I hear you goosed. Ready for primetime as reported by Vivek. People associated with the company were excited that Vivek was able to give that message. To some of us it had special meaning. I have talked about meeting Viveck shortly after he joined POET. It was a good session and provided a lot of additional insights and confirmed much of my fundamental understanding of the platform and the  benefits the optical interposer could provide. The ability to isolate thermal signatures and optimize the layout. A greatly reduced insertion loss that was much less than the large industry players were capable of. And no active alignment.

At the time Vivek confirmed that a fifth element (the vertical mirror) was still under development  but was progressing as expected. And when he confirmed that this 5th element was the final piece required, the final building block, he emphasized that he would never lie to us but there can always be unforeseen setbacks.  True to his word the final piece of the puzzle was available as Vivek had told us.

We have since come to learn that this vertical mirror allows for a highly efficient receive  circuit/path. The incoming signal from fiber enters the upper waveguide through a very efficient butt couple that reduces insertion loss to a very low number. That light signal is then transferred through the receive waveguide to the mirror which focuses that light onto the flip chip photodetector again with excellent coupling efficiency.

Waveguides: Our waveguides are designed to both be CMOS compatible and provide low loss characteristics. The material loss through the waveguides characterized by prism spectroscopy is <0.3dB/cm and is about one order of magnitude better than typically observed in small core silicon waveguides used in most other silicon photonics technologies. Moreover, our waveguides are largely athermal (dn/dT=12pm/°C) and are non-birefringent. A proprietary Spot Size Converter has been designed for chip facet fiber coupling achieving facet coupling losses of 0.25dB.

So when Vivek reported that SPX is ready for production of 4 products by year end with another 4 on the way in the new year it meant a lot to many of us.