I talked to a friend last night about POET and it really is very surprising how details tend to be overlooked in what was said at the CIC. The discussion about wanting to take engineering staff (30 to 40) to develop POET rather than taking cash would have greater value to POET.
There are a very large number of markets that POET can fit into. One just needs to look at the trademark application to see the breadth of products. No one company can do it all. So when reviewing some of the statements made at the CIC we begin to realize that POET is talking about a large number of companies being involved to develop POET for market readiness. And many of those partnerships are hinging on the performance metrics that will be available from these milestones expect over the next couple weeks.
28:35 – Like for example these last two milestones – a 100 nm ring oscillator and a 50 GHz VCSEL. Those are industry-driven milestones for us. Customers and partners we have talked to said, “If only you could do this – the ring oscillator –, we could compare those results with silicon-equivalent results and really compare the performance of what you have.”
29:06 – And similarly with a 50 GHz VCSEL, there are leaders in that industry that said, “If you could go and fabricate this with your process, we’d love to see the performance of that vertical-cavity laser, and that would be extremely significant in my industry. So once you have that, come back to us and we’d love to see what that is.”
Come milestones, come partnership
34:40 – Stephane talked about some of the partnerships that are due, some of the milestones that are due at the end of the quarter, the 50 GHz VCSEL, for instance. So that is from a multi-billion dollar company who came to us and said, “If you can do this in POET, we would be really interested in having serious conversations with you.” So we are getting ready to produce that technical milestone at the end of March. I would anticipate that that in itself is a great watershed moment for the company, and then the partnerships that come afterwards will be the start-off, the moment in time where POET really goes from just a concept in the fab to actual commercial companies investing their time and energy and money in our company.
35:26 – And I was saying some gentlemen earlier on that for our first partnership, Ajit and I were looking at these companies and we don’t need them to write a big cheque. What we really want them to do is to invest 30 or 40 engineers of their time. We need them to invest some of their know-how to partner with our engineers in order to take an end-product company and say, “We really want to be here in two years,” and get POET to do it. Because after that basically the world would be on our oyster.
