Crealights and GlobalFoundries have expanded their strategic collaboration around silicon photonics for AI infrastructure, with Crealights planning to use GlobalFoundries technology to advance engineering and mass production of 6.4T near-package optics (NPO) products, according to a company announcement released Tuesday.
The companies are targeting high-bandwidth optical interconnects for AI clusters, where moving data among accelerators is becoming a larger part of system performance and power consumption.
6.4T near-package optics
Near-package optics places optical engines close to compute devices, shortening electrical signal paths compared with conventional pluggable optics. Co-packaged optics takes the integration further by placing optical connectivity even closer to switching or compute silicon.
Crealights said it is integrating GlobalFoundries’ silicon photonics platform and SCALE co-packaged optics technology into its NPO and CPO development. The companies also plan to coordinate across design, packaging, connectivity and system-level partners.
The announcement centers on Crealights’ 6.4T NPO products, alongside a portfolio that the company says includes 3.2T NPO engines, optical modules ranging from 400G to 1.6T, active optical cables and CPO technologies.
Manufacturing and commercialization
Crealights said GlobalFoundries’ manufacturing footprint will support a dual-track production strategy covering domestic and international capacity. The company said the partnership is intended to shorten product development cycles and support delivery to customers in North America and other markets.
The companies also plan joint research and development, manufacturing coordination and broader ecosystem work around NPO and CPO. The commercial timetable and customer deployments for the 6.4T products were not detailed in the announcement.
GlobalFoundries has been expanding its photonics and specialty semiconductor footprint in Asia. TNGlobal previously reported on the company’s acquisition of Singapore silicon photonics foundry Advanced Micro Foundry.
For AI infrastructure, the partnership reflects a wider shift in which interconnect bandwidth, power efficiency and packaging are being developed alongside accelerator performance. As clusters scale, optical connectivity is increasingly moving closer to the chips that generate and consume the traffic.
GlobalFoundries acquires Singapore’s Advanced Micro Foundry to expand AI infrastructure portfolio