartphones larger or heavier.”

GF smartphone solutions available for other smart mobile devices

GF’s innovative solutions in connectivity, display, imaging and audio are also being offered for use with other smart, internet-connected mobile devices, such as watches, earbuds, headsets, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) glasses and more.

To learn more on how GF is enabling the Internet of Things (IoT), click here.

To learn more about GF’s mobile device solutions, click here.

It wasn’t that long ago that we stored personal data on our home computer, and work data on our work computer or a company network. If we needed something to be portable, we’d save it on a portable drive, or sign into our company’s network remotely, which wasn’t always a fast, smooth or easy process.

At least for our personal, non-work content, each of us managed our own data. Our personal computer or Mac also functioned as our own personal data center. And retrieving files usually wasn’t a speedy transaction.

Today we live in the age of the cloud, where we can access massive volumes of music, photos, videos, email, work and personal files from anywhere with Wi-Fi access, and depending on how our hardware is equipped, maybe even with 5G cellular service.

So where exactly is this mysterious cloud? How big is it? Can we see it? How can it store data for billions of people that previously stored it themselves?

When it comes to technology and data, nothing operates in a vacuum, nor is it a self-sustaining island. Anything with technology and data is part of a broader system of interdependencies, where a change in one area has a rippling impact in other areas.

Smartphones being able to do more drive not only more data, but the need for more capacity for that data. Devices, electronics, appliances and more connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) create more data. Working and learning from home is creating more data. More data drives a need for ways to not only be accommodate greater volumes of data, but transport, store, analyze and compute data faster, easier, more reliably and less expensively. On top of all of that, the solution needs to be able to fight off the latest and increasingly cunning attempts to be accessed by unwelcome intruders.

We are living in an age where the volume of data has exploded, and demand for quality transmission of data continuously grows. In 2009, the average data speed in the U.S. was five megabits per second (Mbps).1 At the time, it was an impressive technological achievement. Today, the average speed in the U.S. is nearly 100 Mbps.2 And the speed and expectations are only moving in one direction – up.

“The cloud” is actually not one location, nor is it in the sky. It is made up of thousands of data centers located around the world, each a building with row upon row of servers, storing, analyzing, processing and computing peoples’ data.3 Data centers are also equipped with telecommunications systems and other infrastructure, facilitating access to it.

New data centers are being constructed at a rapid pace, and real estate for this purpose continues to be acquired, showing that a peak is nowhere in sight. The world’s largest data center is the size of 110 U.S. football fields.4 The country of Iceland has had so many data centers built in a short time that in 2016, it contributed nearly one percent to its gross domestic product (GDP).5 And growth of the cloud as the place to store data is expected to grow at a brisk pace for the next several years.6

Data center industry faces new challenges

Cloud computing has presented the data center management industry with several needs:

• Using silicon photonics to move, process and compute data, an area where GlobalFoundries® (GF®) is further along than any other company. Silicon photonics (SiPh) involves the use of silicon as the primary fabrication element to manufacture semiconductor chips with photonic integrated circuits (PICs). It is based on using photons rather than electrons for transporting and computing, enabling high-speed processing at significantly lower power. 
• Reducing the amount of time it takes for data to get to its destination (in this case the data center itself) and back, known as latency 
• Supporting the transition from 4G to 5G 
• Decreasing power consumption as data center electric bills reach new highs 

“Our customers are telling us that their power bills are through the roof, and they need solutions,” said Hiren Majmudar, vice president of Compute Business at GlobalFoundries. “They are looking for ways to make their existing hardware work better and more efficiently, because deploying faster hardware results in higher power consumption and lower efficiency, which will raise costs even higher.”

GF innovation is helping data centers take on their toughest challenges

“GF is meeting our customers’ needs through innovative features, silicon processes and using existing technologies in new and exciting ways,” said Anthony Yu, vice president of Computing and Wired Infrastructure at GlobalFoundries. “We are successfully using silicon photonics in complex and challenging solutions and have demonstrated our ability to build new solutions to scale for data centers.”

GF is reshaping computing and data center architecture by delivering a new generation of solutions known as silicon photonics and ReDriver high performance silicon-geranium (SiGe) alloy solutions, which will help transform computing capability in this decade and beyond.

Moving at light speed with silicon photonics

Historically, photonics has been used with a different type of semiconductor chip. But GF innovators have been able to make the material work at scale with 300 mm-based silicon wafers, taking advantage of the large-scale foundry experience in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) manufacturing.

“GF has discovered a way to combine photonics on the same chip as high-speed CMOS to move data,” Yu added. “Our solutions are using photonics within data centers, between data centers and now between chips at data rates eight times higher per channel.”

At its annual Technology Summit, held virtually on Sept. 15, 2021, GF extended its silicon photonics manufacturing leadership by announcing that its new Silicon Photonics Solutions 45nm platform has passed critical technology milestones and is on track for full technology qualification by the first quarter of 2022. The monolithic platform, combining radio frequency (RF) CMOS and optical components on the same chip, includes availability of the first micro ring resonator (MRR) optical component in 300 mm wafer technology. GF is engaged with leading partners on this new platform.

ReDrivers driving better performance

ReDrivers are advanced analog devices that guarantee signal integrity. As peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) and USB interface speeds are increasing, ReDrivers are becoming an increasingly needed solution in data center servers and consumer electronic devices.

GF’s High-Performance SiGe is accelerating ReDriver growth by offering a full portfolio of SiGe processes at various performance and price points. In addressing PAM4 (pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) technology using four signal levels for transmission) ReDriver requirements, GF is expanding its SiGe portfolio with state-of-the-art high performance complementary BiCMOS (a semiconductor technology that integrates two formerly separate semiconductor technologies, those of the bipolar junction transistor and the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) gate, in a single integrated circuit device) technology.

GF is adding a 300mm SiGe process to accommodate ReDriver accelerated growth.

Power delivery – Better data center performance while saving power

Conventional power delivery solutions account for significant power loss in data centers, limiting the speed that they can process and analyze data. GF’s BCD/BCDLite® smart power delivery solutions address that problem head-on, making it possible to realize power efficiencies that translate into better data computing and artificial intelligence (AI) performance. By doing more with less hardware, GF technology is reducing data center operating budgets, which cost companies more over the long-term than their initial hardware investment.

The inefficiencies of a conventional, discrete, component-based solutions limit processor performance. GF’s customization of power delivery solutions with market leaders and drivers enables low on-resistance (Ron) switching devices, high current inductors and high-density capacitors. These GF solutions are unique in that they are enabled in the same technology platform optimized for data center power delivery.

To learn more about how GF solutions are addressing the needs of the data center industry, please click here.