A little review POET Presentation part 2
Question from the audience: Why is an optical signal better than an electrical signal?
The optical signal is not affected by capacitance. No electrons have to move. They can go at high speeds and they can typically go long distances without attenuation. If anyone remembers how much our phone bills dropped when we went from copper long haul transmission lines to fiber optics its because you can put an optical signal onto a piece of fiber and one watt of power will take you hundreds of kilometers before you have to regenerate the signal. One watt of power in an electrical signal would probably take you maybe hundreds of inches (big laugh from Lee he has a good sense of humour) not very far.
Back on topic:
System backplanes…If anyone has seen a networking switch from Cisco. There is a bunch of cards that plug into a big circuit board in the back and that card at the back is just full of wires connecting the slots together. Geoff’s technology could eliminate the backplane. All you need is a light pipe with some spigots coming off it. That’s it.
That is just one example of massively simplifying a piece of networking equipment. Really what Geoff has done is he has developed 3 key technologies and they are three firsts. He has developed a complimentary P and N channel transistor pair that has never been made in anything but silicon CMOS before. This is the first time that people have been able to make it work. My comment if you got to the UConn lab tour clips you will hear this from one of Geoff’s team in this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALYDMN0NLEs
So those electronic components on their own have a tremendous value proposition leaving the optical stuff alone. The third piece of this technology is something called an optical thyristor and he has spent 12 years just on the thyristor design and we are actually fabricating some of these at BAE over the next few months. These devices are very interesting because they are so versatile. They can be used as a laser. They can be used as several kinds of lasers. They can be used as a detector. They can either be used to detect infrared or visible light. Whatever kind of energy level you want to detect. What is truly unique about this is the same optical thyristor can be used for both. So one of the reasons the US Defense Department has been interested in funding this type of technology and has really funded it for 15 years. We are still getting grants from NASA that we are still spending. Their big motivation to pursue this technology is that you can build an array. Today you can build and array of detectors. That’s the night vision equipment that everyone has seen in the movies or you can build lasers that shoot things or shoot people. Geoff’s technology can do both. So basically you can have a panel, an array that is configured as a detector and in micro seconds I mean millionths of a second you can change the bias on those things and turn them into lasers. So in a military application your radar panel is also your direct energy weapon. It sounds like Star Wars but it actually works. The reason it works is that the US Defense Complex has put money into this technology for years and they believe in it.
The interesting thing about this is there is such a breadth of applications for the technology. There are many processor vendors for example. This will allow their architectures to not be so reliant on multicore parallel processing that most of you have heard about and some have probably invested money in. One of the dirty little secrets about the parallel processing world and the multicore world is that most software can’t take advantage of it. You have to rewrite your programs and think about problems in very different ways and map them out to all these low speed parallel CPU’s. It’s not the natural way that many problems are calculated and solved. And with Geoff’s technology you could make an Intel Atom sized processor that could run single execution streams as fast or faster than any of the 6 or 8 core processors from Intel today to process the parallel workload. So I think that is just one example of how staying away from optics or defense stuff or anything else. There is one industry that is just coming to the end of its current technology life time and this is something that really opens up new architectures with fundamentally lower cost points for all kinds of software applications.
If you look at the electro-optical transceiver business there are a number of companies in the world today that butter their bread by buying electro-optical components… probably 6 or 9 and integrate them together in a high speed module which has fibers coming out one side and electrical signals coming out the other. The POET technology essentially eliminates those companies value proposition because you don’t have to integrate these things together into a high speed module anymore. All of it goes on one chip. No human intervention in terms of having to align parts that use dissimilar materials and have multiple pieces connected to a ceramic board. One chip in a cheap package does it. That’s just two examples of existing industries that are only peripherally related to one another. Each of which can and I believe will be turned on their heads by POET technology.
Question: The $5 million that you are raising. Is that going to take you to a point where this is dressed up for sale?
Lees answer: Yes sir. The reason we are raising that money is to bring this message to the world. Geoff has been working at this for so long that he has flown below everyone’s radar except for some key sponsors in the defense community. So nobody in the mainstream tech business have really been exposed to this. They have been exposed to things like it in the past but nobody has heard of this. What I have found is that once you get past their initial skepticism because almost everyone I have talked to if they have invested in this industry has lost at least some money on this kind of stuff in the past.
Silicon photonics was one of the most recent destroyers of investment capital. In this case once they understand that Geoff actually does have the answer then this technology is ready to bring to the world.
End of Part 2