I actually agree with both Dash & Rob on this one. In Rob's sense there might be a company who stand to benefit when the 100nm node is reached, because they plan to follow POET's licensing strategy. And bottom line is that the fabs have to be on board, or the company adopting POET will have to have significant control over the supply chain - at least for their own products.

But, I also think the 100nm might not be as much a performance threshold as it is an economic viability threshold. After all, there will come a time when POET will be at 20nm, and depending on the new technologies which are enabled by POET, we might be facing a threat to Moore's Law analogous to the one we're in now.

I think the 100nm is the point where switching to POET in GaAs is a no-brainer cost-wise. 100nm is the point where everybody will consider switching to POET at the fab level. That is, a company like Intel will redirect projects in the pipeline to use POET in GaAs, and they will begin to retrofit (such as is required - very little) their existing fabs. They will do it, not because they will be able to throw a 30 GHz chip into your PC or because they will begin to thrash competition in the mobile market for the first time ever, but because they will again be able to realize the same kind of reduction in costs that Moore's Law delivered before Dennard scaling failed.

So although we know 100nm as a performance threshold, we also know that the benefits have to be significantly more than an match for current and projected Si CMOS before there will be any urgency to use POET or buy out the company.

And incidentally, I emphatically agree that the "bolt-on" nature of POET with existing CMOS fabs is one of the main reasons POET is a serious contender. Back when I was in touch with my Uncle who was a significant player in the development of early ICs and who worked at Intel overseeing the construction of fabs in the 90s, he claimed POET wouldn't succeed because they coudn't afford to build a fab. This wasn't only his opinion, but the opinion his friend on the BOD at Infinera. I think the Infinera guys actually said "OPEL isn't even on our radar".

My Uncle actually thought OPEL was going bankrupt when he saw the financials after the infamous 40k quarter in tracker sales. I wasn't able to refute the dire financial state of the company, but I informed him the process would use existing equipment and he became interested again. He agreed that if the performance gains POET promised could be realized (admitting his skepticism about OPEL's claims, but also his lack of experience in compound semiconductors) and if existing fabs could use the process it had a chance to succeed.