News: Optoelectronics
11 February 2022
POET to supply Celestial AI with Optical Interposer-based integrated light engine modules
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 — has entered into an agreement with Celestial AI of Santa Clara, CA, USA to provide multi-laser integrated external light source (ELS) modules using its advanced packaging platform based on the POET Optical Interposer. The agreement includes a contract for continued platform development, along with a purchase order for initial quantities of the modules.
Celestial AI is an artificial intelligence accelerator company that has a proprietary technology platform that enables the next generation of high-performance computing solutions. Celestial AI’s mission is to transform computing efficiency with its Photonic Fabric technology platform, which uses light for data movement both within chip and between chips.
“The customized Optical Interposer platform that we have co-developed with POET is among the most advanced of its kind in high-speed computing,” reckons David Lazovsky, founder & CEO of Celestial AI. “POET’s light engines provide us with precision optical power sources in a highly integrated form factor that meet the requirements for our Orion AI accelerator products.” Celestial AI’s Orion AI accelerator products serve the AI chipset market that is projected by Omdia to exceed $70bn in 2025.
“We are truly excited to take the next step with Celestial AI, one of the leading technology companies in this burgeoning field, to create a highly differentiated means to co-package electronics and photonics and help overcome the fundamental challenges of speed and power faced in high-performance computing,” says POET’s chairman & CEO Dr Suresh Venkatesan. “The challenges in this application are precisely those that the POET Optical Interposer was designed to overcome. They are the same as those faced by datacom and telecom companies as they seek to co-package electronics and optics and to achieve data transmission speeds of 3.2 and 6.4Tbs across a number of channels with multiple wavelengths, with lower energy consumption and higher stability,” he adds. “The multi-laser integrated external light source developed for this application has direct applicability to other products in data communications and sensing.”
