I write this post because I hope to explain and advise that comparing these 2 companies: ARM and PTK, as if equals, profoundly unsound. It is a criticism of anyone.

ARM is a Cambridge, UK., company valued around $24 Billion and POET a Canadian company valued around $300 million.

ARM has been existence for many years, it designs and licences code for the design and manufacture of microprocessors predominantly for mobile technology. It does not manufacture processors but owns and licenses the machine coding that enables them to work. Its codes are known as Reduced Instructional Set Codes (RISC) and differ from Personal Computing (PC) and other high end computing which are Complex Instructional Set Coding (CISC). Because of the simpler coding and reduced demand on the Central Processing Unit microprocessor (CPU), heat losses and speed are significantly altered favourably. Hence they are used extensively in mobile technology. The company's income is wrapped up in the highly sophisticated intellectual property concerned with such technology and they remain highly successful.

POET is a new type of microprocessor, based not on Silicon but Gallium Arsenide (GaAS), which has been known for many years as a much more favourable semiconducor material. Over the coming months or so, it is hoped to produce these microprocessor using this substrate GaAs. To do this, the manufacturing company (which will not be PTK) will require extensive software to enable it to repeatedly and reliably produce these microprocessors and they will require modification and upgrade to deal with the requirements of the purchasing companies who buy the microprocessor. To do this PTK has produced Technology Design Kits (TDK's) which will be available generally by the 3rd. quarter of 2014. To make a POET microprocessor function, it will require either an RISC or CISC microprocessor or, as POET is a monolithic chip, this code will be written onto the chip. As ARM hold patents for such activity, how this is achieved is open to question, and decided not by POET but by the manufacturer of the technology in which a POET microprocessor will be used.

Consequently, ARM and POET have quite different aims and functions and any overlap is well outside their primary roles. To compare the companies is inappropriate and misleading. It would be like comparing Intel and Microsoft as if they were rivals and doing the same thing when it is obvious they are not. In many ways they are compementary.

David.