News: Optoelectronics
12 August 2026
OpenLight and Tower expand PH18DA photonics ecosystem to accelerate photonic IC development
Photonic application-specific integrated circuit (PASIC) chip designer and manufacturer OpenLight of Goleta, Santa Barbara, CA, USA (which launched as an independent company in 2022, introducing the first open silicon photonics platform with heterogeneously integrated III-V lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors) and specialty analog foundry Tower Semiconductor Ltd of Migdal Haemek, Israel have announced the availability of OpenLight’s photonic process design kit (PDK) for Tower’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 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,” says OpenLight’s CEO Dr Adam Carter. “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,” says Dr Samir Chaudhry, VP of customer design enablement and reliability at Tower. “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,” he adds.
“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,” says Gilles Lamant, distinguished engineer, Cadence.
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