I think today’s video “’Expanding Our Portfolio in the AI Space’ and More POET Updates” is particularly important as it once again highlights the versatility of POET’s optical interposer platform. And not only is it possible “in principle” to use it to develop many different products in a simple and elegant way, but that’s also happening as we speak and will bear rich fruit in the months and years to come.

So here’s a transcript, highlighting by me:

Adrian Brijbassi: Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, POET’s chairman and CEO, is joining us from Singapore where he’s checking in on the team there. Suresh, thanks for taking the time while you’re back on the road to update us.

Dr. Suresh Venkatesan: Well, thank you, Adrian, thanks for the time.

AB: Like I said, you’re in Singapore. How are the operations there and what’s the team focused on?

SV: Well, this is of course the center of where all the Interposer development is occurring.

So, much of the team here is really focused on our Infinity chiplets that we announced at the OFC, and we’re going through the paces in terms of getting all of the ducks in row for our alphas and sample shipments and so on. So that’s kind of a big chunk of the activity. There is a lot of development still to be completed. We just did a first-pass, rough, mad dash to the OFC, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to kind of establish the manufacturing processes around that interposer design.

And the 800G receivers which we announced a commitment with Luxshare to using our engines; we are sampling them on a continuous basis. Much of that activity is of course occurring here in Singapore.

But there is a portion of the team that is kind of dedicated to more the legacy products, and it’s operations – which at least has been internal to POET, at least internal to Singapore, is transitioned into kind of operations and manufacturing. So there of course the team is more focused on delivery and supply and establishing a pipeline inventory management and establishing kind of the pipeline of supply now with BFYY. That kicks it up a notch we’ve got 100,000+ interposers to be delivered over the course of some period of time to fulfill that first order.

So, yeah, I think the the team here is kind of split into a couple of different hats, the R&D hat, and then the operations hat. And we are growing that operations team because of the volume of material that’s needing to be shipped. Especially through the course of this year: We take almost, what, 14-ish products into production. We’ve got 100G CWDM4, transmit, receive, the one-chip solutions, we’ve got the LR4 transmit-receive, we’ve got the quad LR4 transmit-receives, so on the legacy side there’s just a whole bunch of stuff that is kind of being established for in a manufacturing readiness, while my R&D team and the assembly team here is really focused on getting the Infinity chiplets as well as the 800G receivers out.

AB: So, 14 products – we have customers for for those as well?

SV: Yeah, we’ve got. You know, I mean, we’ve announced the customers, we’ve announced, and there are several others that were discussing. I think it was good to get a firm commitment from Luxshare, so we are designed into their transceiver modules for 800G on the receiver side first, and then, as we get our samples on the transmit, we have a shot at getting our solutions into them at that time as well.

So, yeah, I think we are getting traction both on the leading edge as well as definitely on the legacy which is starting to become more pronounced as we can announce these products to be production-worthy and production-ready.

And we are also expanding our portfolio in the artificial intelligence space. There are a couple of other customers beyond Celestial that we’re now talking to. So that that’s also been a good expansion of our portfolio.

AB: Yes, so on AI we mentioned Celestial AI has made a purchase order for POET Starlight, it will become a developing that with POET. Specifically what does that agreement mean for the company to be this engaged in this technology that is really the talk of the world at the moment?

SV: We have been working with Celestial for a while, and we’ll continue to deliver leading edge solutions for that particular market segment. That market segment is in some ways different from what we do for data centers; it typically is 8, 16 channel implementations.

The AI market of course is huge and is really exploding. And one of the biggest bottlenecks in artificial intelligence, at least in terms of just kind of providing solutions, is the memory bottleneck between the processing unit as well as the memory. The memory houses all of the weights that are needed for an artificial intelligence calculation. ChatGPT has a billion parameters, the next generation will have tensibly in the parameters.

There’s a big push in that world to change the transmit between the processor and the memory to using optics. A lot of companies are in that field: Ayer Labs, Nubis, Lightmatter, Light Intelligence, Celestial – they’re all kind of in that space. It is not a standards setup today. So each customer is got its own solution, their custom. But what is common among all of them is they need a low–cost light source, and we with our interposer have the ability to provide this low cost light source into that market using wafers-scale integration techniques.

And we also have some IP that can dramatically lower the cost of even today’s solutions that were working on to really corner that market and cut own our fair share of it. When that market matures in 2025 and beyond, I mean it’s going to be the same size as [??? ] some times larger than the projected data communications market.

It’s a different business model in that we’re a light source provider and a critical piece of the system, but it’s a one-to-one attach rate to a processor. So every processor that sold will require a light source. It’s not like data communication sockets that are kind of limited to the number of sockets in a data center. Here you’re now limited to how many processors are going to get sold – and that’s a lot of processors!

So we’re pretty excited about that market and we obviously want to get more penetration in that market beyond Celestial. And I think the announcements so far, engagements there, and our readiness to go into production there as well is is an important stepping stone towards kind of growing our share in that in that space.

AB: Does it surprise you that the technology that you and the team said about creating to address the pain points of data centers and telecoms has also now grown to include the AI market? It seems like such a fit at the right time. May perhaps fortunately things have kind of fallen into your lap in that way?

SV: Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s not surprising me. At the end of the day, we are an integration platform, and we provide a wafer-scale integration capability for photonics that we’ve in a short period of time and literally with far fewer resources than other companies have brought to a point of maturity and production. So, by virtue of the fact that it is an integration platform that has at its very core principles of cost and scale, I think it fits into any market that requires cost and scale, and especially as the channel counts increase the value of our platform increases as well.

At the end of the day, there are going to be many other ways where people can get to the end solution but we are clearly in the pole position in terms of having an integration capability that works in that space. Our desire and our vision is totally to capture that position to solidify our lead in that space in terms of providing integrated light source solutions for their AI market. So, transforms us from being kind of a datacom company to more of an AI player, which is like a step function in terms of kind of potential revenue and potential volumes as well.

AB: Really fascinating how has all developed! So, after Singapore what’s next for you?

SV: I am really happy to announce that I’m finally going to be able to make it to China. I am headed out to Shenzhen next week from here, be spending some time with the team there. I’ve never visited our offices in Shenzhen and I haven’t met most of the people there. So it’s going to be great for me to go there and visit with the team. I’m also going to be visiting Super Photonics for the first time, I’ve never visited them as well, and meet with the executives and team there. So, yeah, I’m finally going to be able to make it to China next week after 2019, January I believe. So it’s three and a half years.

AB: Yeah, unbelievable! Safe travels there! Enjoy that, and we can’t wait to hear what your feedback is from your visit in those facilities!

SV: Perfect, thank you, Adrian!

AB: Thank you, Suresh!