POET Technologies Inc.

It is time to start piecing some information together.

In the recent MD&A a lot of changes were provided without a lot of detail around them. A few details have come to light since the MD&A was issued which are slowly providing us with a better picture but still a lot of questions remain unanswered. Those answers will hopefully be provided in Sept but I would not rule out some announcements along the way leading up to it to avoid a complete overload of information all at once and allow people to prepare in advance for the webcast (which has been talked about).

So where to start?

I think what is on a lot of people’s minds is the milestones announced on October 22 as part of the lab-to-fab initiative. These milestones were requested for the benefit of interested parties as a demonstration of the technologies capabilities.

This effort will enable and progress two of the company's current key initiatives which the company is currently working on: a 100-nanometre ring oscillator which is a common demonstration vehicle for performance and an integrated 50-gigahertz VCSEL device, both targeted for the first quarter of 2015.

It should be noted that the starting point for those developments had already been underway. That is derived both by the language in the news release and by other documents one of which is from the detail in Yao’s LinkedIn account.

During the AGM it was signaled that these milestones were completed but what I really think has been taking place is that these milestones have been built and have continued to be improved to the point where the confidence level to make a decision to go into manufacturing was accepted by their partner(s)/customer(s).

So let’s talk about the 50 Ghz VCSEL that was announced as a milestone. This was to be for demonstration purposes and was to be integrated at 100nm. We know by Yoa’s LinkedIn details that they achieved 50nm. During the lab tour in 2014 Geoff Taylor described the new procedure required to improve the FET structure some of those procedures are outlined in Yao’s LinkedIn account. Others are described elsewhere on documents that have not yet surfaced on this forum.

So let’s reference the most current MD&A which is filled with a lot of changes.

With an immediate view to commercialization, the Company has continued to develop the base process technology necessary to build the complete suite of optoelectronics devices. The new management team is focused on exploiting existing high growth markets where the disruptive power of the POET platform IP provides competitive differentiation. To that end the planned milestones - “PET PDK”, the “electrical 100-nm ring oscillator” and the “50 GHz VCSEL” will be replaced with market relevant and product driven milestones that maximizes the commercialization potential. These milestones will also capture the aggressive lab-fab transition plans being put in place, ensuring that the technology can be commercialized with no additional transfer delays from concept validation to product realization. The Company is engaged in discussions with multiple companies as it finalizes its choice of foundry and epitaxial wafer partners and has recently signed memorandums of understanding with some of these companies and expects to continue this process.

We have read it many times.

So far we have learned that POET has a manufacturing agreement in place to build the VCSEL and we have since learned that the VCSEL to be built is to operate at a data rate of 50Gb/s. To me this is very relevant in terms of the milestone they were working on and the VCSEL they will manufacture. The industry standards for 50Gb/s I believe have all been agreed upon so the device will be built to an existing standard. What this really means though is that the metrics that were provided in the 50GHz demonstration is no longer relevant and has served its purpose such that the 50Gb/s VCSEL has been approved no doubt based on the performance that measured with the 50Ghz milestone. The MD&A has stated that the new milestones are market relevant and product driven milestones that maximizes the commercialization potential. Integration of a 50Gb/s milestone using the POETs integration capability certainly qualifies that statement in the MD&A.

The 100nm ring oscillator.

I believe that the 100nm ring oscillator was built with the new procedures and we will soon be advised of its development but I expect that it will be built with optical clock distribution to maximize its impact as a disruptive technology. There is nothing spectacular about a ring oscillator. They can be built at any node and indeed there is information that POET has done this at 100nm more than a year ago. It needed to be improved and I believe it has been to the point where now they can further reduce it to much smaller nodes and integrate the optical clock. Like the 50Gb/s VCSEL entering into a manufacturing agreement I think there is a very good possibility that we will see the next steps for the whole suite of POET devices. I think that management understands the need to move quickly. I believe that we are going to get a lot of these questions answered in the coming weeks.

This is of course all in my opinion.