POET announces 800G and 1.6T Optical Engines
Company announces Optical Engines with high-speed DMLs and photodiodes
Photonics firm POET Technologies has announced that it will use Directly Modulated Lasers (DMLs) in its optical engines for 800G and 1.6T pluggable transceivers for hyperscale data centres.
The DMLs will be combined with integrated drivers in POET’s transmit optical engines. High-speed photodiodes and integrated Transimpedance Amplifiers (TIAs) will be used in its receive optical engines. The approach will enable low power, cost-efficient and highly scalable 800G and 1.6T pluggable transceivers for hyperscale data centres, according to the company.
POET’s optical engines will be the industry’s first implementation of DMLs at these data rates. The company will use the DMLs for its modulator-free design of the POET 400G transmit engine. It says the 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 centres. 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 centre 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 centres to 1.6T and even 3.2T, " said Suresh Venkatesan, chairman & CEO of POET. " 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 centre customers will have more flexibility in network design than ever before."
POET says that pluggable transceiver customers will benefit from the 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/1.6T Optical Engines in the first half of 2023.
