OpenLight and Tower Expand the PH18DA Photonic Platform
On August 11, OpenLight and Tower Semiconductor announced that OpenLight’s photonic PDK is now available in Cadence’s EDA tools for Tower Semiconductor’s PH18DA indium phosphide-on-silicon photonic platform. This PDK, developed through the close technical collaboration between the two companies, enables customers to design advanced photonic integrated circuits in widely adopted IC design environments and accelerates the process from development to production.
The PH18DA ecosystem integrates OpenLight’s photonic IP, Tower’s process and manufacturing expertise, and Cadence’s leading EDA tools, providing a streamlined path for developing advanced photonic ICs while bringing photonic design closer to established electronic IC workflows and manufacturing systems.
Dr. Adam Carter, CEO of OpenLight, stated: “By providing our PDK on Cadence tools, we enable customers to design photonic integrated circuits within the advanced IC development environments they rely on. This integration streamlines the adoption process and strengthens the path from design to production on the PH18DA platform.”
Designs created using the OpenLight PDK can be fabricated on Tower’s PH18DA InP-on-silicon photonics platform, which integrates active photonic components such as lasers, modulators, and amplifiers into a single monolithic PIC. This platform supports advanced optical systems for applications like optical interconnects, AI infrastructure, and sensing.
Dr. Samir Chaudhry, Vice President of Customer Design Enablement and Reliability at Tower Semiconductor, stated: “Through collaboration with Cadence and OpenLight, we have advanced the design capabilities of the PH18DA platform with a new capability integrating technology, IP, and EDA expertise. This approach enables customers to streamline the development of 400G and 1.6T laser-integrated photonic integrated circuits while achieving co-optimized designs for PICs and EICs to meet the performance, power efficiency, and scalability requirements of next-generation near-chip and chip-scale optical solutions.”
Gilles Lamant, outstanding engineer at Cadence, stated: “Adding Tower Semiconductor’s OpenLight PDK PH18DA to the rich portfolio of photonic processes supported by the Cadence Photonics ecosystem marks a key milestone, as it signifies the introduction of integrated active devices for high-performance co-optimized electro-optical design.”
About OpenLight
OpenLight is a leader in the heterogeneous integration of III-V devices into silicon photonics. Its world-class PASIC technology, supported by PDK, integrates all active and passive components of silicon photonic devices onto a single chip, delivering high-performance, high-efficiency photonic solutions for applications and markets such as data communication, telecommunications, automotive, AI, and quantum computing. The company is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, with an office in Silicon Valley.
Regarding Tower Semiconductor
Tower Semiconductor is a leading foundry provider of high-value analog semiconductor solutions, offering technology, development, and process platforms for growing markets such as consumer electronics, industrial, automotive, mobile devices, infrastructure, medical, and aerospace and defense.