Many years ago, when I was earning my BSEE, “stereo” was “BINAURAL” and was only available via big tape machines or a double track LP record requiring a tone arm with TWO parallel cartridges that you had to set down on the disc very carefully!  The IEEE (our professional society) was the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers)!  The TRANSISTOR was in its infancy!  And a funny little device consisting of a quarter sized piece of bakelite and concentric cylinders of aluminum was developed by RCA (Radio Corporation of America) together with a mating male plug to solve the problem of easily connecting shielded audio cables to interface analog audio devices such as amplifiers, receivers, turntables, and record players!  This SIMPLE little device is still used 65 years later!  Some are gold-plated now but how many dozens of them do you have on the back panel of your latest digital receiver? And how many quadrillions of these RCA plug & Jack connectors have been made and used over these 65 years?

As you can tell, I am rather OLD!  And my EE training was WAY before fibre optics, lasers, and PHOTONICS.  Now, I think I understand the basics, but I would really like one of our resident experts to explain for me and perhaps many others lurking here, is POET’s “Optical Interposer” going to be the RCA plug & jack of the 21st century?  Is there a competition going on out there with other companies in this field to build the bridge between photons and electrons, to build the interposer that becomes the multi-decadal IEEE Standard that every entity in the photonics business uses by default – sort of like the RCA Plug and Jack?  Is our (POET’s) optical interposer in a position to be that iconic standard device, or will it just wind up on the junk heap of great ideas like 8-track tape cartridges, portable CD players, and 45 rpm records??

MtnView