Coherent Establishes InP Fabs; OpenLight Formalizes VLC Partnership: OFC News Roundup

Coherent established capability for 6-inch indium phosphide (InP) wafer fabrication in the company’s Sherman, Texas, and Järfälla, Sweden, wafer fabs. Coherent is in the process of qualifying several existing products on its 6-inch InP platform. The company expects to transition the bulk of its production from 3-inch InP to 6-inch InP in the next few years to leverage the benefits of larger wafer size, higher yield, and improved performance that will be required to provide a sustainable competitive advantage in its communications and sensing markets.

Coherent established the world’s first capability for 6-inch indium phosphide (InP) wafer fabrication. Its expanded capacity significantly reduces die cost for InP devices. Courtesy of Coherent.

Pilot Photonics secured €2.5 million ($2.7 million) from the European Innovation Council to develop, integrate, and commercialize key technology blocks relevant to a coherent co-packaged optics solution to overcome future scaling challenges in the data center. The company will mature a number of its patented technologies including comb lasers, ring resonator IQ modulators, and comb-enhanced digital signal processing algorithms.

Fiber connectivity company Teramount is collaborating with GlobalFoundries (GF) to improve fiber connection with silicon photonic chips. As part of the collaboration, Teramount is integrating its Universal Photonic Coupler solution with GF’s 45CLO silicon photonics platform, GF Fotonix, to provide a scalable fiber packaging solution.

OpenLight, a developer and manufacturer of photonic application-specific integrated chips, partnered with VLC Photonics, an end-to-end integrated photonics services firm. Per the collaboration, VLC Photonics will offer design and test services using the OpenLight process design kit. The expansion of design services increases the number of designs that OpenLight can support at any one time on the Tower Semiconductor PH18DA process.

Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), partnered with MediaTek to co-develop a 51.2T solution, inclusive of CPO. Building upon the FITCONN 800G high-speed connector, FIT seeks to further advance its CPO capabilities by using MediaTek's cutting-edge ASIC platform, which includes high-speed SerDes and silicon photonics technologies. The collaboration aims to deliver high-performance computing systems tailored for switches within front-end and back-end networks.

Eoptolink Technology, a provider of advanced optical transceiver solutions, demonstrated a VCSEL-based multimode optical transceiver operating at 212 Gbps per lambda. The development is reportedly an industry first and has applications in short-reach data center and AI and machine learning connectivity.

Juniper Networks collaborated with Coherent and Marvell Technology for a public demonstration of its 800ZR solution featuring Juniper Networks PTX10002-36QDD packet transport router, Coherent’s 800ZR transceiver, and the 800G Marvell Orion coherent digital signal processor.

TRUMPF demonstrated 100 Gbps VCSEL performance in an 800 Gbps transceiver in collaboration with Optomind. The VCSEL operates at 112 Gbps per channel and is geared toward hyperscale data centers. TRUMPF expects the laser to reach the commercial market this summer.

Data technology company Alphawave Semi collaborated with InnoLight Technology, a provider of data center optics, for a low power, low latency linear pluggable optics (LPO) demonstration. The demonstration paired Alphawave Semi’s PCIe 6.0 subsystem (Controller + PHY) with InnoLight’s LPO optical small form factor pluggable optics, breaking down barriers to disaggregated networking and enabling connectivity at the data center scale.

StarIC, a provider of semiconductor and ASIC solutions, partnered with GF to introduce a library of high-speed silicon photonic technologies specifically tailored for the GF Fotonix 45SPCLO process. The library includes silicon-proven micro ring modulator drivers, and transimpedance amplifiers targeting NRZ and PAM4 data rates exceeding 100 GS/s. The library adds to the expanding portfolio of IPs that StarIC is developing for silicon photonics applications.