POET Technologies confirmed that it will use high-speed directly modulated laser (DML) technology from Lumentum in its own transmit optical engines to enable high volume, low power, and cost-efficient 400G, 800G, and 1.6T pluggable transceivers for hyperscale data centers.
POET expects to start sampling the 400G FR4 transmit optical engines with integrated drivers in the first half of 2023 and production by the second half of 2023. The 400G FR4 optical engines are architected as photonic chiplets and will be the industry’s first implementation of DMLs with flip-chip integration on an optical interposer at these data rates. With the small size and elegant design of POET’s optical engines, customers will have the flexibility to design 400G, 800G, and 1.6T pluggable transceivers using the same 400G FR4 chiplets.
“The majority of the 400G transceivers in the market today use either externally modulated lasers or silicon photonics combined with external lasers. These solutions require multiple components and involve several cumbersome and costly active alignments,” said Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman & CEO of POET. “POET has a significant opportunity to disrupt the market with a highly integrated solution with all passive alignments and monolithically integrated waveguides and multiplexers, which translates to lower cost, power, and size benefits to our customers.”
“With the continued deployment of 400G, plus 800G on the horizon in hyperscale data centers, there is a need for laser technologies that lower power consumption and cost and are easier to scale to high volumes,” said Wupen Yuen, Lumentum’s senior vice president and general manager of the Datacom Business Unit. “Lumentum’s high-performance 100G DML provides customers with an additional laser technology choice to help them optimize their transceiver solutions to best meet the needs of hyperscale data center operators while leveraging Lumentum’s proven high-speed laser manufacturing scale and quality.”