GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology are expanding their longstanding manufacturing partnership to increase production capacity for high-speed optical processors.
The agreement announced by the two companies will increase production capacity for GlobalFoundries’ silicon-germanium (SiGe) technology at its facility in Burlington, Vermont. The additional capacity is intended to support Marvell’s growing requirements for optical networking products used in next-generation data center infrastructure.
“AI is fundamentally changing the way data centers are built, and connectivity is becoming increasingly critical to unlocking the performance of these systems,” said Robb Johnson, vice president of foundry technology at Marvell, in a statement. “Our expanded collaboration with GF will help ensure we have the SiGe technology and manufacturing capacity to support the significant growth we see ahead.”
The move reflects a shift in computing. For the longest time, the emphasis has been focused on improving speed of processing and making GPUs and CPUs faster and faster.
And while that battle continues to be fought, a new realization has come upon AI supporters: the amount of data that needs to be moved around is increasing exponentially and network traffic, not processing, has become the bottleneck. CPUs and GPUs are essentially waiting around for data to arrive because it can’t get there fast enough.
That’s where optical connectivity comes in. The expanded collaboration will support SiGe technology used in several generations of optical connectivity, including conventional pluggable optical transceivers as well as near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO).
SiGe combines silicon (Si) with germanium (Ge) to produce transistors that can operate at much higher frequencies than conventional silicon devices. This allows engineers to build very fast, low-noise components while still using much of the manufacturing infrastructure developed for conventional silicon.
SiGe is particularly useful for high-speed communications because it can provide the high-frequency performance, signal integrity and power efficiency required to process signals at very high data rates.
The technology is being combined with silicon photonics and advanced packaging as the industry moves optical components closer to compute hardware. That shift is significant because conventional electrical interconnects increasingly face bandwidth, power and signal-integrity constraints as AI clusters grow.
GlobalFoundries said its current SiGe technology supports optical connectivity of up to 200 Gbps per lane, while its technology roadmap is designed to support higher bandwidth generations as cloud and AI data center requirements increase.
For Marvell, the expanded manufacturing agreement provides additional access to the SiGe capacity needed to scale its optical connectivity products. Marvell said it is preparing for a transition toward higher-bandwidth optical architectures, including NPO and CPO, as AI infrastructure expands.
