Thanks Rogue

Host: What exactly is an optical interposer and how is it different?

Great question…Through a variety of different exercises I've been trying to simplify the message as to what it actually means or what it does, so let me see if I can play this out to the audience here. An interposer is anything that interposes between two mediums, so it is basically a means of communication, hence the word interposer. There is a term called interposer that is very very widely used in the semiconductor industry. It's been in production since about 2015 and that's the electrical interposer.

My Comment: It was January 2018 that the POET Optical Interposer was announced. In March 2018 D-Wave (quantum  computing) presented at The Empire Club in Toronto. It was attended by Suresh, Tom and Don Listwin (who is a director at D-Wave) Myself, Tombot and Ms Tombot also attended that event and we had an opportunity to speak with Suresh and Tom. Suresh was more excited than I had ever seen him and he was eager to explain the breakthrough for us.The Optical Interposer allowed for very very close connections of both optics and electronics in a design that Suresh was sure would be very well received by Industry leaders. It is what industry needed. I remember asking him if these companies would welcome them because of who he was. And he was quick to say that it was the technology that would open the doors for them. It was a solution that was badly needed. 

So for me it was interesting to see the ranking of importance stated in today's presentation:

form factor, cost, architecture and then economies of scale associated with the way we do our integration.

So again we look at how Suresh took a filtering technology and adapted to the new approach that was being used (2015) in advanced electronic applications.The closer the connections the higher the data throughput can be achieved and of course the lower the energy consumed.