POET – component cost against competition

00:47:37 – Suresh Venkatesan:This is to give you some perspective of cost. We’ve run some cost models, we know what foundries cost us, we know what our epitaxial cost is, we’ve kind of factored in what our yields would be. If we just take a typical cost against a competitive solution out there, if we were to sell a single detector, the cost to manufacture that for us is about 33 times lower (33x) than what a competing solution costs. So this is just to give you a sense when I say „hey, why is this a value proposition, why is it important?“ In the worst case we are 2x lower and in the best case we could be up to 33x lower. So we are not talking about small changes of 10 percent or 20 percent, we are talking about 100 percent or 1000 percent.

00:48:23 – So that is what to me, integration does, and that’s what integration, whether it be indium phosphide with DenseLight or indium phosphide with BB Photonics or POET gallium arsenide, integration helps drive costs, and driving costs down drives adoption up. And so that’s really the wave we want to go down and that’s the wave …

00:48:44 – I mean, others are doing it, too, it’s not like we’re the only one out there thinking that this is the wave of the future. There are a lot of people trying to work with silicon photonics, for example, it’s a fairly popular technology out there, a lot of people working on it and with the same thought processes: Find a way to integrate photonics together. There are a lot of companies, Acacia just went IPO with silicon photonics solutions. The good thing about silicon photonics and indium phosphide is every silicon photonics chip requires an indium phosphide laser. It puts us in a really good growth position even from that perspective, because we’re a laser provider. We can provide into the silicon photonics industry while, at the same time, making our own integrated chip to compete for those same pockets. It gives us kind of a foot in both camps, if you will, in terms of integration.