News: Optoelectronics
29 October 2020
POET readies Optical Interposer for production
POET Technologies Inc of Toronto, Ontario, Canada — designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer and photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for the data-center and telecom markets — has added several new features to its proprietary POET Optical Interposer platform and completed the design for products identified on its roadmap.
New Optical Interposer features include:
- waveguide designs and process integration methods that minimize reflections of laser light within the Optical Interposer platform;
- fiducials that better enable the sub-micron accuracy of automated pick-and-place assembly of lasers and other components mechanically placed on the platform;
- vertical mirrors that extend the platform applicability to top- and bottom-surface-access optical devices, such as top-entry photodetectors and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs);
- improved spot-size converters that provide efficient coupling of lasers and modulators to waveguides (important for 400G and 800G optical engines);
- the latest generation of low-loss Mach-Zehnder interferometry (MZI)-based multiplexers embedded in the waveguides; and
- newly developed IP to efficiently align fiber-attach-units (FAUs) to POET’s optical engines.
“We have determined that the Optical Interposer platform is now production-ready,” says president & general manager Vivek Rajgarhia. “We have proven out all of the features and production methods for the platform itself, including the flip-chip assembly and bonding steps for lasers, which has historically been the ‘Achilles’ Heel’ for other approaches to optoelectronic integration. The basic platform features, now completed, apply to all of the products that we are engaged with customers to develop. The pre-alpha and alpha prototypes that are now being assembled differ primarily in the particular components included, and in most cases, those designs have been validated,” he adds.
“The POET Optical Interposer platform is fully compatible with standard CMOS semiconductor processing methods and equipment,” Rajgarhia continues. “It seamlessly incorporates the best features of a planar lightwave circuit (PLC), silicon optical benches (SiOB) and interposer functionality and is fabricated solely within the production limits of silicon-based semiconductor processing. In addition to being fundamental to lower-cost and the higher-performance value proposition of the Optical Interposer, the processing compatibility with CMOS opens up a variety of applications to POET that are simply not available using other integration approaches seen in the market today.”
POET’s product roadmap, presented in late August at its annual general meeting of shareholders, revealed four products under development, each associated with an individual customer or potential groups of customers. The firm reported that the 100/200G CWDM4 Optical Engine, the 400G LightBar, 400G FR4 Receiver, and the 400G FR4/DR Optical Engines all remain on schedule.
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