The multi-billion-dollar Data Communications market is a particular focus for POET. Data centers are enduring an excruciating pain point in terms of power. Energy Management costs are approaching 50-60% of the cost of operating a Data Center today. Each watt of heat that does not have to be rejected from the rack could be worth about $10 per month in operating costs for a data center. A single copper direct attach cable burns about 3W of power per end – so a total of 6W per cable. Lets take a single mega datacenter with 10000 servers and 100000 copper links. If you can save 5W of power per copper link used in this one Data Center, this could easily translate into 500,000W of saved energy or $50 million per year in saved operating expense. And that is for a single mega data center.

For data centers, power has become critically important. Historically, the way to solve power problems is integrating multiple components monolithically on a single chip — in short, what has driven silicon technology for years. Now the optics world is primed for a similar transition to integrated solutions. POET offers the only integrated platform with gallium arsenide and optics. Critically, POET uniquely attacks the cost equation at the component level, the wafer-scale-packaging level and at the wafer-scale-test level — which translates into an overall cost that becomes competitive with copper technology. This is the key to the performance of optics at the price of copper. Other ancillary benefits of optics are lower weight, higher flexibility, smaller size and less Electro-Magnetic Interference -- all of which are becoming significant pain points in high density installations.

http://poet-technologies.com/poet-platform.html