And see the February agreement with BFYY blog post by Poet.

Things are moving forward much faster than anticipated.

POET Technologies (poet-technologies.com)

FAQ: Inside the POET Technologies’ Agreement with BFYY

February 22nd, 2023

On February 22nd, POET Technologies announced an agreement that would see a new company, Beijing FeiYunYi Technology Ltd., or BFYY, purchase an initial 10,000 units. Those customized optical engine units will be developed for optical modules, which would be sampled to BFYY customers in the Chinese telecom industry.

The agreement represents a significant step in the commercialization process for POET Technologies and follows on earlier agreements in 2023 with ADVA and LuxshareTech.

Here is a closer look at the BFYY agreement.

1. What is the significance of BFYY’s formation?

BFYY was created because its principals have very strong existing business relationships with the major telecom companies in China and they see an opportunity to rapidly and boldly enter the market with solutions the industry needs. The BFYY management team has been selling networking equipment to operators of cellular towers for many years and saw a chance — in part because of the performance abilities of POET’s products — to capture a sizeable share of the Chinese telecom market for transceiver modules. It anticipates that because of the cost benefits of POET’s wafer-scale assembly and the single-chip solution it will be able to quickly ramp to high-volume production without the capital investment required for conventional module assembly.

2. What POET products are expected to be featured in BFYY’s optical modules?

POET has agreed to design a single-chip optical engine solution that incorporates complete transmit and receive functionalities for implementation in a 100G optical transceiver for BFYY’s initial product offering. The unique single-chip solution, called ”POET ONE”™, will offer significant performance advantages along with minimizing the transceiver design cycle time for BFYY.

The chip-on-board optical engines will be sold to BFYY, which will incorporate them in devices for its end customers. BFYY’s differentiated solution will result in lower power and cost than competing products. POET plans to send alpha samples and evaluation board samples to BFYY that show a complete optical solution for its modules.

3. What is the key differentiator of the POET product that BFYY will use?

Scalability is key. Devices built on the POET Optical Interposer™ platform are able to use photonics to meet the demand BFYY anticipates its products will command. The single-chip combination of transmit and receive functions that POET provides makes it far easier to scale than legacy solutions. Also, there is an approximately 40% cost savings in the single-chip design. In addition, there’s a reduction of assembly costs because of the POET Optical Interposer’s reduced bill of materials.

BFYY has electronic chips that can be flip-chipped on the board next to POET’s optical engines to achieve a simplified module design with improved performance.

4. What happens now that POET and BFYY have announced an agreement?

Alpha samples have been sent to BFYY and Beta samples are expected to be delivered by the end of June. A production release is currently scheduled for the second half of 2023.

BFYY will need up to six months to perform its reliability testing. Notably, POET has already performed rigorous reliability testing at its operating facilities in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Super Photonics, the joint venture with Sanan-IC that is located in Xiamen, China. The approximately 2,000 hours of testing proves the 100G CWDM4 product can withstand extreme temperatures, meets industry standards, and is scalable.