Mr. Vivek Rajgarhia reports

POET TECHNOLOGIES ANNOUNCES FIRST VOLUME PURCHASE ORDER FOR ITS OPTICAL ENGINES

The first volume production order for Poet Technologies Inc.'s optical engines has been placed with the company's 80-per-cent-owned joint venture company, Super Photonics Xiamen (SPX). Valued at more than $3-million (U.S.), 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 centre markets globally. This initial volume purchase order was placed against BFYY's three-year forecast of $30-million (U.S.) 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 centre service providers. The modules incorporate Poet Optical Interposer-based optical engines which are assembled with components tested and sold by Poet's 80-per-cent-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), chief executive officer 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 general manager 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.

About Poet Technologies Inc.

Poet Technologies is a design and development company offering integration solutions based on the Poet Optical Interposer, a novel platform that allows the seamless integration of electronic and photonic devices into a single multichip module using advanced wafer-level semiconductor manufacturing techniques and packaging methods. Poet's Optical Interposer eliminates costly components and labour-intensive assembly, alignment, burn-in and testing methods employed in conventional photonics. The cost-efficient integration scheme and scalability of the Poet Optical Interposer brings value to any device or system that integrates electronics and photonics, including some of the highest-growth areas of computing, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and high-speed networking for cloud service providers and data centres. Poet is headquartered in Toronto, with operations in Allentown, Pa., Shenzhen, China, and Singapore.

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