The Power of Silicon Germanium: Analog, RF, and High-Speed Interconnects in AI Infrastructure

What happened

In a podcast episode (Amelia's Weekly Fish Fry, episode 707) published November 13, 2026, Shankaran Janardhanan, Senior Vice President of Photonics and RF Business at GlobalFoundries, said GlobalFoundries is continuing to invest very heavily in its silicon germanium (SiGe) capacity expansion, whether at its U.S. facility or in Singapore. The stated cause is responding to data center spend and supporting the AI data center rollout: he said hyperscaler spend over the last couple of years was around $400 billion, growing to about $800 billion across hyperscalers, and expected to cross over a trillion dollars. The interview also notes the market move from 100 gig per lane to 200 gig per lane, with 200G per lane ramping up now especially in scale-out architectures and expected to head toward 400 gig per lane; SiGe is used to close the electrical/electro-optical link budget in optical modules because CMOS cannot keep up at these data rates; and the next generation of SiGe technologies will need higher FT and Fmax (greater than 500 gig, greater than 600 gig Fmax). This is a planned capacity expansion — a supply-chain background event with no component price movement stated.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: EE Journal · 11/13/2026 · View original source