A fellow poster asked me by PM whether we'll have access to POET's presentation Bill Ring is going to give next Tuesday at the PIC, and I think I might dump my thoughts here.
POET has several conflicting goals:
- They want to position themselves as a leader in photonic integration.
- They want to hide as much as possible from competitors or adversaries.
- They have to fulfill their legal obligations regarding publicty requirements.
Now what we don't know yet is what exactly are their intentions with their PIC presentation and whether/what they are going to reveal.
One extreme is that they won't go any further than what we already know, i.e. they might give a general overview on the POET technology, stating that they are developing an integrated VCSEL transceiver, lab to fab, being at the cusp of whatever, commercialization in 2018, no dates, blah, blah. Something like that would meet target 2 and at the same time would not require them to release anything with regards to target 3. However, not telling anything new at an expert conference would be a really poor message from a company claiming to be ahead of the curve of photonic integration (target 1)!
The other extreme would be the presentation of a VCSEL transceiver prototype and displaying sample wafers. This would meet target 1, but miss on target 2. One might argue whether a prototype contrary to a product would require a public news release, but since the info would be out to the expert public or at least to the PIC participants they might as well publish a news release – and if only to comply with target 3. That could be a summary news release only. However, they might attach the complete PIC presentation which would be the safest way to comply with legal requirements (target 3).
However, the real presentation might still be somewhere between those two extremes. We'll see.
