A couple of notes from the presentation Someone here is very confused about the development of POET. I am not sure if he is trying to make people believe that Taylor and his team of scientists have never produced devices or what but clearly he has no concept of the significance of development taking place.
A couple of notes from the Toronto Presentation and IBK meeting:
IBK meeting notes:
My Question to Lee Shepherd:
I have heard zero discussion about technology risk. It doesn’t exist?
Answer:
There has been a lot of technology risk in the past.
Me: The laser was a big one for sure.
Lee: The laser, the form it is in now with so many modes and features it took a while to get there. But Geoff built his first working laser in 93.
Peter: I think the technology risk was a while ago.
Lee: The technology risk I think was that it took a quarter century to get rid of the technology risk.
Me: So scaling isn’t considered any issue?
Lee: That is one of the areas that a tremendous amount of work has been done is in modeling the scaling of both the electrical features, devices as well as the optical ones. And that is what I think the last tweaks really from about 2004 to 2010 the process tweaks were only to make it more amenable to building devices on the same die of very different sizes. But I think that from what Geoff has done is that he has been able to keep at this problem long enough to get the technology risk under control.
Peter: What I have learned from Geoff is that although he looks like just a scientific guy, he actually really thinks outside of the box in terms of how would the companies. 10 years ago how would these companies be able to put it into their systems? Not just getting it to work in their labs. He has done that work and that is the great thing. It is one thing to be able to do it but can I make a thousand can I make a 100 million of these can I do it. And he has thought of that.
Lee: And one big thing that I was very pleased to see is that this has always been in Geoff’s mind. How do I do things so they can be made with semiconductor fabrication equipment that exists today? That is the real key. Because anytime you need a new widget you have got interdependency in the way. So I would have to say... Is there a lot of technology risk in this space? Absolutely. I could name 25 companies that it has killed. Has there been technology risk in Geoff’s past? Absolutely. I think it took 24 years to get past it. I have been in the semiconductor business and been a device designer long enough that I can say Geoff is well past that stage. We are building proof points of the last 23 years of Geoff’s work that we can give to people.
POET Toronto Presentation
Lee Shepherd
Optics unlike electrical stuff has to be mechanically aligned. Any optical system has to be very carefully assembled and aligned. Anyone who is familiar with manufacturing knows that the more precisely you have to do something the more expensive it is. So there has been a long term industry interest in taking optical technologies that have to be assembled out of discrete components today with great precision and at a great cost and integrate them onto one chip such that all of your fine tolerances can be done using photolithography and not by using the ever increasing cost of Chinese labour which is how the stuff is built today. So there is the idea of integrating optical and electrical function ability and that has a tremendous value proposition for optical transceivers. Any systems that have optical interfaces.
POET actually goes beyond that. We can integrate electro- optical functionality onto the same die that does purely electrical processing. It can run much faster than CMOS technology can. A CMOS transistor would run at maybe 3.5 GHz which is a little faster than your fastest Intel processor today. Geoff’s first transistor prototype that he produced two and one half years ago ran at 65 GHz and they were 100 times bigger than the CMOS transistors today (remember that performance increases as the size decreases). So the performance is not really comparable. They are two different worlds and are very different materials. What is interesting about POET. Beyond the electro-optical integration and the very high performance of the electronic processing that can be done… there is also a very significant capability to do optical processing which means actually processing data. The tremendous value of POET is that if we look purely at the electronics business the silicon CMOS replacement technology in POET can do anything that silicon CMOS can do and do it an order of magnitude maybe 10 to 15 times faster than a comparable CMOS technology. We have the ability to integrate optical functionality that today requires multiple separate components and significant assembly costs and testing costs. But also with POET we won’t have to convert optical signals to electrical signals and back, we can do significant processing in the optical form.
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.
We have been building devices since 2004. We have been building devices in 3rd party fabs. Essentially to make sure that the recipe is transferable since 2010. 2011 the first ones were completed and that has been going on continuously since and will continue on through calendar year 2013. There is a bunch of milestones listed on the presentation. What these basically are is the culmination of Geoff’s quarter century of work where the parts that he has designed, built and optimized. He is building them in a form that I can go and take and show to folks at Intel, at Samsung, at Philips where ever and say you don’t have to believe what I tell you. I am going to leave this with you take it to your lab and do whatever you want to with it and call me back. I know you will call me back because you will be impressed. So we are spending the year making our physical proof points in our own fab as well as at the BAE fab to go out and show the world what this stuff can do and how it works.