GlobalFoundries Inc. announced it is collaborating with industry leaders including Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Inc, Marvell and NVIDIA, along with breakthrough photonic 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. GF announced GF Fotonix™, its next generation, widely disruptive silicon photonics platform. GF also announced it is partnering with industry leader Cisco Systems Inc., on a custom silicon photonics solution for DCN and DCI applications, including an interdependent Process Design Kit (PDK) in close collaboration with the company's GF manufacturing services team.

GF Fotonix is a monolithic platform, the first in the industry to combine its differentiated 300mm photonics features and 300GHz-class RF-CMOS on a silicon wafer, delivering best-in-class performance at scale. GF Fotonix consolidates complex processes that were previously distributed across multiple chips onto a single chip by combining a photonic system, radio frequency (RF) components and high-performance complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) logic on a single silicon chip. GF is the only pure-play foundry with a 300mm monolithic silicon photonics solution that has demonstrated the industry's highest data rate per fiber (0.5Tbps/fiber).

This enables 1.6-3.2Tbps optical chiplets, which deliver faster, more efficient transmission of data, more efficiently with better signal integrity. In addition, the up to 10,000x improvement in system error rate enables next generation artificial intelligence (AI). GF Fotonix enables the highest level of integration onto a photonics integrated circuit (PIC) so customers can integrate more product functions and simplify their bill of materials (BOMs).

End customers can realize greater performance through increased capacity and capability. The new solution also enables innovative packaging solutions, such as the passive attachment for larger fiber arrays, support for 2.5D packaging, and on-die lasers. GF Fotonix solutions will be manufactured at the company's advanced manufacturing facility in Malta, N.Y., with the PDK 1.0 available in April 2022.

EDA partners Ansys, Cadence Design Systems Inc., and Synopsys provide design tools and flows to support GF's customers and their solutions. GF provides customers with reference design kits, MPWs, testing, pre- and post-fab, turnkey and semiconductor manufacturing services to help customers get to market faster. In addition, for customers needing discrete, high-performance RF solutions for optical systems, GF also announced it is adding new features onto the GF SiGe platform.

High-performance silicon germanium (SiGe) solutions from GF are designed to deliver the speed and bandwidth required to transport information through next generation fiber optic high speed networks.