X-FAB, SMART Photonics, and Epiphany Design Collaborate on Advanced Heterogeneous Photonics Integration Platform

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embedded.com, Mar. 26, 2025 – 

X-FAB Silicon Foundries SE, a leading analog/mixed-signal and specialty foundry, SMART Photonics, a premier Indium Phosphide (InP) integrated photonics foundry, and Epiphany Design, a fabless photonic design house specializing in hybrid and heterogeneous photonics, have joined forces to develop a cutting-edge heterogeneous photonics integration platform. This platform leverages the combined strengths of InP and Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technologies to enable multi-terabit data rates for data communication and telecommunications applications.

By co-optimizing SOI, InP, and Micro-Transfer-Printing (MTP) technologies, the new platform is designed to meet customer demands for high-speed data transmission and energy efficiency in high-volume optical transceiver manufacturing. In addition to enhancing system performance and introducing new functionalities, it lowers integration costs by relaxing photonics packaging requirements. MTP technology, originally pioneered by X-Celeprint, offers system and product designers greater flexibility by enabling the seamless integration of chiplets into product architectures.

Significant progress has already been made within this collaboration, culminating in the development of a design flow and process design kit (PDK) that facilitates the integration of InP chiplets onto an SOI-based photonic circuit. This design flow is fully implemented in Luceda’s IPKISS EDA tool, with Luceda’s technical expertise playing a key role in supporting the development of the demonstrator.

As a major milestone in this initiative, Epiphany Design—an X-FAB innovation partner and part of the XCHAIN ecosystem—has successfully demonstrated the heterogeneous InP-on-SOI design flow through an optical transceiver demonstrator. The results of this collaboration will be presented at the 50th Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Francisco next week.

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