News: Optoelectronics
7 January 2021
POET enters into development and supply agreements with photonic neural network systems firm
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 entered into development and supply agreements with a “technology leader in photonic neural network systems for artificial intelligence (AI) applications”.
Artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented demand for computation at the same time that the physics of digital semiconductors, driven by Moore’s law, is reaching its end, says POET. Transistor scaling is approaching its limits and AI accelerator companies are struggling to keep pace with demands, particularly in ‘edge’ applications that require greater power and cost efficiency, it adds. Domain-specific architectures targeted at AI workloads can make up for some of the slowdown in transistor advances, but that approach also has its limits.
The chipset market for AI applications is projected to grow from about $18bn in 2020 to over $65bn by 2025. POET says that its new development and supply agreement for photonic AI computing represents an entry point into this new, large and extremely high-growth market. The firm says that its customer for these applications is breaking the digital semiconductor mold by integrating photonics into accelerators for AI workloads, enabling step-change advancements in AI computation. Harnessing light to perform data-parallel calculations is many orders of magnitude faster, more power efficient and lower cost than in traditional semiconductors, so photonic computing changes the game in the field of artificial intelligence, POET reckons.
“Photonics has been readied for optical computing as a result of over a decade of advancements in photonics design and fabrication driven by telecommunications and data communication and promises to be the technology to usher in the next era of rapid growth for AI computing,” says chairman & CEO Suresh Venkatesan. “POET is now well positioned to participate meaningfully for a new class of high-volume, high-growth applications, expanding the addressable markets for our Optical Engines and Optical Interposer platform products,” he believes. “In addition to highlighting the tremendous adaptability of the POET Optical Interposer platform, this project is anticipated to result in revenue for POET this year in the form of NRE [non-recurring engineering] and potentially initial product sales.”
