POET Technologies enters AI market

TORONTO — POET Technologies Inc., the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center and tele-communication markets, announced on Jan. 6 that it has entered into development and supply agreements for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

The chipset market for AI applications is projected to grow from approximately $18 billion in 2020 to over $65 billion by 2025. POET’s development and supply agreement for photonic AI computing represents an entry point into the AI market. POET’s customer for these applications is breaking the digital semiconductor mold by integrating photonics into accelerators for AI workloads, enabling step-change advancements in AI computation. Harnessing light to perform data-parallel calculations is faster, more power efficient, and lower cost than in traditional semiconductors. Photonic computing changes the game in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

“Photonics has been readied for optical computing as a result of over a decade of advancements in photonics design and fabrication driven by telecommunications and data communication and promises to be the technology to usher in the next era of rapid growth for AI computing,” commented Suresh Venkatesan, the Company’s Chairman & CEO. “POET is now well positioned to participate meaningfully for a new class of high-volume, high-growth applications, expanding the addressable markets for our Optical Engines and Optical Interposer platform products. In addition to highlighting the tremendous adaptability of the POET Optical Interposer platform, this project is anticipated to result in revenue for POET this year in the form of NRE and potentially initial product sales.”