RE:Module Development from MD&A2023 AGM:
Today, our technology and business strategy is fundamentally centered around building interposers and optical engines and providing expertise to end customers or module makers providing finished modules. While we believe that this is a reasonable model for kind of the legacy, if you will, or 100G to 200G to 400G, especially in the AI segment we think we have to transcend beyond the optical engine and create optical modules. So, the future for POET is to actually create optical modules, and we believe we can do that because a big portion of the optical module is already factored into the engine. We've integrated tiers, we've integrated drivers, we've got very good RF capability on the interposer, we've got all the photonics components on the interposer, we create effectively everything except the DSP. So our intent is to add a third set of capabilities for design and development of these optical modules. We're already doing it for AI. It's a critical requirement for AI. So our intent in AI is clearly to have optical modules generated. So, that doesn't mean that we're going to stop selling engines to module makers. I think in the advanced technology, specifically for AI, our intent would be to create optical modules. It enables the sale of our leading edge products directly to the end customer without having to go through this middleman and this long process of getting designed-in and the iterations associated with more development to be done along the way. It reduces time to market, eliminates qualification cycles. We think it's the right thing to do. It requires some investment, and we're looking at an alternate joint venture capability that allows us to potentially fund this activity. Again, raising money with some non-dilutive financing here.