It appears that Rockley will be spending some of their new found dollars in Cork Ireland.

http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-news/rockley-to-open-irish-photonics-rd-centre/171456/

After going through some of the Rockley patents I have come to the conclusion that these companies at this stage offer very different solutions. Rockley’s strength is in their optical switch and the ability to modulate optical signals from inside the ASIC.

Specifically designed for data center routing, Rockley Photonics' single-chip L3 routing switch is the world’s first ASIC to directly integrate 100G network ports using single-mode fiber, supporting a 100X improvement in interconnect reach.

Some nice wordsmithing.

They are connecting optical fibers directly to the ASIC thereby replacing copper so yes that would in fact be a 100X improvement in distance over copper.

So I ask this question?

Where is the laser? The detector? MUX/DEMUX? Clearly they are modulating light from the ASIC but what is the source.

It is an assembly using fiber optics to couple the ASIC to the SiP.

So we are talking about very different approaches and different parts of the problem.

POET of course is currently focused on building optical engines for the QSFP transceiver which is the immediate market that needs addressing right now.

If we are talking about on board optics POET offers a PIC connection right at the edge of the silicon through the dielectric optical interposer. It is thought that initially they will just use the electrical connections to drive the PIC to allow the material sets to be optimized separately. But we don’t know where POET will take this as any optical capability should be utilized on the ASIC (or other silicon…DSP) if it can reduce the power budget while meeting performance objectives.  

In other words both POET and Rockley could (may) have very strong synergies in the combined technologies for on-board optics utilizing POETs optical interposer with MUX/DEMUX integrated PIC to couple Rockley’s ASIC.

POET

As the need for higher data transfer speeds at greater baud rates and lower power levels increase, optics will move increasingly closer to the source of the data, whether it be a processor, application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or field programmable gate array (FPGA). Poet's Optical interposer platform enables an optoelectronic interconnect fabric to interface directly with the source of data to support high-speed optical data transfer from within the multichip module (MCM).

The one conclusion that I would make is that POET represents an immediate need for industry with the roll out of optical engines for the QSFP form factor (outside the box) transceivers for 100G, 400G and further in the future 800G.

And of course sensing applications.

But it would not be surprising if work is taking place simultaneously for on-board optics (OBO) applications which is what Rockley appears to be focused on.