OpenLight Unveils First 800G DR8 Photonic Integrated Circuit Design to Advance Global Datacenter Interconnect Industry

Fully validated design provides customers with a shortcut to create 800G DR8 transceivers and accelerate customer time to market for data center applications

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Delivering new levels of performance and scalability to accelerate the design of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for datacom applications, OpenLight today announced the availability of its first 800G DR8 PIC design targeted at datacenter interconnects. OpenLight has fabricated and tested these wafers using the world's first open silicon photonics foundry platform with integrated lasers offered by Tower Semiconductor. 

The 800G DR8 PIC design provides customers with an easy-to-use, validated approach to jump-start their transceiver production design. OpenLight's achievement with on-chip laser integration and high-speed InP-based modulators removes the need for the procurement and attachment of additional lasers into a PIC, offering scalability with high-speed performance and cost at scale to tackle complex designs. Built on Tower Semiconductor's silicon photonics production process (PH18DA), the 800G DR8 PIC design is a fully validated PIC design with an associated circuit model and available test datasets.

"As the number of users and devices per user continue to increase, the demand for bandwidth and higher data rates will only grow multifold. We are seeing an uptake in the adoption of silicon photonics and believe our first-of-its-kind 800G DR8 PIC design and available tested samples will help customers quickly design optical transceiver modules and enable faster time to market for emerging datacom needs," said Dr. Thomas Mader, Chief Operating Officer at OpenLight. "Together with Tower, we are able to consistently offer scalable design solutions and support the industry's move to 800G and beyond for datacenters with integrated lasers."

"Our partnership with OpenLight continues to add new, silicon-proven IP to Tower's existing open foundry offering, enabling customers to accelerate development of next generation silicon photonics products with fully integrated lasers," said Dr. Marco Racanelli, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Tower Semiconductor's Analog Business Unit. "The process technology and PDK are available to Tower customers along with regularly scheduled shuttle runs while higher order IP such as the 800G reference design announced here, is available through our partner OpenLight."

The 800G DR8 PIC sample kits are now available, and they come with design files to enable customization ,if desired. High-speed test data is also available. To learn more information on pricing and availability, contact OpenLight at www.openlightphotonics.com.

OpenLight has decades of experience in photonics design. Our executive and engineering teams are delivering the world's first open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers to improve the performance, power efficiency, and reliability of designs for telecom, datacom, LiDAR, healthcare, HPC, AI, and optical computing applications. With over 200 patents, OpenLight is bringing optical solutions to places it has never been before and enabling technologies and innovation that weren't previously possible. The company is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with offices in Silicon Valley.

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