I have been asked by PM whether Intel could rightfully make the claim of being the only company that …, and I’d like to try to give an answer here.

Well, let’s see what their exact claim is, verbatim from their press release, but broken into individual items:

“Intel is the only company that has demonstrated

1. integrated multi-wavelength lasers and
2. semiconductor optical amplifiers,
3. all-silicon photodetectors, and
4. micro-ring modulators
5. on a single technology platform tightly integrated with CMOS silicon.”

If I understand more or less correctly what POET is doing, POET has 1. and 5. of that list (and 5. in a much better, wafer-scaled way than Intel), but POET does not have 2., 3., and 4. – or at least I am not aware of it.

So, yes, Intel can rightfully claim that they are the only company that has this particular set of building blocks in combination. And, yes, POET can rightfully claim that they are the only company that has another particular set of building blocks in combination, and both sets overlap somewhat, at least regarding their functionality, not regarding their technological foundation.

POET, please correct me if I am wrong!

(Oh, and of course Intel is the only company among these two that has such nice videos explaining their stuff, for example those micro-ring modulators, while POET does not explain what that “latest generation of low-loss Mach-Zehnder Interferometry (“MZI”)-based multiplexers embedded in the waveguides” might be, who will benefit from those multiplexers, and in which way.)