The next platform is already in the lab.

The Advanced R&D Center exists to keep the platform’s technology lead compounding. Its programs target the wide-bandgap frontier — silicon carbide device development and gallium-nitride research — plus the advanced-packaging and next-generation process options that will define power electronics after the current ramp completes.

Research here is deliberately coupled to manufacturing. SiC device work uses wafers from the Silicon Boule division and processes scalable to the frontend fab; packaging research runs prototypes through the Backend division’s assembly and reliability equipment. A discovery does not need to survive a technology-transfer desert — it moves a few hundred meters, not a few thousand kilometers.

The center also runs the platform’s longer-horizon programs: next-generation process modules, research partnerships with universities and institutes, and structured innovation programs that convert academic results into industrializable process steps. Its output is measured the way fabs measure yield — as qualified capability, phased into production on the roadmap.

Photonics is the newest pillar. The photonics program develops silicon-photonics process modules — optical waveguides, modulators and detector structures — on the same 8-inch CMOS platform the frontend fab runs, targeting optical interconnect and co-packaged optics for the AI Datacenter division. The motivation is bandwidth and energy: as AI compute scales, copper links between chips and racks hit distance, density and power walls, and moving data with light — manufactured like any other wafer-level process — is the way past them. Photonics research therefore pairs device physics in the lab with system requirements from the racks its results will eventually connect.