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Thanks so much for that, Oz.
Below is all of the Agm transcribed to date:
(22:27) “In the process we’ve established a manufacturing and development agreement with SilTerra. SilTerra a is a pure-play foundry based in Malaysia. We’ve transitioned our dielectric waveguide development from a university lab—which was the University of Swansea in England—to Silterra, it was done both to complete our development in a manufacturing environment on eight-inch wafers, as opposed to smaller wafer sizes that we were working with, but also to provide a seamless ramp to high volume manufacturing.”
(24:40) “With Accelink, they are our lead customer and also a development partner in the sense that we are able to provide prototypes and get feedback on their performance as it relates to market applications that we’re going after. Our first products would be 100/400G receive optical engines. Subsequent products would be an extrapolation of that interposer capability from receive to also include the transmit chain as well as an expansion of our portfolio to telecom applications like GPON—the next generation GPON, so it’s 10G (downstream) 2.5G (upstream) combination solution. Early prototypes, to validate the functionality of our interposers, will be in Q3 of this year, with production ready prototypes delivered to the customer by the end of the year. We would expect production revenues associated with this product.”
(34:21) “The concept of an interposer has been around for a while, in the electrical world interposers are in production since about 2015. It was initially invented for close proximity placements of electrical components. So as the data speeds and frequencies have gotten faster it is very difficult to place let’s say a memory die/chip and logic die/chip on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB), because the spacing in a PCB is in orders of millimeters to a centimeter and that is typically to large to support high-frequency operations. So the concept of an electrical interposer was invented, a practice that most semiconductor foundries master today, that allows very close proximity placements of two electrical dies/chips to promote high-speed communications.”
(35:34) “What we have done with the optical interposer is we have taken the concept of a electrical interposer and provided a level of an optical interconnectivity to it using our waveguide technology. And the key piece of our waveguides technology is the compatibility with CMOS so that you can actually build a CMOS chip and then post completion of this CMOS process we are able to depose waveguides on top of the chip without affecting the underlaying CMOS. So we are able to build a interposer with pre-built copper metallization required for interconnectivity and then depose the waveguides on top of that, that allows for both an electrical interconnectivity and optical interconnectivity to occur. So we have now the ability to communicate optically between the optical components on the interposer and we communicate electrically through the electrical connections underneath it. And it is really the first practical application that we know of with the Dielectric Waveguides technology because we have deposed this Dielectrics in a way that is compatible with the underlaying metallization and underlaying CMOS.”
(37:00) "So that is in essence what a interposer is, the interposer platform in it self can be targeted for multiple applications. If the filters on the interposer are let’s say CWDM for wavelength-division multiplexing applications (WDM) then that becomes CWDM interposer, if we design does filters for a different (data com) protocol like LR4 then it becomes a LR4 interposer, etc., etc. So the interposer, once the mechanics of depositing, patterning, designing waveguides are figured out then you can spin-off variants of this interposers for different applications.
Active devices are then done separately and the key piece of this optical interposers are, because you have separated out the interposer from the active die, we can engineer them separately and assembly what we call « known good die » it allows us to lower the cost of photonics packeting quite dramatically."
(38:00) "So the next slide 15 shows what an interposer multi-chip modules may look like. It has metallization at the bottom, it got waveguides on top and then we would place our active die - flip chip or upside-down - on to that interposer and we would have build into interposer the appropriate mechanical stops, such that when a die is placed on the interposer the optical access of the die that we are placing aligns it self with the optical access of the waveguides that are on the interposer. And that is the key it allows us to place in a passive way the components/dies onto the interposer and communicate optically between this dies without requiring active alignments or individual handling of this components/dies. So you can assemble them on wafer scale using conventional pick & place tools and we can hermetically seal them at wafer scale as well and it dramatically lowers the cost of the end solution that utilizing this interposer."
"A critical piece of this is the deposition process that is proprietary that we have worked to develop over the last year and half which needs to be extremely low loss, so that is the optical loss as you go to the waveguide has to be very low. As a benchmark silicon photonics that uses silicon waveguides typically have let’s say an optical loss - it is measured in decibels - that is 2 decibels per centimeter length let’s say of the waveguide, we have been able to improve that by order of magnitude so we now have demonstrated that we are at 2 tenth dB/cm, so very very low loss waveguides. It also needs to have very low stress, so if you typically deposit material on a silicon wafer and if the stress of that material is very high then you typically get bowing, warping or chipping of the wafer, so a critical piece in any deposit process is to insure that it can be deposit with very low stress.And it has to be low temperature so that is a unique combination of low loss, low stress and low temperature kind what makes the ability for us to make this interposer in a CMOS compatible manner and make it versatile in it application space. A other key thing with our dielectric waveguides is that it is transparent from the visible (300nm) to about the 2000 nm range. So we can apply it to what we are doing right now what is called at the O band spectrum of light which is around 1310 nm which is what we using for our data communication products, but it is equal applicable to the C band & L band which is 1550nm & 1650nm, it is also applicable down at 850nm & 900nm and then below that into the visible spectrum."
(41:25) “The versatility and flexibility of the platform really comes into play when we talk about expanding the portfolio of our products from a specific wavelength band that we are focused on today to alternate wavelength bands that we will work on in the future. And to a certain extent that is a critical piece of why customers are excited about working with us on the interposer, because when they look at their portfolio of products, it’s not just one type of product at one wavelength, telecom uses multiple wavelengths and the ability for this interposer to be used as a more pervasive packaging approach is quite appealing. In each application that we’ve looked at we can provide the kind of cost savings that we’ve talked about in the datacom products as well.”
(44:00) [talking about slide 16] “This is an example of how the interposer would be used in the context of a laser assembly—this is actually a product that we’re working on now for another customer on the transmit side.”
(45:30) “We passively place these lasers onto the interposer—there’s no active alignment—so when we sell a module with four to twelve lasers on it and provide it to the customer they don’t need to now actively align twelve lasers or four lasers, it’s all pre-aligned for them, and it makes it easy for them to apply it in to their applications. So completely separate from the receive optical engines that we’ve been talking about over the past couple of quarters, this is another product application that we’re working with for another customer, also in the datacentre applications, utilizing the concepts of the interposer."
(46:15) “The opportunities for us to make a dramatic difference in the way photonics chips are used and packaged is there and our discussions with every customer we’ve had over the past couple of quarters has borne out the fact that the strategy we put in place a year ago and that we’ve been executing on is in fact the right one. The market opportunities are very large: eight billion dollar plus growth opportunity over the next two to three years. A couple of these products with a couple of customers could drive a revenue opportunity for us north of seventy-five million dollars.”
(47:00) “It is incumbent on us, of course, to deliver the capabilities of the platform to the promise we know we can deliver--finish its qualification--but we are in a unique position right now with having promoted this platform to have the kinds of reception we’re having with customers and it’s also been encouraging that different customers have come up with slightly different applications of the interposer and so we know we’re solving problems for them using this approach and using this capability. So it’s been exciting that the strategy that we set forward is gaining momentum and traction in the market. We’ve been able to have three, what we consider, critical agreements in place over the course of the past couple of quarters with companies and partners that have the heft and the capability to take this into high-volume production for us.”
(48:05) “The interposer does allow and enable the capability for electronic die, ASICs in this case, to coexist with optics. There are some slides that we took snapshots of at the OFC conference, that were presented by either Microsoft or Arista Networks, talking about the need for interposer connectivity so that we can bring the optics from outside of the server chassis to eventually onto the ASIC itself. And, of course, with the concept of the interposer and its known-good-die assembly capabilities, we believe that there is a path to being able to provide this capability as we get up in frequency beyond 400Gb/s. So it is a road-map play in terms of the platform--It’s not a one-and-done--you get a product, once that platform is done it has legs because the platform, in and by itself, is speed agnostic. The active die can go up in frequency but the platform itself is speed agnostic, and hence the term versatile, and hence the term flexible, when we talk about the potential capabilities that the platform can offer.”
(49:30) “To recap then, the key differentiators, we believe, is: using dielectric waveguides to essentially create a solid-state, multi-chip module for photonics; eliminating the need for active alignment; doing the packaging at wafer-scale rather than at a module-scale or a die-scale; it’s a system architecture that allows for optimization of power and performance; it’s a fairly small form-factor that can be placed onto a PCB (printed circuit board); the cost doesn’t scale with the number of channels, so we make a four channel device, or eight channel, or sixteen channel, the cost of the interposer doesn’t scale linearly--where as if you did it using more conventional means, as you add more channels your cost goes up linearly--so that allows for flexibility.”