The dream of course started with Geoff Taylor. He convinced a lot of people that the GaAs platform would work in the fab without issues.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

When the first Pellegrino report was issued a spreadsheet was built using all the details as they were presented in the report including the Feb 27/11 letter to Pierhal. It contained detailed assumptions of market size, market penetration and royalty fees.

Based on the numbers provided in that report POETs 2018 (year 7) revenue would have been $2.3 billion.

Of course the first thing that Suresh did is kill any notion that POET would be building processors for the general computing market which was basically what that entire P1 report was based on. He instead focused on the optical interface for communications. But the darn thing kept getting stuck in the snow. Historically a lot of money and time was spent trying to develop the GaAs platform. I think Suresh’s view is accurate that more time and money is required and hopefully it will become the first commercially viable monolithic platform in history to fully integrate photonics and electronics in a single fabrication flow. Time will tell.