Marvell pushes GlobalFoundries to light up wafer production

Marvell has entered into a significant partnership with GlobalFoundries, an American wafer fab renowned for its silicon photonics manufacturing expertise. This collaboration aims to boost silicon germanium (SiGe) wafer production at GloFo's Burlington, Vermont wafer plant. SiGe is widely used in the creation of optical transceivers, laser modules, and other components found in high-end switches from companies like Nvidia.

The enhanced capacity will cater to the production of near- and co-packaged optics (CPO/NPO), as well as next-generation pluggable optics. Nvidia has previously implemented CPO in certain Spectrum Ethernet and Quantum InfiniBand switches to reduce power consumption and enhance reliability. Experts anticipate that NPO will find its way into large multirack systems such as Huawei's Ascend 960DT-based SuperPods.

The semiconductor fab claims its SiGe technology has already been validated up to 200 Gbps per lane, sufficient for 1.6 Tbps transceivers. With faster lane speeds, the roadmap may even extend to 3.2 Tbps transceivers. The demand for optics technologies has skyrocketed, particularly due to the explosive growth of AI applications.

Marvell CEO Matt Murphy highlighted this trend during Computex this spring, explaining how optics are moving from connecting racks across datacenters to shorter distances within a few meters as lane speeds increase. Copper interconnects have hit practical reach limits even within a single rack; beyond 400 Gbps per lane, copper cables can no longer transmit signals effectively beyond 1.25 meters.

This has spurred a surge in investment to strengthen optics and photonics supply chains, with Nvidia committing $2 billion each to Lumentum and Coherent. Coherent has since announced plans to quadruple production of indium phosphide wafers used in lasers, photodetectors, and modulators at its Texas fab.