Lightwave Logic Inc (LWLG)

[prototype_101]

The major silicon photonics foundry players today are GlobalFoundries (which recently acquired AMF) and Tower Semiconductor. There are smaller players as well, such as imec for prototyping, LioniX in the Netherlands, and Silterra in Malaysia. In the Chinese market, SMIC offers silicon photonics. TSMC, Samsung, and UMC are all developing silicon photonics capabilities for their foundry offerings.

GlobalFoundries (GF), with its acquisition of AMF, claims to be the #1 silicon photonics (SiPho) foundry, with almost $300M SiPho revenue expected in 2026 and >$1 billion expected by the end of the decade. Kevin Soukup, VP/GM of silicon photonics at GF, explained to me that in Singapore, they now have two fabs focused on C Band and L Band, primarily for long-haul coherent applications. One is the AMF fab they acquired, in addition to their original, much larger fab that runs the AMF process, as well. Using their larger fab, they can greatly grow capacity for their long-haul customers. In Malta, their SiPho fab focuses on pluggable transceivers and co-packaged optics. They have a process that fabricates 45nm CMOS on chip with RF and/or silicon photonics. They can also do SiPho chips with no CMOS. They use advanced equipment from their 12nm finFet process to build lower-loss waveguides. They also have a process similar to TSMC’s COUPE, which combines an electrical interface chip (EIC) with a photonics integrated chip (PIC) into a single chiplet. They support edge connection and top connection for fiber inputs, but unlike COUPE, they use an optical mirror for the top connection to reflect the light 90 degrees to an edge connection, which eliminates the need for a grating coupler. This gives them an advantage in broadband, because grating couplers have difficulty handling broadband. Soukup said they have customers “designed-in” using GF’s CPO capability for scale-out and scale-up.

GF also projects 2026 revenues for the #2 SiPho foundry at ~$200M, #3 at ~$100M, #4 at ~$50M. Adding this up and estimating the rest of the foundries, 2026 SiPho foundry revenues will be less than $1 B/year. This is less than 1% of TSMC’s annual revenues.

Tower Semi appears to be the second largest silicon photonics foundry.

Some companies make their own silicon photonics, such as Intel, and ST Micro. Many other semiconductor/systems companies sell silicon photonics products that are manufactured at a foundry – for example, Cisco uses GlobalFoundries.

https://semiengineering.com/silicon-photonics-in-the-data-center-what-a-cmos-exec-needs-to-know/