POET technologies announces a strategic collaboration with ADVA for highly integrated 4x100G solutions

POET Technologies, the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center, telecommunication and artificial intelligence markets, announced that it has developed multi-engine 100G CWDM4 and 100G LR4 chip-on-board solutions for its lead customer, ADVA Optical Networking SE. ADVA will use POET’s multi-engine transmit and receive chips in an innovative pluggable solution that packs the functionality of four independent 100Gbit/s interfaces into a single QSFP-DD housing.

“ADVA’s MicroMux™ Quattro brings the industry’s smallest aggregation technology all the way to the network core. Engineered as a standard-compliant plug in a QSFP-DD form factor, it fits into a 400Gbit/s socket, enabling it to meet legacy needs. This innovative pluggable solution packs the functionality of four independent 100Gbit/s interfaces or two independent 200Gbit/s interfaces into a single QSFP-DD housing,” said Ross Saunders, GM of Optical Engines, ADVA. “POET’s unique design of its optical engines with hybrid integration of optical chips and monolithically integrated MUX and DMUX enables us to deliver products in a small form factor that is scalable to high volume production as well as to higher data rates, such as 1.6Tbit/s and 3.2Tbit/s, thereby enabling much higher bandwidth in a pluggable form factor.”

“We are excited to work with ADVA and to enable a high-density platform with a large market potential,” said Vivek Rajgarhia, President & GM of POET. “POET’s Optical Interposer platform provides a high level of photonic integration to provide unique solutions in miniature form factors. We believe that our wafer-scale integration platform provides ADVA with compelling solutions that are well aligned with their current and future products.”

POET’s multi-engine chips incorporate multiple instances of industry standard 100GBASE-CWDM4, for 2km applications, and 100GBASE-LR4, for 10km applications, transmit and receive functionalities on a single optical engine. The Company’s 100GBASE-LR4 optical engines are the industry’s first implementation of chip-on-board solutions for the 100G LR4 market. The hybrid integration of lasers and photodiodes, monolithic integration of optical MUX and DMUX and the passive alignment of components on POET’s Optical Interposer platform provides a unique and differentiated solution to enable high-density network connectivity.

POET has successfully demonstrated 10km operation of 100G LR4 optical engines in its Shenzhen Lab and plans to ship beta samples to ADVA in Q1 2023 with production targeted in the second half of 2023.

According to LightCounting’s April 2022 report, the market opportunity for 100G CWDM4 and LR4 pluggable transceivers will continue to remain strong at an average size of $700 million annually from 2023 to 2027.