Dash8400: … why is POET acquiring wafers?

Who said they are buying wafers? Yes, okay, they might want some for their lab, but in the past they did the epitaxy themselves and I don't think they need large volumes now – not in the lab.

However, they will likely need more wafers for the lab-to-fab transition at BAE Systems when doing production trial runs. On the other hand, if it's only for the lab-to-fab transition, demand would be temporary only and would not sustaining. And since they don't provide us with any details about the lab-to-fab transition, why should they mention this one in particular? And so prominently?

"The Company has, for the first time, engaged commercial epitaxial wafer suppliers in providing wafers with the unique and proprietary POET epitaxial stack. While comprehensive discussions are underway with a number of potential foundry and epitaxial wafer partners, we have recently signed memorandums of understanding with some of these companies and expect to continue this process."

The news release clearly speaks about multiple wafer suppliers. POET Technologies obviously "has engaged" (whatever that means legally) with some of them, while POET is in "comprehensive discussions" with other wafer suppliers. Multiple wafer suppliers? This does not sound like satisfying just the demand of the lab and the lab-to-fab project and nothing else!

However, there's another group of companies mentioned in the news release: the foundry partners. These are the guys who actually produce the chips. They are in need for POET wafers, because they are (resp. will be) "printing" the chip circuitry onto those wafers.

To me, this looks like POET is setting up a Fab 2.0 ecosystem for the to-be-revealed POET semiverse: with companies supplying POET wafers to anyone who need them, companies producing chips out of these wafers, companies designing chips etc. And their (our) IP is everywhere! I like it!