[News] OpenLight and Tower Semiconductor Expand PH18DA Photonics Ecosystem to Accelerate Photonic IC Development

OpenLight, a leader in heterogeneous III‑V‑on‑silicon photonic integration and custom Photonic Application‑Specific Integrated Circuits (PASICs), and Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ/TASE: TSEM), the leading foundry for high-value analog semiconductor solutions, today announced the availability of OpenLight’s photonic Process Design Kit (PDK) for Tower Semiconductor’s PH18DA indium phosphide (InP)-on-silicon photonics platform in Cadence’s electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Developed through close technical collaboration between the companies, the PDK now enables customers to design advanced photonic integrated circuits (PICs) within a widely adopted IC design environment and accelerate development toward production.

The PH18DA ecosystem brings together OpenLight’s photonics IP, Tower’s process and manufacturing expertise, and Cadence’s leading EDA tools, enabling a streamlined path for developing advanced photonic ICs while bringing photonics design closer to established electronic IC workflows and manufacturing.

“By making our PDK available on Cadence tools, we enable customers to design photonic integrated circuits within the same environment they rely on for advanced IC development,” said Dr. Adam Carter, CEO at OpenLight. “This integration simplifies adoption and strengthens the path from design to production on the PH18DA platform.”

Designs created using OpenLight‘s PDK support fabrication on Tower’s PH18DA InP-on-silicon photonics platform, which enables the integration of active photonic components – including lasers, modulators, and amplifiers – into a single monolithic PIC. The platform supports advanced optical systems for applications such as optical interconnects, AI infrastructure, and sensing.

“In collaboration with Cadence and OpenLight, we are advancing design capabilities on the PH18DA platform through a new capability that integrates expertise across technology, IP, and EDA,” said Dr. Samir Chaudhry, vice president of customer design enablement and reliability at Tower Semiconductor. “This approach enables customers to streamline development of 400G and 1.6T laser-integrated photonic integrated circuits, while achieving co-optimized PIC and EIC designs for improved performance, power efficiency, and scalability necessary for next-generation near- and co-packaged optics (NPO/CPO) solutions.”

“Adding the OpenLight PDK PH18DA manufactured by Tower Semiconductor to the rich portfolio of photonics processes supported by the Cadence Photonics ecosystem is a key milestone because it marks the introduction of integrated active devices for high-performance, co-optimized electro-optical designs,” said Gilles Lamant, distinguished engineer, Cadence.

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