News: Optoelectronics
15 August 2023
POET creates optical interposer platform for 1.6T transceivers using 200G-per-lane technology
POET Technologies Inc of Toronto, Ontario, Canada — designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer, photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and light sources for the data-center, telecom and artificial intelligence (AI) markets — has announced its development of an optical interposer platform for 1.6T transceivers and beyond using 200G-per-lane technology for next-generation data-center and AI networks.
Migrating from 100G per lane to 200G per lane doubles the bandwidth with the same face-plate density as 100G per lane, lowers the overall system power consumption and reduces the solution cost. Cloud and other service providers can continue to reap the benefits of pluggable transceivers in their networks and deploy pluggable solutions at bandwidths of 1.6T (and beyond) with 200G-per-lane technology utilizing POET’s enhanced interposer-powered optical engines.
“Moving to 200Gbps per lane is a critical step for the industry to sustain the bandwidth demands of the cloud and AI networks,” says chairman & CEO Dr Suresh Venkatesan. “An integration platform like the POET Optical Interposer is an absolute requirement at such high speeds to connect optical and electrical components and at the same time meet performance and power requirements,” he adds. “We have augmented the Optical Interposer platform in several important ways to extract the native bandwidth of components without inducing the losses and interferences that are common in other integration schemes. We are working with several industry leaders and integrating their high-bandwidth components on our platform to demonstrate 200G performance.”
Enhancements to the Optical Interposer now support 200Gbps-per-lane speed for both the transmitter and the receiver. The transmit optical engine has been modified for externally modulated lasers (EML), EML drivers and monolithically integrated multiplexers for single-mode fiber applications for up to 10km reach. The receive optical engine can now incorporate the next-generation higher-speed photodiodes, trans-impedance amplifiers and monolithically integrated low-loss polarization-insensitive demultiplexers for 1.6T transceivers and beyond.
The newly designed Optical Interposer architecture enables seamless wafer-scale passive assembly of externally modulated lasers from multiple suppliers, providing maximum flexibility for customer requirements. Among the new features of the Optical Interposer, the most important include:
- novel transmission line designs to supply low-loss, high-speed electrical interconnects with bandwidth greater than 75GHz, a requirement of next-generation high-speed lasers and drivers;
- adaptations to support the integration of conventional surface-mount device (SMD) components, which improve RF performance that is crucial at such high speeds;
- new, proprietary demux architectures and assembly techniques to allow passive, wafer-level assembly of the next generation of high-speed photodiodes;
- through-silicon-vias (TSVs) on the Optical Interposer platform for the integration of high-speed electrical and optical components while eliminating wire bonds – one of the primary sources of signal noise and interference in transceivers.
The overall effect of these improvements to the Optical Interposer platform is to achieve superior performance in a power-optimized solution at 200G per lane that can be included in 1.6T pluggable transceivers. The small-form-factor of POET Optical Engines makes the solution scalable to 3.2T pluggable transceivers in existing industry standard form factors.
POET expects to complete the design of 1.6T transmit and receive optical engines with 200Gbps-per-lane technology based on the new generation of Optical Interposer designs by early 2024. It plans to demonstrate these products at major tradeshows and to begin customer sampling by first-half 2024.
Additional information about POET’s developments in 200G-per-lane 1.6T optical engines are being featured at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2023) on 2 October in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, where POET’s senior VP Raju Kankipati is discussing the ‘Semiconductorization of Photonics using Silicon Optical Interposers’.
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