I believe the answer to the question, "Why 100nm?", Aves, was in the most recent news release.

• Drive for Reduction of Feature Size to 100-nm Range (100nm), Milestone #8 – The Company has introduced new specific milestones associated with reducing feature size to the 100-nm range in scale. The POET team has realized submicron device operation down to 200-nm. The path to maintaining scaled operation down to 100nm has been identified. The Company has scheduled its Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) to be shut down for cleaning and maintenance for a period of approximately 6 weeks after completing Milestones 5 and 7. After restarting the MBE, the Company expects to complete Milestone 8 and, accordingly, the timeline for the completion of this milestone has been moved to the first quarter of fiscal 2014. The 100-nm goal is matched to the state-of-the-art commercial III-V foundry capabilities and will demonstrate the greater than 50x speed improvement together with lower power consumption by a factor ranging from 4 to 10 depending on the application as compared to silicon at smaller nodes. Significant progress has been made on the completion of this milestone, although it has proven to be more difficult to achieve with the limited equipment available to POET. This highlights the importance of developing an alliance with a fab partner where repeating this milestone and improving it will be significantly easier with advanced lithography equipment standard for CMOS processing.

The way I take that statement is that there is an upper limit to every new generation of fab equipment as well as the intended lower range that is the goal for reducing feature size. I have thought for some time that this may have been the reason for the 100nm target and, for me, this news release confirmed it. Makes sense for a fab to not have to downgrade its equipment to be able to produce the POET chips at the size that the POET lab had been producing them last summer. Sure, there are probably some fabs out there that wouldn't have to downgrade to use POET, but possibly not the most current, state of the art fabs.

That's my take on it, anyway. Interested to hear other opinions.

Green