I am somewhat surprised that S.V., being a visionary and researcher, to what customers need and want, that he did not see these Pivots being a major obstacle to revenue and success. You would think that with his credentials & oversight, he would have found a more direct way to offer Transceiver pluggable modules. Even if it meant a JV or partial minority stake partner being found. I guess that is were a good Buisness CEO would have helped.

Each time Poet goes quiet(waiting on cust decisions) and timelines are pushed out longer, it seems to be caused by those customers that have asked for one less step to deal with before they commit to orders and sales. The less steps to getting modules, makes it easier, faster and problem free to get the product out. Poet has finally reached a point that customers have to commit or get left behind, by offering the complete Modules. As long as they stay solvent.

Now that they have a road directly to the pluggable transceiver module's(and customers hands) there should be no more Pivot's. Only upgrades with very minor adjustments. Customers should have a quick decision on buying or not. 

Hopefully this is the last major pivot that I see Poet doing. 

Pivot 1   Wafer Scale OE's, JV & Manufacturer

POET Technologies: Enters a Joint Venture Agreement with Leading LED Producer

TORONTO, June 30, 2022 15:53:46 ET  POET Technologies has signed a US$50 million Joint Venture Agreement with Sanan IC who is the worlds leading producer of LEDs. They've also applied for the registration of Super Photonics Xiamen Co., Ltd. (“Super Photonics”). This will offer a new generation of cost-effective, high-performance optical engines to transceiver module manufacturers, systems suppliers, data center operators and network providers globally.

Jan 10 2023

POET technologies announces production release of optical engines for 100G, 200G and 400G for telecom and data center market

• The small form factor optical engines with integrated directly modulated lasers  optical multiplexer, high-speed photodiodes and optical demultiplexer enable low power, cost-efficient and highly scalable 100G CWDM4, 200G FR4 and 400G FR4 pluggable transceivers for telecom and data center markets.

• POET and Super Photonics are actively working with at least four other customers to complete transceiver level design and qualification of the optical engines and expect to ramp to high volume in the second half of 2023. POET expects to release more products to production in the first half of the year.

Pivot 2   AI-Packaged light engines & Integration.  Collaboration & Order

POET Technologies Introduces "POET Starlight" for the Artificial Intelligence Market and Receives Advanced Purchase Order from Celestial AI

TORONTO, April 25, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- POET Technologies Inc. (“POET” or the “Company”) (TSX Venture: PTK; NASDAQ: POET), the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer™ and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center, telecommunication and artificial intelligence markets, today announced “POET Starlight™” , a packaged light source solution for AI applications. POET has entered into an agreement with Celestial AI, creators of the Photonic Fabric™, for development and production of POET Starlight packaged light sources and has received an advanced purchase order for initial production units.

The POET Starlight products are packaged light engines based on POET's LightBar™ platform, which recently earned industry praise when it was demonstrated at OFC. Chip developers are working to redesign the core of computer architecture to incorporate light for communication among chips or to perform complex computations, all in an effort to eliminate the bandwidth and power-efficiency bottlenecks inherent in electronic devices. Each such chip requires one or more light sources able to provide several frequencies of light integrated into the fabric of the device.

POET’s Starlight products integrate active components like lasers and certain other passive optical and electrical components into the optical interposer to provide a complete light source solution that can be integrated on a host board and connected to chips and ASICs with built-in silicon photonics. POET achieves its low-cost solution through the use of features and benefits of the POET Optical Interposer platform and the “semiconductorization” of photonics fabrication processes.

Pivot-3   Chiplet-based transmitter platform in Module

Jun 14 2023

POET Technologies Announces Sample Availability of "POET Infinity" and Testing with Two Lead Customers

TORONTO, June 14, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- POET Technologies Inc. (“POET” or the “Company”) (TSXV: PTK; NASDAQ: POET), the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer™ and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center, telecommunication and artificial intelligence markets, today announced alpha sample readiness of “ POET Infinity ™”, a chiplet-based transmitter platform for 400G, 800G and 1.6T pluggable transceivers and co-packaged optics solutions. Two lead customers have agreed to partner with POET to test the alpha version of the Infinity chiplet.

The POET Infinity chiplet complements the POET 800G 2xFR4 Receiver optical engine that the Company announced in February 2023, and completes the 800G chipset for 2xFR4 QSFP-DD or OSFP applications with two Infinity chiplets and one Receiver optical engine. Both customers intend to develop 800G 2xFR4 QSFP-DD and OSFP transceiver solutions using the POET Optical Engine chipsets.

The Infinity chiplet is the industry’s first implementation of directly modulated lasers (DMLs) for 100G/lane applications. DMLs are power efficient, cost effective and become a highly scalable solution when paired with the POET Optical Interposer™ platform. The chiplet incorporates 100G PAM4 DMLs, DML Drivers and an integrated optical multiplexer for a complete 400GBASE-FR4 transmitter solution on a chip. The small size of the chiplet and a daisy-chain architecture enables side-by-side placement of multiple instances to achieve 800G and 1.6T speeds.

The POET Infinity product line carries forward the POET differentiation of all passive alignments and monolithically integrated waveguides, multiplexers and demultiplexers, which translates to lower cost, lower power consumption and ease-of-assembly benefits for customers.

“The availability of a transmitter solution for 400G, 800G and 1.6T speeds that is power efficient, cost effective and highly scalable for the data center market is a major achievement,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman & CEO of POET. “Our customers are excited to receive the samples and test them because it simplifies their transceiver design significantly and shortens the design cycle with POET optical engines that incorporate all of the required optical elements as well as the key electronic components, including laser drivers and trans-impedance amplifiers.”

Aug 15 2023

POET Technologies Creates Platform for 1.6T Transceivers Using 200G per lane Technology

TORONTO, Aug. 15, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- POET Technologies Inc. (“POET” or the “Company”) (TSXV: PTK; NASDAQ: POET), the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer™ and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center, telecommunication and artificial intelligence markets, today announced its development of an optical interposer platform for 1.6T transceivers and beyond using 200G per lane technology for next generation data center and AI networks.

Migrating from 100G per lane to 200G per lane doubles the bandwidth with the same face plate density as 100G per lane, lowers the overall system power consumption and reduces the solution cost. Cloud and other service providers can continue to reap the benefits of pluggable transceivers in their networks and deploy pluggable solutions at bandwidths of 1.6T (and beyond) with 200G per lane technology utilizing POET’s enhanced interposer-powered optical engines.

The newly-designed Optical Interposer architecture enables seamless wafer-scale passive assembly of externally modulated lasers from multiple suppliers, providing maximum flexibility for customer requirements. Among the new features of the Optical Interposer, the most important include:

• Novel transmission line designs to supply low-loss, high-speed electrical interconnects with bandwidth greater than 75GHz, a requirement of next generation of high-speed lasers and drivers.
• Adaptations to support the integration of conventional surface mount device (SMD) components, which improve RF performance that is crucial at such high speeds.
• New, proprietary demux architectures and assembly techniques to allow passive, wafer-level assembly of the next generation of high-speed photodiodes.
• Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs) on the Optical Interposer platform for integration of high-speed electrical and optical components while eliminating wire bonds – one of the primary sources of signal noise and interference in transceivers.

The overall effect of these improvements to the Optical Interposer platform is to achieve superior performance in a power-optimized solution at 200G per lane that can be included in 1.6T pluggable transceivers. The small form factor of POET Optical Engines makes the solution scalable to 3.2T pluggable transceivers in current industry standard form factors.

Sep 12 2023

POET Technologies' New Module Designs Attract Major Companies at CIOE

Oct 10 2023

POET Technologies Collaborates with Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology for Laser Supply as the Company's Optical Engines Enter Volume Production

Pivot 4 Direct Module to Customer. 2-Collaborating Partners

Jan 3 2024

POET Technologies Announces ZKTel as Customer and Collaborator

POET and ZKTel have been collaborating to develop a 100G CWDM4 optical transceiver module using POET optical engines supplied by POET’s joint venture company, Super Photonics Xiamen (SPX). Each module contains a 100G CWDM4 transmit and a receive engine with monolithically integrated MUX and DMUX, directly modulated lasers (DMLs), and high-speed photodiodes. POET developed the product to suit ZKTel’s desired designs, demonstrating the flexibility of the optical interposer technology.

POET and MultiLane Collaborate to Develop High-Speed Pluggable Transceivers for AI Networks

TORONTO and SAN JOSE, Calif., March 27, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- POET Technologies Inc. (POET) (TSX Venture: PTK; NASDAQ: POET), the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer™ and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for data center, telecommunication and AI markets announced today a collaboration with MultiLane Inc., a leading provider of high-speed IO and data center interconnect test solutions, to develop next-generation, performance-optimized pluggable 800G, 1.6T and higher speed transceivers using POET’s newly designed transmit and receive optical engines. POET and MultiLane will focus on jointly developing pluggable transceivers that will reduce cost and improve power efficiency over existing solutions, and address the increasing need for more scalable hardware components for AI and cloud data center markets.

“Our intent with this collaboration is to design cost-optimized 800G modules that offer superior performance with both the DSP integrated version as well as Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) variants. We also want to kick start our designs for 1.6T and 3.2T pluggable transceivers for the most advanced data center and AI network operators,” said Raju Kankipati, POET’s SVP of Product Management. “We have to plan and develop ahead of market demand and be ready when customers are ready to test these higher speeds. The collaboration with MultiLane will significantly shorten the design cycle time for POET’s technology and will enable us to bring this value to our global customers much more quickly.”

“We are excited to collaborate with POET, offering our services in product development, testing automation, and contract manufacturing to accelerate the product development and launch,” said Fadi Daou, Founder and CEO of MultiLane. “MultiLane specializes in high throughput testing that enables shorter design cycles and a faster time to market; driving industry innovation and maintaining a healthy networking ecosystem.”

Initial samples of pluggable transceiver modules from this collaboration are expected to be available in late 2024. According to LightCounting the market for 800G transceiver modules is approximately $750 million today but is forecasted to reach $1.7 billion by 2027.

I only wish we would have been at this point when they went to the Nas.

Ron