PRESS RELEASE

23 March 2017

Contact:
Robert van der Veer robert.vanderveer@phoenixbv.com

TowerJazz Announces New Foundry Silicon Photonic (SiPho) Process Targeting Optical Transceiver Electronics Market

Collaborates with Phoenix Software to provide customers with photonic PDKs for the manufacture of optical integrated circuits for optical networking components

LOS ANGELES, Calif., March 23, 2017, OFC – TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader,
announced today a new silicon photonic process (SiPho) which complements its SiGe BiCMOS
processes utilized for the manufacture of optical transceiver electronics. Further, TowerJazz is
collaborating with PhoeniX Software to provide process design kits (PDKs) for its customers
who are developing optical networking and data center interconnects applications. Silicon
photonics holds the potential to become a cost-effective, scalable technology for the production
of photonic integrated circuits and addresses the high-performance requirements of these
applications.
 
TowerJazz’s foundry SiPho process offering is built to enable a wide range of optical fiber
interconnect Tx and Rx front-end optical ICs. The process includes several versions of singlemode silicon waveguides, high speed germanium photodetectors, p-n junction modulators and enablement for edge and grating couplers.
 
PhoeniX Software’s award winning PIC design solution, OptoDesigner 5.1, uses a unique process known as photonic synthesis to map design intent into a design-rule clean circuit layout targeted to the TowerJazz SiPho process. Designers can use OptoDesigner’s parametric object oriented scripting environment and its integrated photonic simulators to optimize their designs to achieve an optimal layout that meets their performance and design requirements while also ensuring robust design manufacturability.
 
“We are excited to be entering the silicon photonics foundry space in order to provide solutions
to a greater portion of the optical transceiver market for our customers,” said Dr. Marco Racanelli, Sr. Vice President and General Manager of RF & High Performance Analog Business
Unit, TowerJazz. “As a pure-play foundry, design enablement plays a critical and complementary role to the manufacturing process and we are excited to have partnered with
PhoeniX Software which has extensive experience in the silicon photonics space to bring highvalue  PDKs to our customers.”
 
“PDK-based design is key to achieving greater designer productivity and we are very excited to be working with TowerJazz to make their SiGe BiCMOS PDKs available to the Datacom market”, said Twan Korthorst, CEO of PhoeniX Software. “We are especially pleased to be working with TowerJazz as they offer world-class production capabilities to our mutual customers in the integrated photonics market.”

Availability
SiPho PDKs for TowerJazz’ SiPho process will be available Q3 2017. Please contact
info@towerjazz.com more information.