POET Technologies Inc.

Just as a reminder. The POET Vertical Cavity Laser is an Optical Thyristor and POET has been doing a lot of work increasing the indium levels to increase the electron mobility of the quantum well structures. These structures are very unique to POET. The POET laser is like nothing that has ever been created before. Geoff told us at the first lab tour that an optical expert would not even know he/she was looking at a laser. The QW structures employ quantum dots which make these lasers very efficient. This is way deeper than anyone outside of Geoff’s lab would really be able to explain. But the key here is that not only are these lasers exceptionally fast and efficient they are micro fabricated with the drivers in the same structure. Right now to drive a VCEL additional chips need to be added which increase costs, energy requirements and slow it down by introducing transfer distance.

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Optical Thyristor

The OT is the backbone of the development of the POET platform. The OT is a multiple-use, four-terminal device having both optical and electrical inputs and optical and electrical outputs. Depending on application and design, an OT could be a (i) laser, (ii) an optical amplifier, (iii) a photoreceiver, or (iv) have multiple electrical operations, as detailed below. An additional anticipated aspect of the POET OT in development is a process step that allows for emission and reception of light in-plane, parallel to the chip surface. Lasers and photoreceivers may either be designed with vertical emission, or use this step to have in-plane emission. This step would allow on-chip optical interconnections and would also support a low-cost multiple-fiber attachment system that the Company has designed.

Various modifications of the basic POET epitaxial structure are being designed to support emission or reception at wavelengths of 980, 1310 or 1550 nanometeres. ODIS’s structure and fabrication also is being developed to provide detection and emission from the 3 to 20 micrometer band via the attributes of its quantum well structure.

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Table of Contents

OT Lasers

POET lasers are being developed to be a third-generation fabrication that uses an implant confinement technique and improve efficiency and reliability over the proton-confined and oxide-confined devices currently available. Either vertical emission or in-plane emission are anticipated to be employed, depending on design needs. When the in-plane feature is employed, vertical cavity lasers are formed in stripe geometries and have end emission. Such vertical cavity traveling wave lasers have ratios of peripheral length to active area higher than conventional circular vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, thus dissipating power more readily and resulting in higher reliability components having longer life. All POET lasers are being developed to be driven by a logic voltage signal, further lowering power requirements and increasing efficiency.

OT Photoreceivers

As photoreceivers, OTs have high sensitivity, are self-contained and do not require trans impedence amplifiers, which convert current to voltage to produce usable outputs. Incident light of adequate intensity will produce a direct electrical logic signal. Semiconductor optical amplification provides signal gain and the OT provides the thresholding function. All optical OT structures can be made selectively as transmitters or photoreceivers, further adding to POET integrated circuit flexibility. The in-plane emission feature of POET allows easy connection to on-chip passive waveguides. This waveguide technology design features enlarged waveguide apertures to facilitate ease of coupling to single mode fibers with low device insertion loss. This feature is also part of POET’s low-cost multiple fiber attachment technology via waveguides. We are developing a packaging technology that we anticipate will match this horizontal input/output coupling in order to further maintain the cost-effective approach.

OT Electrical Applications

The POET OT is being developed to also act as an electronic device in memory, digital logic and millimeter-wave oscillator applications. OTs can form single-device static random-access memory cells and can be designed for bistable logic uses. An OT with an optical cavity forms a low-noise voltage controlled oscillator. The ability for OTs to act as comparators is important for high speed analog-to-digital converter designs. The POET platform is targeted to enable manufacturers to develop the internal components required within their product offerings (e.g., handhelds and laptops) to be more reliable, operate faster, and operate for longer periods of time.

The best information we have to identify why companies would want to see the 50GHz laser performance is because what the total package looks like and the link below describes the data center application.

http://www.poet-technologies.com/docs/Optical-Interconntion-of-High-Speed-Circuits.pdf