GlobalFoundries Thomas Barber: CPO, Silicon Photonics, 300mm, SiGe, OCI, NRZ

Silicon photonics serves as a critical foundation for modern data center infrastructure, enabling the transition from copper to optical communication as bandwidth demands for AI scale-up networks surge. GlobalFoundries, leveraging its history with IBM Microelectronics and 300mm wafer manufacturing, provides the essential silicon and photonic integrated circuits required for this shift. As copper reaches its physical limits at 200 gigabits per second and beyond, the industry is moving toward Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) to minimize power consumption and signal loss. The Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) multi-source agreement further accelerates this evolution by standardizing NRZ modulation and multi-wavelength transmission, which simplifies receiver complexity. Additionally, high-speed Silicon Germanium technology remains vital for the transimpedance amplifiers necessary to support these high-bandwidth optical engines, ensuring reliable, low-power data movement across increasingly dense GPU clusters.