News: Optoelectronics
14 November 2022
Lumentum’s high-speed DMLs to be used in POET’s 400G FR4 transmit optical engines
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 — is to use high-speed directly modulated laser (DML) technology from Lumentum Holdings Inc of San Jose, CA, USA in its transmit optical engines to enable high-volume, low-power and cost-efficient 400G, 800G and 1.6T pluggable transceivers for hyperscale data centers.
Working with Lumentum, POET expects to start sampling the 400G FR4 transmit optical engines with integrated drivers in first-half 2023 and production by second-half 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, POET says. With the small size and 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,” notes POET’s chairman & CEO Suresh Venkatesan. “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,” he adds.
“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,” says Wupen Yuen, Lumentum’s senior VP & 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.”
The market opportunity for 400G/800G/1.6T pluggable transceivers is forecasted in LightCounting’s April 2022 report to grow from $2bn in 2023 to $6.5bn in 2027.
POET unveils 800G & 1.6T optical engines for hyperscale data centers
