To be honest it is MaxLinear’s Telluride PAM4 DSP that Raintree selected that interests me. Raintree is the latest silicon photonics company to announce they are using this Digital Signal Processor for PAM-4 applications. It obviously gets really fuzzy when you begin to make comparisons on the electronic side whether to use the cutting edge 7nm process available from companies like Broadcom.

So will POET use the MaxLinear Telluride PAM4 DSP and TIA or will they use a mix based on customer preference? The plan is to source off the shelf electronic components. The key here is again to allow the flexibility to mix and match components as required by the application.  But the real  strength  is again full wafer level production from laser burn in to loop back testing with much lower insertion loss and athermal  wavelength stability all enabled by the dielectric stack optical interposer.

MaxLinear did make POET’s short list (page 16).

https://poet-technologies.com/docs/presentations/OTC-Technology-Virtual-Presentation-April-2-2020.pdf

A better description focused on MaxLinear’s DSP and TIA is provided below:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190923005206/en/MaxLinear%E2%80%99s-Telluride-PAM4-DSPs-TIA-Selected-Centera