It is interesting to me that when we met Vivek for the first time the plan as described was to set up a hub in the US which would become Allentown. To connect with both suppliers and customers in one location in the US. To build a supply chain which would ultimately provide an off the shelf inventory of devices designed to be utilized specifically for optical interposer integration.

Seems that we are seeing the beginning of that ecosystem being born in China. Where device manufactures have an opportunity to be placed into the POET Optical Interposer ecosystem.

This makes perfect sense and really this demonstrates yet another strength of the POET Optical Interposer. The strength to mix and match different material sets associated with different devices to allow customers to define their own products and provide suppliers with access to high volume hybrid integration.

Why? And here is the big difference as I see it. Companies who are working primarily with silicon photonic solutions can’t integrate with the same ease and efficiency that are provided with the POET optical interposer. Monolithic type SOI solutions are painfully slow and very expensive to develop. Thermal management and crosstalk become exceedingly complex to manage. We have used Rockley as an example of this. 

Q: What have the follow-up discussions since the China product demonstrations been like?

VR: It was a coming out party for us at those conferences. The impact of those events was that people now know what we are doing and understand the value we can provide to them, and in many cases to their customers. Since those events, we’ve had multiple engagements. I would say we have three levels of engagements happening.

First, we have customers who make transceiver modules and see the value of getting an optical engine from us or a semi-customized product from us because of the benefits we provide of cost and scale, and the flexibility we have in terms of form factor. Those would be Level 1 customers and we have a whole list of them, especially in China, and also in North America that have come up since those meetings.

Second, there are technology companies who have developed a certain device and they need a platform to make that device operate for the application while working with other devices. So they’re looking to see if we can integrate their device into our platform and make it meaningful to the market. Also in that same category I would say there are incumbent companies who have been packaging their products in a certain way and they look at us and want to see if they can get to the next level of packaging and provide value to their customers.

Third, is a level of companies who are end users. These are the data centers who are coming to us to say, ‘Hey, can you provide a solution for better performing and cheaper products for optical connectivity?’

At all three of those customer levels we have multiple engagements in our pipeline.