Dr. Suresh Venkatesan reports

POET APPOINTS GHAZI CHAOUI, PHD, AS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT - GLOBAL MANUFACTURING AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Poet Technologies Inc. has appointed Ghazi M. Chaoui, PhD, MBA, as its senior vice-president of global manufacturing and digital transformation. Dr. Chaoui recently concluded a multiyear assignment as chief procurement officer of Coherent Corp.

An industry veteran of nearly 40 years, Dr. Chaoui (widely known as Ghazi) brings his considerable experience and stellar reputation to Poet as it gears up manufacturing in Penang, Malaysia, where he will be stationed, reporting to Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Poet's chairman and chief executive officer. Ghazi will plan, direct, co-ordinate and oversee all operations tied to order fulfilment, and ensure the development and implementation of efficient operations and cost-effective systems to meet the high demand for 800 G and 1.6 T transceivers needed by hyperscalers and artificial intelligence cluster operators. Sundar Natarajan Yoganandan, Poet's director of external manufacturing and NPI, also a resident of Malaysia, will report directly to Dr. Chaoui.

"We are thrilled to welcome Ghazi to the Poet team," said Dr. Venkatesan. "Our relationship with Globetronics in Malaysia is off to a strong start, with a suite of wafer-level assembly and test equipment installed and operational. With full production capacity expected to be on line this quarter, this is the ideal time for Ghazi and Sundar to staff an organization in Penang and establish the systems we need to ensure delivery of optical engines to customers. We have established Poet Technologies Sdn Bhd as a wholly owned subsidiary and have begun resourcing it accordingly."

Dr. Chaoui holds PhD and MS degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering and an MBA. He began his career as a research and development lead designer and manager with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Microelectronics in Reading, Pa. Over the next 40 years, Dr. Chaoui held key manufacturing and supply chain roles in several countries with Lucent Technologies, Corvis Corp./Broadwin Communications, Infinera, Oclaro, Teraxion, Kaiam Corp. and Macom Technology Solutions Holdings.

"I am pleased to be joining Poet at this time to help build a great company in photonics and optoelectronics, serving many customers that I know well and interacting with many suppliers with whom I have strong relationships," said Dr. Chaoui. "By semiconductorizing optical engine assembly, I am confident we can supply high performance optical engines at high volumes on time to customers."

About Poet Technologies Inc.

Poet is a design and development company offering high-speed optical modules, optical engines and light-source products to the artificial intelligence system market and to hyperscale data centres. Poet's photonic integration solutions are based on the Poet Optical Interposer, a novel, patented platform that allows the seamless integration of electronic and photonic devices into a single chip using advanced wafer-level semiconductor manufacturing techniques. Poet's Optical Interposer-based products are lower cost, consume less power than comparable products, are smaller in size and are readily scalable to high production volumes. In addition to providing high-speed (800 G, 1.6 T and above) optical engines and optical modules for artificial intelligence clusters and hyperscale data centres, Poet has designed and produced novel light-source products for chip-to-chip data communication within and between AI servers, the next frontier for solving bandwidth and latency problems in AI systems. Poet's Optical Interposer platform also solves device integration challenges in 5G networks, machine-to-machine communication, self-contained Edge computing applications and sensing applications, such as lidar systems for autonomous vehicles. Poet is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with operations in Allentown, Pa., Shenzhen, China, and Singapore.

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