A bit more context in the relationship with Dr Ben Chen. It goes back to Accelink. There has been a lot of work put into this.
Remember Dr Ben Chen. He was with Accelink when we signed a MOU with them In March 2018. He said this about Poet at the time.
https://poet-technologies.com/news/2018-mar-5.html
Dr. Ben Chen, Technical Director of the Datacom & Access Product Department at Accelink stated, “POET’s Optical Interposer platform is a step-change advancement compared to other approaches in gaining lower cost of integration and offering a superior method to scale-up to the higher data rates demanded by our customers. We look forward to working with POET to develop and qualify this technology. Upon successful qualification, we believe we will have an opportunity to gain rapid penetration into key customers and markets, based on both cost and performance advantages.”
Since Sept 2018 he is the chief technology officer for Hengtong Rockley a company we often wondered was a competitor or a possible partner for Poet.
https://www.mwcshanghai.com/speaker/dr-ben-chen/
Dr Ben Chen CTO Hengtong Rockley
https://optics.org/news/10/3/2
The deal, part of Rockley’s series E funding round, extends the partnership first signed in 2017, which saw the Shanghai-listed optical fiber and cable manufacturer lead a $42 million co-investment.
Hengtong and Rockley are now targeting what they describe as the “burgeoning” market for 400 Gb/s optical transceivers in data centers.
Transceiver focus
The Rockley-Hengtong joint venture, headquartered in Suzhou, aims to develop, manufacture, and sell 400G DR4 transceivers based around Rockley’s “LightDriver” optical engines.