GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology have announced a strategic partnership to expand their collaboration in silicon photonics manufacturing and packaging. The companies aim to accelerate the commercial deployment of high-density, low-latency, and energy-efficient silicon photonics interconnect platforms for AI data centers and hyperscale cloud infrastructure.
Traditional copper-based electrical interconnects face physical limitations in AI training clusters, which are expanding to hundreds of thousands of units. These include short transmission distances, signal attenuation, and high power consumption. Silicon photonics technology replaces electrons with photons to increase bandwidth and reduce energy consumption by several orders of magnitude.
Under the expanded framework, GlobalFoundries will provide comprehensive process support using its Fotonix platform, covering wafer manufacturing, electro-optical component integration, and high-precision packaging. Marvell will utilize this platform to develop and mass-produce next-generation pluggable optical transceiver modules and co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions.
The partnership focuses on optimizing the structure and thermal management of co-packaged optics while improving mass production yields and cost efficiency for silicon photonics chips. Both companies intend to support cloud service providers and AI firms in building scalable, energy-efficient computing clusters, moving the technology into broader data center infrastructure.
