Delivering new levels of performance and scalability to accelerate the design of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for datacom applications, OpenLight announced the availability of its first 800G DR8 PIC design targeted at datacenter interconnects.
OpenLight has fabricated and tested these wafers using the world's first open silicon photonics foundry platform with integrated lasers offered by Tower Semiconductor.
The 800G DR8 PIC design provides customers with an easy-to-use, validated approach to jump-start their transceiver production design. OpenLight's achievement with on-chip laser integration and high-speed InP-based modulators removes the need for the procurement and attachment of additional lasers into a PIC, offering scalability with high-speed performance and cost at scale to tackle complex designs. Built on Tower Semiconductor's silicon photonics production process (PH18DA), the 800G DR8 PIC design is a fully validated PIC design with an associated circuit model and available test datasets.
The 800G DR8 PIC sample kits are now available, and they come with design files to enable customization ,if desired. High-speed test data is also available.
Dr. Thomas Mader, COO at OpenLight
As the number of users and devices per user continue to increase, the demand for bandwidth and higher data rates will only grow multifold. We are seeing an uptake in the adoption of silicon photonics and believe our first-of-its-kind 800G DR8 PIC design and available tested samples will help customers quickly design optical transceiver modules and enable faster time to market for emerging datacom needs.
Dr. Marco Racanelli, SVP and GM of Tower Semiconductor's Analog Business Unit
Our partnership with OpenLight continues to add new, silicon-proven IP to Tower's existing open foundry offering, enabling customers to accelerate development of next generation silicon photonics products with fully integrated lasers. The process technology and PDK are available to Tower customers along with regularly scheduled shuttle runs while higher order IP such as the 800G reference design announced here, is available through our partner OpenLight.
