Thanks CWDM, lots of discussion about Ayar and their connection to Intel and NVidea.  Definitely good company if there's something to an Ayar - Poet relationship

To your point "Customer H says "I/O system" -> could be Ayar Labs (Source, slide 18)"

Ayar's flagship product is their TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet which is intended to provide optical chip to chip connections:

"Ayar Labs is the first to deliver monolithic in-package optical I/O (OIO) chiplets, a new universal I/O solution that enables chips to communicate with each other from millimeter to kilometer-scale, at the power, latency, and bandwidth density of in-package interconnect. Several technology trends point to the arrival of OIO chiplets as a critical industry inflection point."

The solution relies on another product, their SuperNova multi-wavelength optical source and is advertised as a multi-wavelength, multi-port remote light source for advanced integrated optics applications.

One can see how a laser supplier would be integral to overall solution, is this where could POET fit in as well? Perhaps

Looking elsewhere, we see that the TeraPHY consists of a multi-chip package (MCP) and described as Embedded Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), Silicon-interposer, High-density fanout.  We've heard of interposers elsewhere, is it possible POET is developing an optical interposer based solution to provide additional capabilities or optimization of their current platform? Perhaps

Regardless of where POET is or could be involved, I'd be willing to bet we'll find out soon enough.

https://ayarlabs.com/teraphy/

https://ayarlabs.com/supernova/

https://20173286.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/20173286/Resource%20Files%20-%20August%202022/Site%20Downloads/Technical%20Papers/Optical_IO_Chiplets_Eliminate_Bottlenecks_to_Unleash_Innovation_2.0%2011-15-2019.pdf?hsCtaTracking=a86fcc45-079d-46bd-ba18-9568bc6460ed%7C27b4bdbe-3ac5-4415-8c03-f846c03f97d4