If you read all these articles on the latest Intel or other company chips, you will notice that they issue clock speed, wattages (power), memory capacity. Other terms are quad core, 8-core, tri-gate, etc. In truth all these terms represent Silicon based companies' difficulties in overcoming the limitations of Silicon. Here they are:

• Tri-gate - a method of transistor control involving 3 gates (a gate is in the centre of a transistor and acts as the on/off switch for electron flow) to control electron flow producing a 3 dimensional shape that is very expensive to produce in a factory and has cost 10's of billions of dollars. Its effects is to overcome short channel effects in very small transistors down at 10 and 14 nM size.

• Quad core - 8-Core. By putting 4 or 8 microprocesoors together you can process more bytes at once. But, its very expensive and quad core doesn't mean 4 times faster because you have to have adequate programmes in the software to use the 4 microprocessors and there are always bottleneck areas where only one microprcessor can operate because the other processoras are on stop waiting for the info. The effect doesn't speed up at all well unless a very specific programme is used. Very, very expensive.

• All chips have to be cooled because they produce heat as elcetrons move inside the billions of circuits. In Silicon this is at significantly higher voltages than Gallium based substrates (like POET). As a consequence, there is a limit to Silicon's speed unless you use specialised cooling with lquid gases e.g. Nitrogen. Standard cooling limits clock speed to about 3.8 Ghz or less (3.8 billion cycles per second). Even sophisticated cooling with liquid gas only doubles it.

• Computer Memory is a bank of transistors that retain the bytes sent to them from a microprocessor (they are used in various areas of a computer and are given names like Random Access Memory (RAM), Cache meory (on chip fast memory) and Hard Drive memory (which is bigger but much slower). They can only be changed by receiving an additional instruction from the running sofware. Because each bank of transistor making up a memory cell has a label attached to it (a register ) it can be identified and instructed to disclose its contents when required. Because you can put Gigabytes of these on the chip you make transfer of inforation very efficent for a central processing unit of a microprocessor.

• POET clock speeds, which have been measured on 200 nM chips, run at 60 - 70 Ghz. and are some 20 times faster than Silicon. We have insufficient information about whether more can be achieved, but more is certainly possible. Also the voltages used to run the transistors within a POET microprocessor are significantly lower, and lower voltages mean much less heat (heat production is acutally proportional to the square of the voltage and this means the effect is dramatic). So a POET chip runs 20 time faster and produces one fifth of the heat for the equivalent high end Silicon chip. This is the very nub of why POET is a killer technology. The very best Silicon can do will suddenly face a competitor, when fully devleoped, that will increase processing speed by a factor like 20 times greater. It will process like this at much lower temperatures and this will save battery usage in mobile technology (said to be 5 times better than current products). Add to this that the design architecture of the chip can include memory, central processing units, laser for light transfer and other wave length including UV and Infra Red. So you can put lots of chips into one POET chip and you see why design engineers will have a field day. What you end up with a 20 times (at least) faster processor, using 20% of the current, with a much smaller space occupation within the product as well as additional features like laser, scanner, light and other electromagnetic readers. Do you now see why this is disruptive?

Finally, when you read these complex articles on Intel and other chips remember that all these names mean they are very sophisticated efforts to drag the last bits of processing speed out of Silicon chips. The word 3D is used because to control a transistor means you have to raise its control off the surface of a chip and, thus, to manufacture this arrangement, is extremely costly and vastly costly to research. It results in very expensive chips at much higher costs. Along comes POET and says we have a planar chip (its flat and so is the P part of POET) which 20 times faster than Silicon, It has other compoenent on the chip such as a Laser (hence OPTO part of POET), it can function like any other computer chip (hence E for electronic in POET) and the T is for technology (I amsure you don't want me to explain that). Now you can see what a paradigm shift in technology this is. If I'm right, and the management and amrket teers get this right, then expect to be very, very wealthy because there ain't noopne else doing this now.

David