POET Technologies Inc of San Jose, CA, USA — which has developed the proprietary planar optoelectronic technology (POET) platform for monolithic fabrication of integrated III-V-based electronic and optical devices on a single semiconductor wafer — says it has achieved a milestone in its lab-to-fab transition with a manufacturing services agreement with Taiwan-based gallium arsenide (GaAs) foundry Wavetek Microelectronics Corp, a member of the New Business Group of silicon wafer foundry United Microelectronics Corp (UMC), and located at UMC Fab 6A in Hsinchu Science Park).
The POET platform transfer and manufacturing agreement with Wavetek (established in 2010 as Hsinchu Science Park's first 6-inch GaAs foundry) is an acceleration of POET's ultimate objective of working with a pure-play foundry offering a wide range of dedicated, flexible and competitive foundry services.
POET says it is encouraged by the promising initial results of its wafers sourced from its epitaxial wafer partners processed in the Wavetek facility using POET's proprietary technology, which has recently been transferred under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between POET and Wavetek. The agreement addresses all current manufacturing requirements — including vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) — in POET's ongoing commercialization initiative. A previously announced subsisting manufacturing services agreement was limited to prototype demonstration of VCSELs.
"Its manufacturing capabilities provide POET the foundry services we need to meet the high-volume and cost requirements that are critical to our success in delivering low-cost monolithically integrated optoelectronic transceivers," comments POET's chief operations officer Dr Subhash Deshmukh about Wavetek.
