POET Technologies Announces First Volume Purchase Order For Its Optical Engines

  Toronto, Ontario, May 11, 2023 -- POET Technologies Inc. (“POET” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ: POET | TSXV: PTK), the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer? and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) and light sources for the data center, tele-communication and artificial intelligence markets, today announced the first volume production order for its optical engines placed with the Company’s 80%-owned joint-venture company, Super Photonics Xiamen (“SPX”). Valued at more than US$3 million, the purchase order was placed by Beijing FeiYunYi Technology Ltd. (”BFYY”), which will produce optical transceiver modules using POET-designed optical engines for sale to telecom and data center markets globally. This initial volume purchase order was placed against BFYY’s 3-year forecast of US$30 million in expected optical engine purchases.

  With deep connections to the telecom industry in China, BFYY is investing heavily in transceiver module design and manufacturing to build, market and sell optical transceiver modules specifically focused on large telecom and data center service providers. The modules incorporate POET Optical Interposer-based optical engines which are assembled with components, tested and sold by POET’s 80%-owned JV company, SPX.

  "We are pleased to partner with POET and Super Photonics to utilize their unique optical engines in our transceivers,” said Wei Zhang (Wesley Zhang), CEO of BFYY. “POET and Super Photonics have demonstrated the superior performance and design of these optical engines. There is ongoing close collaboration among our engineering and manufacturing teams to complete the design and start production. Feedback from our customers is extremely positive and we want to quickly ramp to high-volume production to service the telecom market.”

  POET had previously announced POET ONE?, a single-chip optical engine solution incorporating complete transmit and receive functionalities for implementation in a 100G optical transceiver. The POET ONE optical engine offers significant performance advantages and minimizes the transceiver design cycle time for BFYY. In addition to the cost benefits of POET’s wafer-scale assembly, POET ONE will enable BFYY to speed the design and qualification cycle with customers and ramp to high-volume production and sales.

  “With this purchase order, POET and SPX have both achieved major commercial milestones for our optical engines and for the companies overall. A production order of this size validates the commercial viability of our optical engines and other POET Optical Interposer-based products that are specifically designed to be scalable in volume, cost, and power consumption, well ahead of current industry demands,” said Vivek Rajgarhia, President and GM of POET and Vice-Chairman of SPX. “Our fundamental differentiation in bringing wafer-scale die attach, passive optical assembly, and chip-scale manufacturing represents the true “semiconductorization” of photonics. Our partnerships with world-class component vendors, combined with the POET Optical Interposer platform, allows us to serve the needs of customers like BFYY in a highly competitive market with a truly differentiated technology.”

  POET and SPX expect to complete the design verification testing and reliability qualification of POET ONE by the fourth quarter of 2023 and then start production shipments to BFYY in early 2024.