Sunday, May 10th 2020
Did GlobalFoundries Give Up 7nm to Chase Silicon Photonics Manufacturing?
A Forbes report provides a fascinating peek into something that could explain GlobalFoundries stalling its 7 nm-class silicon fabrication plans, and shedding much of its offshore foundry bulk, other than just fiscal prudence. Apparently, the company has been making moves in silicon photonics, benefiting from few of the 16,000+ patents and other forms of IP it inherited from the IBM Microelectronics business acquisition from 2015. In particular, GlobalFoundries appears interested in high-bandwidth networking physical-layer applications that involve photonics and fiber-optics.
GlobalFoundries has reportedly been engaging with customers in the telecom- and data-center industries since 2016 in offering medium-range networking physical-layer solution, providing 40 Gbps bandwidths over distances of up to 10 km (without repeaters in the middle). In 2017, it partnered with Ayar Labs to develop an optical I/O chip. This solution combines Ayar's optical CMOS I/O tech with GloFo's 45 nm CMOS process to 10x the bandwidth at 1/5th the power of a copper-based I/O. By 2018, the combine qualified a platform that can push up to 100 Gbps per wavelength, and up to 800 Gbps on the client-side. By 2019, the combine developed a supercomputing chiplet co-packed with an Intel silicon as part of DARPA's PIPES (Photonics in Package for Extreme Scalability) project. With network bandwidth demand on an exponential rise with the advent of 5G, I guess you can say that the future for GloFo's silicon photonics business looks bright.
Source:
Forbes
GlobalFoundries has reportedly been engaging with customers in the telecom- and data-center industries since 2016 in offering medium-range networking physical-layer solution, providing 40 Gbps bandwidths over distances of up to 10 km (without repeaters in the middle). In 2017, it partnered with Ayar Labs to develop an optical I/O chip. This solution combines Ayar's optical CMOS I/O tech with GloFo's 45 nm CMOS process to 10x the bandwidth at 1/5th the power of a copper-based I/O. By 2018, the combine qualified a platform that can push up to 100 Gbps per wavelength, and up to 800 Gbps on the client-side. By 2019, the combine developed a supercomputing chiplet co-packed with an Intel silicon as part of DARPA's PIPES (Photonics in Package for Extreme Scalability) project. With network bandwidth demand on an exponential rise with the advent of 5G, I guess you can say that the future for GloFo's silicon photonics business looks bright.
7 Comments on Did GlobalFoundries Give Up 7nm to Chase Silicon Photonics Manufacturing?
GF did not give up 7nm manufacturing to chase silicon photonics. They had to give up chasing 7nm, mostly due to financial reasons, and now looks like they found a new potentially lucrative direction.
ISPs love fiber optics and other high-bandwidth solutions but only if they are cost-effective. Fiber optics is not simple and not cheap. Even more so when laying it down to a large and/or sparsely populated area. ISPs do not mind a bit if they are to have more bandwidth available but they are concerned about who pays for it.
In my country a lot of the fiber-optic backbone of country's Internet outside bigger settlements has been funded publicly or semi-publicly. This would absolutely not be feasible financially for a single ISP to do. There are always lobby groups, ownership disputes, suspected foul play and the like with an undertaking of that sort but the bottom line is that there is a fiber optic network in the ground that anyone (due to technical reasons, mostly limited to ISPs) can use, obviously for a fee.
From viewpoint of an established ISP, there is an argument to be made if public infrastructure is built next to an sufficient existing infrastructure but that works on a very case-by-case basis.