POET Technologies Joins New Center for Photonics I
Post# of 1140
POET Technologies Joins New Center for Photonics Integration as Founding Member (yahoo.com)
The Video.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi1RaXly4Ck
More Info thanks to InThisThinRain on Agoracom
"First: just a quick glance at the industry partners of shine:
POET Technologies (223 million USD market cap), Advanced Micro Foundry (151 billion market cap), Applied Materials (103 billion market cap), Cadence Design Systems (43 billion market cap), Continental Automotive (14 billion USD market cap), Soitec (6 billion USD market cap)
Good company to be and grow in.
POET Technologies Is a Founding Partner of the SHINE Center in Singapore
Adrian Brijbassi: POET Technologies is lighting the way in the hybrid integration of silicon photonics, so it makes sense that the company would be part of a center called SHINE. The acronym stands for Singapore Hybrid Integrated Next-generation micro-Electronics, and it will officially open in June. POET has recently announced it will join the innovative new facility, located at the National University of Singapore. Here to discuss the importance of this project for POET and its commercialization plans is the company’s CEO, Dr. Suresh Venkatesan. Suresh, thanks for joining us from Singapore. How does it feel to be there as SHINE is starting to pick up?
Suresh Venkatesan: Yeah, it’s been great. I do try to make it a point to be here often. My association with Singapore pre-dates POET; I started working with—at that time—Chartered Semiconductors back in the late ‘90s, so I’ve had an association with Singapore for over twenty years, through Motorola, Chartered (Semiconductors), GlobalFoundries, DenseLight, right? I’ve known professor Aaron Thean for years—he used to be at Motorola as well—and has worked for me and with me in various capacities over time. So about a few years ago, when we started this technology activity with our optical interposer, and we hatched this whole concept around ideas of hybrid integration, he (Aaron Thean) really bought into that vision and he’s been able to get the grants and the funding from the government here, and pull in other influential industry participants, like Applied Materials, Soitec, and others, who are keen on various forms of hybrid integration—not just photonics, but also for power electronics and other high-power capabilities that some of the industry partners are interested in. But as a consequence of us plotting the path to creating such a center, we’ve been able to access NUS’s capabilities to do a lot of the work that we’re doing on the optical interposer. In fact, a lot of our alpha samples, in one waveform or another, found its way through the university’s labs as well. Of course, for beta and production we will be in more of a production environment, but the labs have given us an ability to create prototypes with a faster turnaround than us trying to do it ourselves. Critical assembly equipment, that we use for our optical engine assembly, especially with the passive flip-chip placement of devices, we now have the capability through NUS to do that assembly here in Singapore [On screen note: “A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and DSO National Laboratories (DSO) will be active research participants at SHINE.] which really compliments what’s happening at (POET-SANAN joint venture) Super Photonics. So we’re now in a position to do things, potentially, different than what Super Photonics is doing especially as it relates to new products around remote lasers to artificial intelligence applications, etc. We expect a lot of that activity to happen here in Singapore, while Super Photonics is really focused on the 100, 200, 400G (transceiver) product family. So NUS and the SHINE Center has enabled us to have that capability. The other thing that it has done for us is obviously our labs here are primarily characterization and testing facilities. We don’t have in POET Singapore, in our offices, the ability to put some of our back-grinding or dicing equipment, as well as some failure analysis equipment, so the labs (at SHINE) allow us to house our equipment in a clean room facility there as part of the center. It’s been a terrific opportunity for us to expand our footprint in Singapore without expanding our budget (laughs). So it’s been terrific from that perspective.
AB: That’s always a benefit. For the sake of the viewers, Super Photonics is the joint venture in Xiamen, China, that will be assembling a lot of the interposer products.
We know what SHINE can do for POET, but what is it about POET, Suresh, that you think the government of Singapore, at the National University, see is the great value that, POET, your company is bringing?
SV: There are two trends in the micro-electronic or semiconductor space. One is the push to smaller and smaller nodes: 10nm, 8nm, 7, 5, and so on. And that train is going to continue with the likes of TSMC, Intel, and Samsung—fundamentally three companies pushing that envelope. But for a lot of the applications, including photonics computing, quantum computing, etc., it’s fairly clear that standard silicon scaling is really not going to get there, and silicon needs to be augmented with new capabilities. So that’s where this whole hybrid integration concept comes about. I started the word hybrid integration and started talking about it publically three years ago. But now it’s used by a lot of people. When I say hybrid integration, now, it is very clear what we mean. First, with the interposer, we have the ability to integrate different material systems on a common base. There are many ways to do that. The same applies to non-photonics devices. What they get (SHINE partners, NUS, the Singapore government) is the capabilities of the interposer to further science. What we get is the capability to do what we need to do in the near-term and mid-term to further our presence in Singapore, and to further our commercialization activity around the optical interposer. We also get more visibility; there are six companies now that are part of the center [slide: POET Technologies (223 million USD market cap), Advanced Micro Foundry (151 billion market cap), Applied Materials (103 billion market cap), Cadence Design Systems (43 billion market cap), Continental automotive (14 billion USD market cap), Soitec (6 billion USD market cap)] or are going to be joining the center that are going to be interested in gene sequencing [first reference to this in POET history?], and so there are likely to be expanding opportunities for collaboration down different market verticals, different than just pure data communications that we’re focused on today.
7:21 [ slide: James Lee, POET Technologies VP & GM of Singapore Operations]
AB: Tell us a little bit about shine. I understand you played an integral role in getting that set up.
JL: Yeah. I think SHINE is actually a center that was proposed by NUS (National University of Singapore), where they bring in industry collaborators to move hybrid integration [note at bottom of screen: (James Lee) spent 19 years at GlobalFoundries developing leading-edge CMOS tech. Credit with 60+ patents. Expert in defining logic roadmaps]. Being part of this is a wonderful opportunity for us, to put POET on the roadmap across the world, here in Singapore. In Singapore we are at the crossroads between the East and the West. We have a good spread of talent across many different regions. As we interact with the rest of the industries, and the university, we have an opportunity to bring a great awareness to what we do over here at POET.
AB: Just going back to the origins of that term, hybrid integration, you’re right, about three years ago I remember doing a Google search on hybrid integration when you first used the term and it was like (unclear. Looking for water?) in the desert. Now, all of a sudden, like you said, it’s everywhere. Do you take some credit for that? Or is just everyone in the industry looking for a way to get smaller and faster?
SV: (Laughs) I’ll take credit. To me it’s a vision thing. I felt it was important for us to take a path in that direction because there are a lot of companies doing regular integration with silicon photonics and others. When I decided which direction we needed to take POET, back in 2017 or ’18, I felt we needed to do something different, that we believed could be important for the industry. And also something that we, as a small company, could digest and deliver. From that perspective, I go back to the OFC where we delivered a 400G FR4 receiver, which is a multiplexed receiver, honestly we’re one of the few companies to do an integrated form factor of such a receiver in the world. People have been doing research in silicon photonics for twenty years. We were at it for about three years, and we were able to deliver a 400G FR4 engine, which is a multiplexed engine, in the form factor, sooner and faster than anyone else with 1/100th the budget of some of the companies. Not to try to boast about it, really what that means is the innate simplicity of what we’re trying to do is logical, it’s simple, but yet quite innovative and differentiated. That combination started to resonate with a lot of people when we met them at the OFC. From that perspective it was personally rewarding to me, but more importantly people believed that this kind of a path of hybrid integration, and then moving forward along this trajectory, could be a path to getting to the end applications that matter to the world.
Thanks to InThisThinRain on Agoracom