GlobalFoundries Fotonix™

[Dark Kaeser]

GlobalFoundries Announces Next Generation in Silicon Photonics Solutions and Collaborates with Industry Leaders to Advance a New Era of More in the Data Center​

GlobalFoundries Inc (Nasdaq: GFS) (GF) today 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.

Customers and Partner support for GF Silicon Photonics Solutions​

“We’re working closely with GlobalFoundries to design high-bandwidth, low-power optical interconnects for some of our leading-edge data center products. NVIDIA interconnect solutions manufactured with the monolithic GF Fotonix platform will boost high performance computing and AI applications, enabling breakthrough advances.” Edward Lee, vice president of Mixed-Signal Design, NVIDIA

“We are delighted to share our multi-disciplinary silicon-photonics IP cores and chiplets, and advanced packaging solutions with our customers who are driving the adoption of novel data center architectures based on integrating best-in-class chiplets and co-packaged optics,” said Hojjat Salemi, chief business development officer of RANOVUS. “Our close collaboration with GlobalFoundries underlines our joint commitment to deliver a fully featured set of qualified IP cores and chiplets with OSAT-ready high-volume manufacturing flows and supporting ecosystem to enable the huge potential of monolithic silicon photonics.”

GF solutions to move and compute data at speed of light​

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.

https://gf.com/press-release/global...xt-generation-silicon-photonics-solutions-and

GlobalFoundries Fotonix, The Leading Silicon Photonics Foundry For Co-packaged Optics And Processing​

In comes GlobalFoundries Fotonix platform. Although GlobalFoundries hasn’t explicitly said, we presume this is the marketing name for a their 90WG and 45CLO process nodes as well packaging options. The companies partnering with GlobalFoundries on the Fotonix platform includes Broadcom, Marvell, Cisco, Nvidia, Macom, Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum, Ranovus, Xanadu, Ansys, Cadence, and Synopsys.

These partnerships include 3 of 4 top photonics transceivers suppliers, 4 of 5 of the top networking firms, 3 of the 4 leading EDA and simulation firms, and some of the most promising photonics-based startups. Intel is the only major firm involved in photonics that is missing. They are using their own in-house platform.

Nvidia is a top networking vendor due to their acquisition of Mellanox. In addition, they have acquired a few photonics firms including, OptiGOT from Sweden. Nvidia networking also does some design for photonics transceivers used in Infiniband networks. Nvidia has the full array of IP for switches as well. Due to their position as the leading firm for AI training and accelerated computing, they run into the problem of IO power scaling the hardest in relation to compute applications.

Each generation of Nvida’s GPUs has doubled the IO via the custom NVLink interconnect. Nvidia likely can only do this 1 more generation before it significantly impacts their processors energy efficiency. Due to the nature of how new AI models have been exploding in parameter count, Nvidia is stuck in between a rock and a hard place with performance and power. Nvidia needs co-packaged optics to continue to scale in AI.

Nvidia has presented research related to co-packaged photonics before. We have always been concerned about how they would manufacture with photonics because most manufacturing IP is held by non-foundry firms. The GlobalFoundries Fotonix platform answers this issue.

It seems as though Nvidia is announcing a brand-new technology via the press-release of a partner, which is very odd. Given Nvidia’s graphics technology conference is very soon, we hope to hear more about this platform then. As for a bit of speculation, we expect TSMC to still do most of the logic fabrication and advanced packaging over the long term. TSMC would likely ship diced chip on wafer assemblies which GlobalFoundries could then co-package these with optical tiles.

GlobalFoundries is championing the ability to do 500Gbps per fiber as their technical superiority over other players. For reference, the most advanced datacenter 800G transceivers typically do 8x100Gbps fibers. GlobalFoundries is positioning themselves as the leader by being able to deliver 1.6 to 3.2Tbps optical chiplets. For reference, an Nvidia A100 GPU delivers 4.8Tbps of NVLink IO. If Nvidia doubles this rate as expected with their next generation Hopper GPU architecture, then it would need as many as 6 optical tiles. If GlobalFoundries research into 500Gbps fibers is realized to production, then they would only need 4 fibers coming out of each GPU, which could potentially be achieved with a single optical tile. While Hopper will be able to get away without co-packaged optical tiles, the generation after that will surely integrate this sort of technology.

Ranovus is another co-packaged optics firm. They have partnered with AMD for co-packaged optics on FPGAs. This partnership could extend beyond, but it may also be similar to the Ayar and Intel collaboration where it is short lived. AMD lacks photonics IP, so this would be a natural long term partnership or acquisition target for them.

"We are delighted to share our multi-disciplinary silicon-photonics IP cores and chiplets, and advanced packaging solutions with our customers who are driving the adoption of novel data center architectures based on integrating best-in-class chiplets and co-packaged optics. Our close collaboration with GlobalFoundries underlines our joint commitment to deliver a fully featured set of qualified IP cores and chiplets with OSAT-ready high-volume manufacturing flows and supporting ecosystem to enable the huge potential of monolithic silicon photonics."
Hojjat Salemi, chief business development officer of Ranovus

https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/globalfoundries-fotonix-the-leading?s=r