News: Optoelectronics
16 March 2022
POET demos 200G FR4 Transmit and 400G FR4 Receive Optical Engines at OFC
At the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC 2022) in San Diego, CA, USA (8-10 March), POET Technologies Inc of Toronto, Ontario, Canada — a designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer and photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for the data-center and telecom markets — gave live demonstrations of its recently announced 200G FR4 Transmit and 400G FR4 Receive Optical Engines.
“Our live demos attracted a variety of existing and potential customers, suppliers and business partners as the only company exhibiting chip-scale integrated FR4 optical engines,” notes CEO Dr Suresh Venkatesan. “FR4 is a multiplexed standard that transmits and receives up to 2km, compared to its DR4 counterpart which supports a parallel four-lane standard limited to 500m. The number of fibers required is also a factor, with DR4 requiring eight per module and FR4 requiring only two per module,” he adds.
“We had 40-50 meetings overall and are rapidly gaining traction with potential customers, including data-center operators, networking systems and artificial intelligence (AI) vendors and module companies,” says president Vivek Rajgarhia. “Some of the more interesting partnering opportunities were with innovative device companies, looking to utilize POET’s platform for the next generation of optical engines for transceivers and co-packaging applications,” he adds. “The Optical Interposer is an integration platform that is agnostic to the material system that any given device is built from, meaning that we can select the ‘best of breed’ for the specific application rather than trying to do everything in silicon or any other material. This distinctive feature of the POET Optical Interposer technology, among others, means that we can address applications where conventional free-space optics or traditional silicon photonics cannot.”
Also at OFC, Venkatesan gave a Technology Showcase presentation ‘Hybrid Integration Platform for Co-Packaged Photonics Using POET’s CMOS Based Optical Interposer’, which can be found on the ‘Presentation and Events’ page of the firm’s Investor Relations website.
