I always enjoy reading your posts David. :)

Without taking anything away from your words, I would like to add my thoughts on something that I think is at the heart of POET and is one of it's biggest advantages: The all-in-one solution that Dr. Geoff Taylor has provided with his work with POET. That coupled with the optical capabilities that are needed to further the advancement of semicondutor technology into the future.

Let me explain what I mean by those two points. We've all heard the maxim, "Fast, Good, and Cheap.... Pick two." A simplification of what we've come to expect nowadays. But POET (and it's electrical subset PET) breaks the rules. POET is faster, better and cheaper to produce than current offerings. With the library of new devices that will be available to designers, who knows what they will eventually be able to do. Dr. Taylor had the forethought to design POET with the ability to be made with commonly used fab equipment. Early on he realized that optical capabilities would be required and built that into his design. Of course the laser would have to be onboard and manufactured as a step in the fabrication process. All these features were identified and targeted as requirements of a successful candidate for Si's successor. Geoff identified GaAs as the semicondutor material that had the potential to fulfill that need that he saw at some point in the future and set about addressing that right mix of properties for the technology that became POET.

At this point I'd like to direct everyone to the Empire Club presentation from last April(it's in the Link Library on the left if you haven't seen it yet).

Here's a post I made not long after watching it:

http://agoracom.com/ir/POETTechnologies/forums/discussion/topics/610479-180-degrees/messages/1914316#message

Geoff's EC presention, I thought, really highlighted well the need to efficiently use optics on the chip itself. It doesn't matter how fast we can process the bits inside the core if we cant get the date back and forth from the different memory types or the storage device. As Geoff described, copper has very real limitations that we have been pushing the boundaries of for decades now. As we have more and more date to move around, the need for faster and faster signal speeds was needed just to propagate the signal to the next routing point. Fiber optic cables have been utilized for longer distances for a long time now to provide the throughput and signal stability needed. But the need has arisen for throughput and signal stability at shorter and shorter distances. Hence the need for photonics.

I still think Geoff summed up the case for POET best when answering the question on graphene as a competitor.

He said,"...it (graphene) doesn't address the optical problem, and the optical problem IS the problem. We can't go further without improved connections, and you can't improve the connections unless you can perform the optical functions using the economies of scale that you have in microfabrication. Intuition tells you that's the way it has to be."

Well said, Doc.

Green