Prestigious international annual awards program honors the POET Teralight line of high-performance optical engines
POET Technologies Inc. (“POET” or the “Company”) (TSX Venture: PTK; NASDAQ: POET), the designer and developer of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs), light sources and optical modules for the AI and data center markets, today announced that it has been selected as the winner of the “AI Hardware Innovation Award” in the 8th annual AI Breakthrough Awards. The awards program recognized POET Teralight™, the Company’s ultra-high-performance line of optical engines that power AI and hyperscale data-center connectivity. It is the second consecutive year that the AI Breakthrough Awards has recognized POET for its groundbreaking, commercially available technology. This is the sixth notable award the Company has won in the past 12 months.
POET Teralight™ features a highly integrated chip-scale design that is produced entirely at wafer level. The complete optical system-on-chip consists of a 1.6T transmit optical engine and a 1.6T receive optical engine, each approximately 12×12 mm in size. Without wire bonds, Teralight’s chip-scale architecture delivers unparalleled low signal-to-noise ratios and high energy efficiency. Unlike conventional design and development team efforts, with POET’s optical engines, a single design team can build both 1.6T DR8 and 2xFR4 pluggable modules using the identical board design and manufacturing process.
The Teralight transmit optical engine incorporates 2x200G EML lasers from Mitsubishi Electric, enabling a 1.6T engine with only four laser chips instead of the conventional 8-laser alternative. The transmit engines also include a DC-coupled EML driver that is flip-chip attached to the POET Optical Interposer™. The integrated high-speed electrical traces and optical waveguides on the optical interposer platform enable enhanced performance by minimizing crosstalk and maximizing coupling efficiency. Those features and the overall elegance of the optical interposer-based design were key factors that convinced AI Breakthrough’s jury of industry leaders to select Teralight as this year’s top AI Hardware Innovation.
“We introduced Teralight at the OFC Conference in April knowing it would create substantial customer interest because of the cost reduction and simplified module design. Our product demos have shown impressive results and have led to multiple new customer engagements. We are working with major companies to make Teralight an essential component in their transceiver module designs,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and CEO of POET. “This latest recognition by AI Breakthrough is an important validation of our technology and the innovations we continue to bring to the marketplace. Teralight’s elegant architecture makes it ready to accommodate future generations of compute devices, particularly those that drive AI connectivity.”
This year’s AI Breakthrough Awards program attracted more than 5,000 nominations from over 20 countries, underscoring the explosive growth and global importance of AI as a defining technology of the 21st century. POET’s recognition in such a crowded field punctuates the enormity of its victory in such a competitive category.
“I congratulate POET on being our pick for the ‘AI Hardware Innovation Award.’ Teralight puts POET at the forefront of optical-engine design and breaks through the crowded transceiver space because of its size, scalability, ease of adoption, functionality, value and performance,” said Steve Johansson, managing director, AI Breakthrough.
The AI Breakthrough Awards are conducted by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market. The awards shine a spotlight on the boldest innovators and most impactful technologies leading the charge in AI across a comprehensive set of categories, including Generative AI, Computer Vision, AIOps, Agentic AI, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, industry-specific AI applications and many more.