I believe the following presentation points to an implementation of the POET LightBar solution which was disclosed by POET on Dec 8, 2020 and is expected to be commercially available in 2022 (as I recall). The timing appears to be in sync with Broadcom’s developments. Below is the text transcribed from Alexis Bjorlin’s (Broadcom SVP & GM, Optical Systems) presentation at the following JP Morgan event. As a reminder Alexis’s is on the Celestial AI board where David Lazovsky is CEO and Vivek the technical advisor for Electro-Optical Packaging. A very obvious connection to the referenced development partner identified in POET’s Corporate Presentation for AI and Edge Compute.

I am sure that many who are familiar with POET’s stated metrics and capabilities will recognize the close similarities to what Broadcom is developing as per Alexis’s presentation.

J.P. Morgan 19th Annual Tech/Auto Forum January 12, 2021

https://investors.broadcom.com/static-files/c5414657-07e3-423f-afec-315135a9cb53

Alexis Bjorlin silicon photonics Broadcom

The Optical Interconnect. Power consumption and cost differential of the optical interconnect. It's increasingly an increasing percentage of spend, processing and storing data. One additional data point today, only 4% of the IT spending is on the public cloud. As this percentage grows, the hyperscale cloud operators need to invest even more time and talent, maximizing each unit of compute efficiency. Inevitably furthering this disaggregation and increasing the requirements that are being placed on high performance fabrics. So indeed, the connectivity fabric is growing. It's increasingly of increasing percentage of spend and power consumption in the data center. So, crucially, this all requires power effective and cost effective optical interconnects. Moving on to slide 26. I'm gonna bring you back to Ram’s (Ram Velaga SVP & GM, Switch Products) image that he showed early earlier today of what a traditional switch system looks like. A pizza box with the networking switch, silicon and the discrete pluggable optics. In these systems today, optical interconnects already consumed 50% of the power in the network. And on the dollar per gigabyte basis cloud service providers already spent ten times more on optical bandwidth than they spend on the switch ASIC bandwidth. Without a breakthrough in the technologies that are being used and a profound change in the architecture of the system, we expect the upward trend in power consumption and in the cost differential of the optical interconnect to only continue. In the past, optics were thought of merely as the plumbing connecting everything altogether. But now, with the constraints on power and increasing bandwidth and performance requirements the optical interconnect has become central to the data center design. Our customers are telling us that it's not only driving their networking CAPEX, but it's actually a central and key factor in the design choices of the next generation data center architectures. So the main point here is the traditional system architectures where we have switched systems with pluggable optics can't keep up with the exponential growth in bandwidth required within the constraints of power and cost. A true step function is needed. The time has come to reinvent the architecture of the network platform or the system itself. What our customers need and what Broadcom is uniquely positioned to deliver is a comprehensive engineering solution from the switch silicon all the way through to the fiber connectivity to prevent optical connectivity from limiting efficient and performance bandwidth and compute scale out. Broadcom’s solution is to integrate this optical functionality onto the switch itself, delivering a photonic integrated switch all in silicon. This is a super large opportunity for Broadcom, increasing the silicon content of the switch system by tenfold. So yeah, into the 10s of thousands of dollars and at the same time offering tremendous value proposition for our customers in terms of performance and cost breakthroughs. So as you'll see on the next slide 27, I'll walk you through what Broadcom's doing in this space. So Broadcom is unmatched in our capabilities and technologies to achieve this. We’ve been investing in leadership networking, signal processing, and optical capabilities for over 3 decades. On this slide, you'll see five key pillars that are required to re architect the network platform. And Broadcom has demonstrated leadership capabilities over the first four pillars already.

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My comment as per slide 27: 

The 4 pillars they have are:

1) Switch Silicon… Core switch, SerDes and DSP in leading node • Sustained generational differentiation 

2) Mixed Signal IC… Power and performance optimized in both SiGe and CMOS

3) Optical Devices and Fabs... 50M lasers/year from internal fabs, High-volume optical manufacturing, High-power, multi-wavelength sources

4) Advanced Packaging and Test… Wafer-level test, TSV,  2.5D/3D integration 

The fifth pillar which they do not have leadership capability in:

5) Silicon Photonics… High-density PIC design, Modulators and PDs in silicon, Low-loss SOI waveguides

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So you're already aware from Ram’s talk of Broadcom's exceptional networking switch ASIC, competencies, including leadership, SerDes and DSP. But we are integrating these capabilities with our 30 year heritage in mixed signal IC. Lasers and fabs. And advanced semiconductor manufacturing and test. With all of these, we have the foundation to deliver a disruptive solution. But until now, a critical element to create the solution was missing. The photonic integrated circuit or Silicon Photonics. Well, you all are aware that the electronics industry has evolved from discrete transistors to highly integrated IC's over the past 50 years. But silicon based photonic IC's are still in their relative infancy. They only have a couple years of production under their belt. Today we're introducing Broadcom's first integrated silicon photonics solution. We start with our market leading switch. And we extend the switch capability to incorporate optical IO directly on the switch substrate. Breaking the traditional segmentation and paradigms of system design. As Ram said it's all part of the simplification of the system to enable the broader ecosystem. This will enable industry-leading economics, volume and power efficiency of scale. So moving on to the next slide, we're excited to share with you what our Silicon Photonics looks like. We have designed just as Rama said with the switch silicon a purpose built silicon photonics platform specifically driven for integration. It brings all the discrete elements of the ecosystem together onto a single silicon package with a unified architecture. There are 3 critical capabilities. One, as a massively parallel optical processing on a single chip. Two, it has high density packaging capabilities with other silicon and electrical components, and three; it enables this profound shift in how the network platform and systems are designed and segmented. So unlike many of the early silicon photonics entrance, who focused on optical transceivers and discrete elements, our purpose built silicon photonics solution has been designed from grounds up with breakthrough technology to enable seamless integration of optical IO with ASIC’s on a single standard industry package. Its focus on very high density photonic IC's that are integrated directly on substrate with Broadcom's other market leading networking elements, the switch, the DSPS, and of course our lasers. Now I'm going to jump into a little bit of technical content on the key components that are in the silicon photonics platform itself before moving back out to the system level view. So in this, in this design we've addressed power, most importantly (Emphasis on power), we've engineered a system that directly drives the photonics from the switch SerDes or from the edge of the switch itself. What this does is it eliminates all of the system retimers found in today's switch systems and in optical transceivers themselves. As well as the high cost PCB's that are required to route the high speed high speed signals to the front of the panel and the switch box, this allows us to achieve an electrical interconnect power of less than one Pico joules per bit. A significant improvement over today's designs. And we've developed a thermal management system that can handle the optics and the ASIC in a single package operating under a single heat sink. This of course also addressed density as Ram’s talking about 512 lanes of SerDes. We have to match that with the optical capability. So we do this by shrinking the optics to match the switch IO. Offering the industry's highest bandwidth density at 500 gigabits per second per millimeter of die edge and with 64 single mode fibers attached to a single die. 

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My comment: This is worth repeating...64 single mode fibers attached to a single die. 

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For comparison, today's transceivers enable roughly this bandwidth per 20 millimeters of optical module. 

Finally, we've addressed reliability and operational efficiency as a design priority. Utilizing remote laser sources with no electrical connectors to ease the deployment and field service ability of this new solution.

On slide 29, I'll outline the value we're providing with our integrated photonic switch platform. If you step back and recall the image I used showing today's switch systems made up of discrete components and high cost pluggable optical transceivers. What we're really doing in its simplest form is we're delivering our integrated silicon photonics platform by effectively pulling those 32 optical transceivers directly onto the switch substrate. To reiterate through integration we’re miniaturizing the system and eliminating the high cost PCBA (Printed Circuit Board Assembly) retimers and pluggable optics by adding all of this capability directly onto the same substrate as a switch. You can see this in the image to the left, where we're sharing a schematic of Tomahawk 4 ROMs, 25.6 on terabit switch with four connectorized optical silicon photonic tiles mounted on the same substrate as switch chip. On the right hand side, we're sharing a system level schematic of a tomahawk five system with full optical integration. 8 Co package, silicon photonic chiplets mounted onto an industry standard substrate. Both systems make use of the existing DSP or the SerDes in the switch chip to directly modulate the optical signals into and out of the chip. Simplifying the data signal path and making the most effective use of the silicon in the system. This is the next step in the evolution of semiconductor IO. 

Once again Broadcom is uniquely positioned to forge this new frontier by tapping into our market leading semiconductor capabilities and our current capabilities in high throughput switching advanced SerDes and DSP technologies, and of course, leveraging 30 years leadership and semiconductor and optical manufacturing and tests. I can't think of anyone else who has all of these capabilities and the ability to provide a disruptive new platform. The results are absolutely compelling. By reducing the power consumption of the system by 30% and improving rack density by 50%. And of course offering a cost advantage of up to 40%.Our customers will begin to view that interconnect, not as a pain point, but rather as an enabler to facilitate new network architectures, and continued growth in their services. So moving onto slide 30, you'll see how we are introducing our silicon photonics and phased approach. Integrating with a multitude of our products and expanding Broadcom Semiconductor Solutions franchise. Our first product is called Steven. And it integrates silicon photonics with our 800 gig five and his sampling later this year. In 2022, will be introducing our first optically integrated switch, Humboldt, Co packaging. The Tomahawk four with optical IO and followed soon thereafter by Bailey our 51T solution. Over the longer term, though, we really viewed silicon photonics as an expansion of our semiconductor platform and envision an optical ASIC capability. By integrating both with our own devices and in custom designs, we can enable the scale up and scale out, compute architectures alike Co-packaging to expand our capabilities into different markets. So in conclusion, I'll summarize the key points that we shared today. As the growth of data and pervasive cloud services continue, so does the increasing demand for data movement and fabric connectivity. Breakthroughs are required in optical connectivity technology today to keep up with the explosive demands on bandwidth and minimize the massive power footprint that's drawn from the fabric. Today we introduced Broadcom's purpose, built silicon photonics platform. The next generation of semiconductor IO. This, together with Broadcom's unmatched cadence and delivering leadership switch and routing silicon. Utilizing our SerDes and DSP leadership, our mixed signal technologies and our decades of leadership in lasers and mass volume semiconductor and optical manufacturing capabilities. We are uniquely positioned to deliver the disruptive new capability at scale. Finally, what does this all mean for Broadcom? We believe this means/equates to approximately a $3 billion SAM expansion through the introduction of integrated silicon photonics on our networking platform. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Hock.