GlobalFoundries' new monolithic GF Fotonix silicon photonics manufacturing platform, announced this week, comes at a time when there is a growing need for higher-speed connectivity between multiple boards and backplanes on large-scale chip systems, according to Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.
Gold told Fierce Electronics, “Photonics as it relates to high speed networks and connectivity is a major requirement for future systems as connectivity is one of the key bottlenecks we are running into when building out massive scale systems. Current wired systems can’t transfer data around multiple boards and backplanes anywhere near as fast. There is a need for an integrated photonics capability – first as discrete components on boards but ultimately to be placed in the SoC directly.”
GlobalFoundries is not breaking into an uncharted frontier with its silicon photonics announcement. Intel has been described in some published reports as a “pioneer” in the space, and companies like IBM, Cisco Systems, and most recently TSMC (which launched a silicon photonics packaging capability last summer) have been investing in the technology, which also is expanding through a variety of different system use cases.
“All the major systems vendors will need this going forward – first in HPC systems like for AI/ML and supercomputing, and ultimately they will filter down into the more general purpose server and even PC realm over the next several years,” Gold said via email. “Hyperscalers will also require high-speed photonics networks to reach massive scale connectivity in their data centers… This is a big step for GF to be able to produce photonics devices in their foundry for their customers. But they are certainly not alone in doing this.”
Still, Gold called the effort “an important step for GF to be more leading edge, and it may ultimately bring them a lot of work.” He added that despite other companies having more silicon photonics experience than GlobalFoundries, “it’s certainly possible their process will create some breakthroughs others haven’t. We’ll have to see what they achieve and how long it takes them to get a product line ramped up before we can fully judge the importance of this announcement.”
Notably, GF Fotonix launched with support from many customers and partners, including Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum, Ranovus and Xanadu.
"We're working closely with GlobalFoundries to design high-bandwidth, low-power optical interconnects for some of our leading-edge data center products,” said Edward Lee, vice president of Mixed-Signal Design, Nvidia. Nvidia interconnect solutions manufactured with the monolithic GF Fotonix platform will boost high performance computing and AI applications, enabling breakthrough advances."
PsiQuantum announced an effort with GlobalFoundries last year to leverage silicon photonics in its quantum computer developments, saying at the time, "PsiQuantum believes silicon photonics is the only way to scale beyond one million qubits and deliver an error-corrected, fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer.”
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