World's first HI of QD Lasers on Tower's SiPho Foundry Platform PH18

Tower Semiconductor and Quintessent have collaborated in bringing world’s first heterogeneous integration of GaAs quantum dot (QD) lasers and a foundry silicon photonics platform (PH18DB). This technology is key in manufacturing high-speed optical transceiver modules for datacenters and telecom networks, and also for applications requiring high-speed transceivers such as AI ML based LiDAR and other sensors. The silicon photonics transceiver market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 24% reaching a total available market of $9B in 2025, as per LightCounting. The new PH18DB platform offers GaAs based quantum dot lasers and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) built on Tower's high-volume base PH18M silicon photonics foundry technology, that includes low loss waveguides, photodetectors, and modulators heterogeneously integrated on a single silicon chip. This platform will enable dense photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that can support higher-channel count in small form factor. Open foundry availability of this 220nm SOI platform will provide access to a broad array of product development teams, to simplify their PIC design through use of laser and SOA pcells, in addition to the feature rich baseline PH18 process. Initial process design kits (PDK) for PH18DB have been made available in partnership with DARPA under the Lasers for Universal Microscale Optical Systems ...