Here it is. Thanks, ITTR.

1:50, George Tsiolis: Guys, welcome back.

1:52, Tom Mika and Vivek Rajgarhia: Thank you.

1:55, GT: The news here, and I like this one — don’t get me wrong, all the other press releases are great, and the interviews we have are fantastic: new products, new initiatives—but now we’re talking a little more about the bus[iness] dev[elopement] side. So, let’s talk about this because you guys participated in the OFC, that’s the Optical Fibre Communications conference. Typically, we don’t talk about conferences on Behind the Press Release, because they are standard for a lot of companies, but this is a big one for you guys. So, tell us, first, why this OFC conference is so big to the future of POET.

2:31, VR: Yes, so if I can take that. So, the Optical Fibre Communications conference is really where the industry comes together, in the segment that we are in, to demonstrate, to talk about, to showcase the great work and development, and the technologies that each one is bringing to the market. As well as there is a lot of networking and interaction that go on where you meet your industry colleagues, you discuss what’s going on, and it’s truly one time in the year when the whole industry comes together and jives together [laughs].

3:18, GT: This is the Super Bowl of the optical communications and networking world, right?

3:23, VR: Yeah. You can call it the Super Bowl. You can call it the FIFA World Cup… whatever sports or [inaudible] you like. It is truly the one conference where the entire industry, throughout the value chain—all the way from technology providers, chip providers, modules, systems, sub-systems, to service providers—they all come together and participate.

3:55, TM: Originally, this was scheduled for March in San Francisco in a live setting, but because of COVID they then delayed it until June and then decided, a few months ago, that it would be virtual. So this was a virtual exhibition and conference. On the conference side, obviously you can understand because, someone speaking on a certain topic and you can sign in for that topic. For an exhibition, it was really a first, I think, for this industry. I think OFC did a pretty good job of managing that. We had a webpage on the OFC site where we could feature our products. We also featured who people can contact. Vivek, I’m sure, will go into much more detail, but we were also able to schedule visits with customers and with analysts in which we live streamed a demo from our lab in Allentown.

5:05, GT: I was about to say that: this wasn’t just a simple Zoom, ok three of us get on the way the three of us are on here, have a meet and goodbye. You guys were all in Allentown, together, prepping for this for weeks. This was a really major demonstration, right Tom?

5:22, TM: Yes, that’s exactly right. And I think Vivek will explain how effective it was with the customers and potential customers, the suppliers, and potential partners. I was handling, mainly, the analysts, and we saw seven of those live during the conference, as well as some bankers. That was really effective because, I think what Vivek has said is that seeing is believing. And I don’t mean to steal your line there, Vivek [both laugh]—but that was true, also, for analysts as well as for customers. Let me just cede it to Vivek to describe.

6:05, GT: Before, Vivek, we get to the reaction, first talk about the fact that you conducted live demos for two products, right? So, which products, and why those products, and what did you show off about them?

6:20, VR: Before I get to that, just some maybe background here. I’ll open up my views on this. So when Tom mentioned a few weeks—a couple of months ago, Tom?—that this is going to be virtual… already as Tom mentioned, the OFC, which usually takes place sometime in March, was moved to June, and then they, the committee, came out and said this is going to be virtual. My initial reaction, having participated in, I would say, twenty five of these in the past, I was a bit disappointed: we don’t get to see our colleagues face-to-face, or show our demonstrations live. And then we turned the lemon into lemonade. Tom was, of course, instrumental in a lot of this: getting our messages out, building up enough video-ware that could be communicated effectively in this virtual platform. And then, in today’s world, it’s not unreasonable to expect you can do a live video streaming, right? So we said why don’t we, besides just doing what we’re doing right now with the Zoom platform, why not actually try and give a real feeling to our customers, partners, as if they were there? And the best way we could do it is we came out with this video streaming camera. Again, we are not professionals [laughs], you know most of the people are engineers working on optical chips. But over the last month/month-and-a-half we did several dry runs to make sure we got the bugs out and we’ve got the right instruments. Now we can go become professionals, I think.

8:40, VR: It was highly effective. Again, I don’t want to take away the impact of being there in person, which obviously has its own benefits, but this was—and for me, the first time—it was a truly impactful conference. And everyone, in their minds, realizes virtual, well hey, we always have Zoom meetings and all, but the customers, partners, analysts, other stakeholders of POET, when they witnessed it, I believe it was a game-changer… at least I got the sense…

9:22, GT: Well, you’re the president. You’ve been doing this for your whole life, so you would understand the shift in sentiment, I guess. So, before we were going to talk about which products you demoed, but the response is probably what the shareholders want to know the most. What do you think the response was from customers, partners, analysts?

9:44, VR: If I pick out the customers and partners that we’ve been working with—we’ve been in discussions and been showing stuff for the last several months, maybe a year—lead customers, of course they know we are doing this. When they saw it working live, their impact and reaction was different. It was a turning point, as I mentioned. It was: “Yes, this works!“ So now, of course, they still need to get products, test it, design-in, but that risk of a new platform, which has a promise of changing the game in the industry—it’s a good promise, there’s all these valid reasons: we have proof-points—but to actually show it live, working… and this live streaming is much more impactful, if I put myself in the customers’ and partners’ shoes, than seeing a recorded video, which many other companies rightly did to show their technology, videos and all. And having the ability to ask questions, so that’s a big part of it.

10:56, GT: Yeah, the live part of it people take for granted—right Vivek?—they expect you to be talking live, but typically the videos they’ll run are videos they recorded a week ago and they say, Hey, watch this. You guys were doing it live to prove how confident you were that this works.

11:12, VR: Yeah, to show, so if there was a question, just like in a real, live interaction: Hey, what is this? Where’s this signal? How does this look? What are you using here? We could move the camera around...

11:25, GT: Amazing.

11:26, VR: …and show, and answer, and respond. I see this, not only for POET but, again, in our space in the industry, that this is a key capability. We can bring, in the future, customers whenever we have a new thing to show; we can really bring them in virtually and show them live. And not all customers were able to attend last week, and so some of the big customers have scheduled this week for us too, to see. Hey, we want to see live what you are showing. I would like to add, with time differences, we have a lot of potential customers in Asia, partners in Asia, even if it’s live, a lot of them cannot travel: not everyone gets a visa, or the expenses, or things like that. We were able to schedule these live demos in the evening. Of course, we had our team members in the lab at night, showing. And they could have as many people as they wanted on the other side to witness it, to see the live demo.

12:36, GT: It sounds like for what you gave up, there are a lot of big advantages to doing these live demos, including you’re doing more this week.

12:45, VR: Yes. Yes, exactly. And we continue. It’s a platform: we can continue showing this. As soon as we have something to show we can schedule. It’s convenient for our customers, for our partners, getting on a Zoom call versus flying over. And we can show them live. I truly feel this was a very impactful [conference] for these reasons. I would still want live conferences, but this can go on.

13:21, GT: This is a great augmentation. Look, you might have had a real conference, a live conference, but now you have the ability of also augmenting it with these live video feeds if necessary, right? You don’t have to wait for these conferences. Becoming an expert in doing it yourself mean now you can do it for everybody 365, not just one time a year when you get together under one big tent.

13:43, VR: Exactly. I think we are very comfortable now [laughs] in showing, and I’m sure there’s room for improvement. But I feel it was well done. Kudos to the team who managed it and did it. Of course, the product is the important thing so it’s the entire POET team that contributed in getting these engines ready, and then the team to get the live streaming done. And our partners, and customers, and everyone else was joining and witnessing it.

14:20, TM: So, George the other thing that the virtual conference forced us to do was to think about, “Well if someone passes our page or sees our page on the exhibit, how do we introduce POET to them?” So, a couple months ago we began a process with a professional video production company to actually prepare and present what turned out to be a 12 and a half minute video on POET: what its objectives are, what its history is. The latter part of that video actually shows the live demo that we also did. So that’s an excellent introduction to POET. We will be posting the link. It’s on YouTube on the Poet Technologies channel. We’ll post the link to our main web page at poet-technologies.com

15:25, GT: By the way its already been viewed over 6000 times. It’s amazing. I would think that a lot of that comes from the financial world.

15:35, TM: I would hope so, yes.

15:37, VR: Yeah, or even customers and partners, I’m sure also viewed it.

15:42, GT: No so that’s great for investors to be able to get… to be able to watch part of that demo. I think that’s powerful. And we’re going to post a link in the post, and we flashed it up on the screen as well for everyone to see. Again, just to remind everyone just go to YouTube. Search Poet Technologies. Go to their channel which is pretty new. It’s the one video that’s there. It’s 13 and a half minutes. Very, very well spent. Vivek, by the way… which products… so let’s talk about… so I’m glad we talked about that side first actually. Because I think that’s what investors really want to know about. How’s the reaction? How’d it go? And it sounds like it was all said and done, you guys not only breathed a sigh of relief, but it sounds like you are very happy. Because you are talking about an inflection point and impactful. That’s great. Congratulations to all you guys. You guys demoed two products, which ones and why? Vivek.

16:30, VR: So we demonstrated our O-band lightbar engine, which has four high powered CW lasers in the O-band, which is the 1310 nm band, CWDM4 wavelengths, mounted on our optical interposer with the multiplexer and the light coming out. So, we were able to show the light spectrum out clean and the quality of it, which was… Several, actually, customers and partners who are highly experienced, you know they are leaders in these fields commented, “Yeah it looks very clean and very, very good.” And that has a two-fold significance here. One is, as a product, the O-band lightbar is a product for remote light sources where certain customers want to keep the laser source away from the heat generating silicon. And also lasers being the most “unreliable” part of the whole system, if something goes wrong they can change it without changing the entire system. And also, I would say more significantly even, it’s a stepping stone to our 400G engines. Where CW lasers in these bands are needed, as well as the mux in certain cases, for FR4, are needed. Where we will add a silicon photonic modulator in-between to modulate the signal and create a 400G engine. So its basically a stepping stone, a major stepping stone, to our 400G engine which we are working on. I’m sure we’ll be sharing progress with the team.

18:21, VR: So that was one part of it. The other was the 100G CWDM4 transmit engine. So, this had the four 25G DMLs and DFBs flip-chip attached, with the mux, with the electronics. It was on an evaluation board with the electronics driver, actually sending the light, modulating the signal, and showing an output of the signal we call an optical eye. Which shows the clarity of that signal. That’s really the measure for anyone, any customer or anyone seeing the quality of the system and the signal. It is that optical eye. We were able to demonstrate, or what we demonstrated, showing 45%. Again, it was real. It was from the scope. Customers were seeing the data as it was being generated. So, they saw, and several of them commented, “Wow. It’s 45%.” Usually, 20% margin over what is required is good. We were showing 40% margin which means that the quality of that engine is superior. The network and the systems when you use it, it has more margin, more room, for the quality.

19:49, GT: And in your world that’s a massive leap. 100% better margin is a massive leap.

19:56, VR: Yeah, its something that is… It is a huge benefit to our customers in their systems.

20:10, TM: Maybe as a non-engineer I can explain it as well. When lasers are modulated, at least these types of lasers, you get the zero when the laser is off and you get a one when its on. So, what it is really showing, that openness of the eye is showing the lack of errors in that signaling, in the modulation of those lasers. So, the fewer errors that you have that trail into that never neverland between 0 and 1 is good. Because you don’t want to corrupt the signal. And that’s basically the explanation of what that is showing.

21:00 VR: So, just to add here. You know the “1” being very “1”, and clear, and “0” being very “0”, and clear. So, if you think black is very black and white is very white, it’s easy for the receiving side to decipher which is “1” and which is “0”. So, to make an error, it’s a lesser chance.

21:20, GT: So, guys, how many companies do you think you demonstrated too? Are you able to tell us how many companies, partners?

21:30: So, if I have to recall off the top of my head it was around 35 or so that we actually did live streaming demos, zoom meetings. Customers, and again customers that we’ve been working with as well as new customers, ok? We had the meeting, they saw it. And then it has opened up at least a few real opportunities for us to work on with those customers. And then even partners, certain industrial leaders, who are not direct customers, but what they are doing has synergy with what we are doing. And it opened up room for collaboration. And these are huge companies, huge leaders in their fields. To collaborate and work on next generation type of platform which can be game changing also.

22:28, GT: So, what’s the next step from here, guys? Because even if there was a live conference, or a virtual conference, you’ve got to ship products for demos and so on and so forth. What’s next in terms of getting those products into customers hands. And how close are you to your recently announced roadmap for samples and production.

22:50, VR: Yeah, we are on track to what we’ve announced. The samples for the CWDM4 engines will be going out next month. They are actually going through the process of putting fiber for testing, doing the final test and all. So, we are on track there to sample. And also, the lightbar engine is on track. And with the 400G DR4/FR4, as I mentioned, was a stepping stone with the CW. And we are actually making good progress to get to samples towards the Q4 timeframe for that as well. So, its very encouraging, all the progress that was made, and being on track is a big thing.

23:35, GT: So gents, [is it] fair to say that for the company and for its shareholders the conference was a great success, and gives you further confidence in where POET is going in terms of where POET is going and making a real impact on the business side?

23:57, VR: Yes, definitely. Without a doubt, I would say that. Being able to talk to so many industry veterans, companies, and getting their impressions which were pretty much consistent, and seeing what we have done. So, commercialization is just around the corner. There’s work to be done. Its not a switch that turns on and off. In terms of crossing certain milestones, I think was a [unclear]. Even for us, and I tell you George, sometimes we are so bogged down in doing the day-to-day things, we don’t step back and see it. And at least personally for me, to actually witness it along with our customers was also “Oh yeah!” This is now becoming really real. [We are] looking forward to getting samples out, getting these in production, getting revenue. You know all the good stuff that goes on with good technology.

25:01, GT: Fantastic. Tom, any last words from you? Because it sounds like it’s… or did Vivek sum up everything nicely?

25:07, TM: He did but I would like to say that I know everyone is going to be looking for what Suresh told everybody to look for, which are design wins, right? We are trying to figure out actually how we announce a design win. Because its really along a spectrum of interaction with the customer. But we will figure out a way. And we are looking forward to being able to announce those design wins starting now and going through the Summer and into the Fall.

[Goodbyes.]