POET Technologies (TSX: V.PTK, Stock Forum) advanced its Planar Electrical Technology (PET) miniaturization aims when the company announced today that it had collaborated with a 3rd party foundry to reproduce and enhance the repeatability of the 100-nm scale results reached in the company's labs as well as assisting the company in shrinking the 100-nm PET devices and process to a 40-nm feature size.
According to the news release, the action was taken because the ability to define and repeat the 100-nm scale was hampered by the limitations of available lithography tools and other equipment in the POET labs.
The collaboration is expected to the give the company access to superior capability and diagnostics, allowing the POET approach to start to scale to both 3” and 6” wafers with much larger device count and and across wafer alignment.
As well as repeatability, the effort will target line width reductions from 100-nm to 40-nm with should enable POET performance parameters to compete with present state-of-the-art processes.
Company Board Member and Chief Scientist, Dr. Geoff Taylor, commented, “Developing the 100-nm feature size technology in the current POET labs has proven to be challenging. With the collaboration of our "3rd party foundry", we now have access to state of the art equipment highlighted by a state of the art ebeam writing tool. This will help us make the process more stable and predictable and help prove our process in a true manufacturing environment.”
In other news, the company also announced another collaboration with Synopsys for the creation of the company's first Process Design Kit (PDK). This collaboration will see the development of an advanced model of the company's PET devices targeting a technology node of 40-nm.
Peter Copetti, company Executive Chairman and Interim CEO, added, “We now believe we have the right collaboration in place with Synopsys and our "3rd party foundry" to model our technology down to 40-nm and correlate our process to real physical device measurements.”
Then he concluded, “This should provide us with results needed to showcase our technology to potential customers at the optimum node for our platform. We expect synergistic benefits from having parallel operations with the same end target.”
Shares rose 6.63% on the news to $1.77 per share.
Currently there are 163.8m outstanding shares with a market cap of $290.0 million.