I do have some questions but I do not have answers because I'm not an engineer:
- Can Intel's solution operate at temperatures 0-70°C like POET?
- What will it cost? POET's solutions are 10-40% lower cost.
- Is Intel's solution as small as POET's?
- Is Intel's solution as power efficient as POET? These ring resonators consume additional power?
- Can Intel make these products at wafer scale like POET? They do talk about manufacturing in high-volume. But a while back Fairchijisback wrote: "Furthermore, old CMOS processes do not have enough lithography precision for building high quality ring-resonators with good coupling and relative resonant wavelength control required for dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) applications, and consequently transmitters use Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) which are much less area and energy efficient."
- POET's solution is fully compatible with conventional CMOS processing allowing integration with complex electronics at chip or module level. Can Intel integrate micro-optics at wafer scale like POET?"
- Is the output comparable?
- Intel: "delivers excellent output power uniformity of +/- 0.25 decibel (dB) and wavelength spacing uniformity of ±6.5% that exceed industry specifications"
- POET: "can support a wide range of output power from 15mW to 60mW depending on the application. In all cases, LightBar incorporates POET’s proprietary designs and assembly features that deliver an industry-leading laser coupling efficiency of >80% (power loss = <1.0dB), while maintaining wafer-scale integration capability. These results are significantly better than the best results observed with competing integrated approaches."
- Intel made a solution with 8 channels. The LightBar-C utilizes a versatile and integrated laser source with up to 8 multiple wavelengths, multiplexed in the C-band. And for the O-band, POET talked about up to 12. Thoughts on this channel count?
- What about the ring resonator multiplexing? Something for POET?