Educating $LWLG shareholders
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Rich, at least you're willing to admit that they're running this through an R&D fab, which is a start. We'd probably agree that they wouldn't let "anyone" run wafers through their fab, but the bar is not exactly very high.
Xena,
It takes about 20 seconds on Google to figure out that Ranovus is an independent company focused on silicon photonics, specifically silicon-based resonators and lasers. A polymer-based modulator would be competition for them.
Proof? That's how business work. If you want a service, you...pay for the service. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's common sense.
Actually squinge, on page 35 of the presentation Lebby put down the location of these foundries and they're all in North America or Europe, which is a decent indication that they have nothing to do with supply chain shortages that are coming out of Asia. As we said, these are small pilot runs that Lightwave is paying for, not a charitable foundry operation.
Carlin,
You're mixing up your foundries. The foundries in the far east experiencing disruptions and responsible for things like auto shortages are completely different than the ones running pilot tests in North America.
Don't worry, we don't think foundries are wasting much time on this. This isn't something they're doing charitably or for free, it's a bunch of pilot runs that Lightwave had to pay for. Anyway, we're not saying it could be managed, we're saying that the best case scenario is for it to be managed, but no one has really figured out how to.
This says...nothing about the effectiveness or methods of poling.
The way you're supposed to do investment research is to speak to customers, suppliers, competitors, and former employees. As we've now demonstrated in many ways, there are precisely zero industry participants that consider polymer photonics a commercial technology. The most optimistic take that you can find is that it's an interesting technology that's still at the laboratory stage. Once you accept that, and you start to speak to scientists about why it's still in the laboratory stage 40 years into the initial research, you'll get a very straight answer no matter who you speak to: it's the poling. It's been the number one problem for years, and the progress on ameliorating the problem has been slow. You can only really believe it's been "fixed" if you're completely unaware of the milieu within the industry.
Now, as we've discussed previously, "working with 5 foundries" doesn't mean anything. What does the word "working" mean? Does it mean mass scale production? Clearly not, because there's no revenue to speak of. Does it mean paying foundries for some pilot runs using polymers to make modulators? Possibly, but that's exactly what foundry companies do - they have processes and facilities for pilot products. How many of those end up commercialized? How many go back to the drawing board? How many just quietly die? This is not a foundry's problem. So "working with 5 foundries" just...doesn't mean anything.
You can read the report, but anyone with whom you speak in the business will tell you there's a poling problem that has yet to be addressed optimally. It's really worth pointing out that the poling problem is actually not one that can be "solved." It's a problem to be managed. The idea is to get acceptable yields and acceptable heterogeneity within a certain range. It's not going to be perfect.
We've never spoken to Mark or communicated with him in any way.
prototype,
We're sorry to tell you, but there is almost definitely a poling problem.
Can you point us to where in the patent is the solution to the poling problem? Thanks in advance.
theroc,
Publications at international conferences are usually memorialized as papers or posters with specific data. LWLG has shown one such poster, though from Polariton, that used LWLG's chromophores. That poster does not have much in the way of technical data at all, in contrast to what you'd normally see at a technical conference. Can you point to an actual publication from LWLG or its scientists? We mean a technical paper published in an actual scientific trade journal. We'd look forward to reading it.
This is pretty funny in retrospect given how successful silicon photonics has been.
Not particularly surprising. Many investors began to become acquainted with the Lightwave story after the stock rocketed on no news last year, in tandem with many other zero-revenue meme-like-stocks.
We have zero affiliation with Mark Lutkowitz and we've never spoken to him or with him.
We're not sure who Mark L is, sorry. We really don't know who's being referenced here.
Rich, to be clear, we never claimed Optica is "the authority on industry technology." We are claiming that it's one of the major photonic industry associations, and if LWLG has a legitimate shot at commercializing something, then you'd see it published in the official trade journals under Optica's auspices. I'm not attacking Pozo's integrity - I'm simply claiming that his position does not remotely make him an authority on polymer photonics.
Rich,
You can trust him all you want, but if you're going to put money on the table, you might want to verify what he's saying with real-life indications that he knows what he's talking about and not just parroting a press release from LWLG. He clearly didn't realize how wrong he was on Rockley, and it's likely he doesn't realize how wrong he is on Lightwave.
We would add that it's somewhat laughable that Pozo has also spoken of Rockley Photonics very highly. Rockley has claimed that it can make a chip that would enable photo-sensing of biomarkers, which is a claim that's even more aggressive than what Theranos was making with respect to biomarkers. Since Pozo's excitable comments on Rockley, when it went public via the SPAC route, the stock declined from $15 in its first day of trading to about $2. Maybe it's not such a great sign that Pozo was talking up Lightwave.
To be crystal clear, we have zero affiliation with NLM.
Rich,
So the fact that the CTO of a trade organization once thanked Lebby for helping him now suddenly proves that Lightwave's technology matters? This is quite the stretch, don't you think?
Anyway, our point is much more substantive than that. We'd love if you can show us anywhere in Optica's major conferences or papers that polymer photonics have gotten out of the lab and into the real world.
prototype,
Lightwave is not the active ingredient in Polariton's modulators. We've spoken to the designers at both NLM and Polariton. It's absolutely true that the two press releases that mention Lightwave use Lightwave's polymers in the modulators (including the world record one, which by the way, has been matched since then with a thin-film LiNbO modulator made by Huawei).
Anyway, Polariton actually has single product shown on its website: it's a plasmonic 110 GHz Mach-Zehnder modulator: https://www.polariton.ch/product-plasmonic-mach-zehnder-modulator. This is NOT the modulator made with Lightwave's materials, it's made with NLM's materials. We confirmed this by speaking to people at Polariton and NLM, but if you want actual proof, you can see that in the announcement Polariton made of the availability of "The World’s First Plasmonic-Organic Hybrid Devices" it says that the material used is "NLM’s organic electro-optic material, HLD." A copy of the Polariton press release is here: https://www.polariton.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Press-release-NLM-Polariton.pdf?_ga=2.19894971.2054417883.1648985525-1698945012.1648985525
The world-record modulator referenced in the press release with Lightwave - https://www.polariton.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Lightwave-Logic-and-Polariton-Technologies-Achieve-World-PDF.pdf - is not a Mach-Zehnder design, it's a racetrack design. That press release was in September, so it's worth noting that Polariton actually announced a NEW world record with its "fully-packaged >110 GHz C-band plasmonic Mach-Zehnder modulator." Emphasis theirs is ours, but that's the modulator made with NLM's materials in an MZ design, and not the modulator made with Lightwave's materials in a racetrack design. The racetrack modulator was experimental whereas the modulator being sold by Polariton uses NLM's materials.
They might be required to publish some data, but they've published so prolifically it's hard to ignore. The same is true of Polariton. Companies with legitimate research programs in technically demanding arenas publish their science, and this is true in all fields. There's plenty of primary research to publish without giving away any secrets.
Prototype,
On page 31 of the polymer section, you can see that there are only two contributors, Lebby and Felix Betschon, who's involved with a company that makes polymer waveguides. These aren't exactly disinterested parties here.
https://photonicsmanufacturing.org/sites/default/files/documents/front-end_polymer_materials_3.pdf
We don't think it's a moot point at all. The IPSR roadmap was basically just invented in 2020 by a group that includes Lebby as a member. If you look at the major trade organizations - the IEEE Photonics Society (https://www.photonicssociety.org/) or IEEE ComSoc (https://www.comsoc.org/) or Optica (https://www.optica.org/en-us/home/) - which are the organizations under which the major trade journals are published, and in which the most influential and prominent papers are presented, and which contain thousands of members rather than a strange group of 350-400 members...
If you look at where the serious conversations are being had, none of them includes polymers very prominently, or frequently, at all.
For the record, we think NLM is ahead of Lightwave - far far ahead - in organic materials modulation, which is why they've actually commercialized a modulator at small scale with Polariton (Lightwave has commercialized precisely nothing for what it's worth). We don't think they've solved the poling problem, but they've made a lot more progress on it than Lightwave from what we've seen in the public record (see the 30+ published papers on NLM's website for details).
Richard, we've posted this elsewhere, but in response to your quoting of the IPSR materials, we'll repeat this here:
It's pretty comical that the IPSR discussion on polymers is being used to support the narrative of industry acceptance of polymers. The IPSR section on polymers was written by none other than Michael Lebby, who seems like a not disinterested party here. This would be like a pharmaceutical company touting a particular mechanism of action at an industry conference while conveniently ignoring that it's trying to convince investors that this mechanism of action can be commercialized.
Unsurprisingly, the IPSR discussion of polymers is not that different than Lebby's talking points, which he's repeated almost without change for the last 5 years. There's a certain irony in Lebby then quoting the IPSR roadmap to corroborate his claims when he's the one who wrote the IPSR roadmap.
Nevertheless, we would note that even in this highly biased piece, the roadmap says that "Over the next 10 years, there will be a significant amount of work to show end-users more R&QA (reliability and quality assurance) data to support optical polymers in commercial applications." Back in 2020, when this was written, it was a lot less promotional than the timelines currently being discussed on this message board. The best case scenario back then was that it would take a decade to conduct tests showing the reliability of the product. Worth noting that those tests have yet to be performed.
It's pretty comical that the IPSR discussion on polymers is being used to support the narrative of industry acceptance of polymers. The IPSR section on polymers was written by none other than Michael Lebby, who seems like a not disinterested party here. This would be like a pharmaceutical company touting a particular mechanism of action at an industry conference while conveniently ignoring that it's trying to convince investors that this mechanism of action can be commercialized.
Unsurprisingly, the IPSR discussion of polymers is not that different than Lebby's talking points, which he's repeated almost without change for the last 5 years. There's a certain irony in Lebby then quoting the IPSR roadmap to corroborate his claims when he's the one who wrote the IPSR roadmap.
Yes, modulators are pretty ubiquitous. They're in every single transceiver in existence. We don't think anyone is disputing that.
X,
We're not disputing that there's a power savings to be had with polymer modulators. We're just saying it's insignificant compared to the power being consumed by the laser driver, TIA, and most importantly, the DSP.
Believer,
"Organic" just means carbon-based, or in other words, polymer. Perkinamine is one kind of organic material, but there are many thousands of kinds, and if you look at NLM's prior work, you'll see that they've published on maybe 10 different kinds of organic materials. "Organic" is what's used when referring to polymer/plasmonic devices.
Ha indeed, but we're happy to go on record saying we have no idea who that is, but we wouldn't be surprised if there are other investors on here.
We'd agree with that response that said that it's not very relevant. The actual cost, as well as the proportion of the cost, of the modulator driver chip is going to vary with the particular use-case. Shorter distance generally can tolerate less precise components than longer distance. It's meaningless to put a price on this. Modulators can cost in the tens of dollars or in the thousands of dollars, depending on the distance and the complexity (coherent modulators used in conjunction with DSP error correction for long distances, for example) of the transmission end-use. The same applies for their drivers.
X,
All modulators embed data directly onto the beam. The question is how much power is required to power the electrodes that apply the electric field to the modulator, and what the bias voltage of the device is going to be. Our point, and we've said this before, is that both of these combined are a very small fraction of the total power consumed in an optical module.
Lew, driver-less modulators might be great in theory, but as we've posted here before (edantes must not have seen this, though we posted this in our report), the modulator driver and the modulation is an extremely small proportion of the optical module's power consumption.
matty, that's not how it works. Part of a foundry's business is to do test runs for customers in smaller facilities. Sure there are chip shortages for automobile semiconductors, but that's not in the same ballpark as what's being discussed here.
Rich,
We've previously posted our point by point response to your point by point piece, and we haven't really seen much that demonstrates that we were wrong anywhere. We'll follow up with a discussion of datacom chips, but suffice it to say here that at the current time, direct-detect is still incredibly small even in that market. If you look at the array of Broadcom chips that are installed in datacom boxes, more than likely you're looking at a chip with a DSP. Our thesis is mostly straightforward, which is that:
1. We don't think polymer photonics can be commercialized
2. Even if it can, Lightwave is actually not at the forefront of polymer photonics and the stage of laboratory prototypes that it claims are actually not that different than what the industry is already using
3. Even if polymer photonics can be commercialized, it won't make a very big impact
It's really that simple.
As we said previously, the foundries are happy to waste time and money on pilot runs of chips as long as the customer is willing to pay them for it.
And it doesn't stand to reason that Lebby was discussing yields after the poling step at all. If he were, we don't think he would have been bragging about it.
1. Kerrisdale has stated that even if the technology can be commercialized, it's insignificant.
To be clear, we've made both arguments: We don't think the technology can be commercialized. We also think that even if the technology could be commercialized, it will take years to get there, and that for the overwhelming majority of data transmission use cases, it will be insignificant. So yes, there are two sets of arguments there.
2. Why are Polariton, EPIC and ECOC excited about a technology which, even in the best case (i.e. it can be easily commercialized), is of no significance?
Everyone is excited about what they're working on, which explains why Polariton is excited. Why are scientists affiliated with EPIC and ECOC who have dedicated their entire careers to trying to advance polymer photonics excited about polymer photonics? We think the question answers itself.