POET Technologies will use Directly Modulated Lasers (DMLs) with integrated drivers in its transmit optical engines and high-speed photodiodes and integrated Transimpedance Amplifiers (TIAs) in receive optical engines, to enable low power, cost-efficient and highly scalable 800G and 1.6T pluggable transceivers for hyperscale data centers.
Working with a market-leading designer and manufacturer of lasers, POET’s optical engines will be the industry’s first implementation of DMLs at these data rates. POET will use the breakthrough DMLs for its modulator-free design of the POET 400G transmit engine. Its small size and chip-on-board design will allow 800G and 1.6T designs to easily fit in an industry-standard 1.6T OSFP-XD form factor.
DML technology has a proven track record of enabling high volume transceiver deployments at every generation of speeds in hyperscale data centers. The 100G PAM4 DML passively integrated on the POET optical engine not only addresses current 400G solutions at mass volume but also enables future intra-data center interconnects as the industry moves to higher speeds.
“POET’s optical engines are ’photonic chiplets,’ unique to POET, which enable a scalable, elegant solution to module design that can extend the use of pluggable transceivers in data centers to 1.6T and even 3.2T. Extending pluggables to these speeds with industry-standard form factors was previously thought to be impossible, but because of the small size and extent of integration of devices in our optical engines, data center customers will have more flexibility in network design than ever before,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman & CEO of POET.
“As we continue to integrate more devices on our platform we build more value into our optical engines, increase transceiver module performance, reduce power and cost, and provide unparalleled levels of flexibility for data center customers.”
Pluggable transceiver customers will benefit from POET’s proven optical engine platform with chip-scale assembly, monolithically integrated multiplexer/demultiplexer and passive alignments for use in 400G, 800G and 1.6T FR4 modules. The optical engine solutions will simplify the transceiver design and eliminate the need for cumbersome and costly active alignments. POET expects to start sampling 800G/1.6ToOptical engines in the first half of 2023.
