POET Technologies Inc.

POET’s thyristor is at the heart of POETs opto-electronic capabilities and performs numerous functions. I think Abel highlighted these functions for us the other day.

During the EC event held in April 2014 Geoff provides a really good example of the number of elements required to make an optical conversion using technologies available today and compares it to the POET optical thyristor used to perform the same operation.

Today to build the equivalent opto-electronic circuit in Geoff’s example requires numerous elements contained in an area of 700 microns by 200 microns = 1400 square microns.

The same conversion takes place in a POET thyristor which is 2 microns in diameter or 12.6 square microns.

Geoff was illustrating the experimentation taking place by industry to distribute an optical clock in an SOC. Interestingly his slide shows that existing chips use 40% of their energy requirements on the electronic distribution of the clock. His conclusion when illustrating all the elements required to be combined using existing technologies for optical distribution was that current industry efforts can’t succeed.

So this is a good example of the capabilities of the Optical Thyristor to simplify the opto-electonic conversions that POET technology will be applied to in numerous applications.This device is the heart of POET.

Go to time 20:00 on this clip for that overview:

http://www.vvcnetwork.ca/empireclub/20140428-taylor/

This is the description for the thyristor from the website.

Optical Thyristor

The OT is a central pivotal structure in 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.

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 a single stage implementing detection, gain , thresholding and level shifting. No longer required are trans impedance 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 with less power and thus longer battery cycles