Here is the interview transcript with Cory Johnson and Michael Lebby on The Drill Down episode 116:
CJ: Alright coming up, we've got a really interesting conversation with a really interesting company that for a very long time has been trying to create a new way to move information on the internet. They haven't quite got there yet. We'll talk to LWLG's CEO Dr. Michael Lebby when the Drill Down continues.
CJ: We're joined right now by Michael Lebby. He is the CEO of Lightwave Logic and glad to have you on. Thanks for coming by. So what is Lightwave Logic, what do you guys do?
ML: So we're a company that's based in Colorado. We make what is known as optical modulator devices. These are devices that get used in the internet. You know the internet where you have your traffic. Where you go onto different internet sites. Where you're working from home or on a video platform. And Our devices switch light really fast. They do it also at low power. So why is this interesting? It's because our devices if they can switch light really fast, then you can send internet traffic a lot faster. And so we've all really sorta suffered through the pandemic where we've all had situations where the signal hasn't been good and we've turned the camera off to try and get a better quality signal.
CJ: Story of my life. Story of this podcast. We are constantly doing that.
ML: Completely. And so, if the signal going into your home or the signal going across the internet can at faster speeds, then we wouldn't have these problems at all. And we've got a technology that switches light really fast.
CJ: Where are you in the stages? Cause I can see your company is zero revenue. Is that right? You haven't sold any of these yet?
ML: That's correct, we are a pre-revenue company. But our technology, unlike other optical switching technologies that are out there into the network today that use semi-conductors, our technology uses polymers. Optical polymers. And these polymers operate similar to a liquid crystal type situation in a TV. Where if you apply a field or a voltage across the polymer, you can actually switch the light. So these are called electro-optic polymers. We make these polymers in Colorado and we put them into devices and those devices switch light very quickly and they get used in the internet.
CJ: Or they will be at some point in time. At what point in the development process are you? To whom will you sell these?
ML: Obviously this starts with the chemistry. We turn the chemistry into a physical device. So, the part where we are today is we have made prototypes and we have tested our own modulators. We've shown results even today, at the earlier presentation today, we showed results that showed performance, 2 to 3 times faster than what's out there in the internet today. So, super high performance. So yes, we've got prototype devices. We are actually positioning ourselves to scale those prototype devices into a full scale product.
CJ: With whom would this compete, once you get a product ready for market?
ML: So, the internet is full of optical components already.
CJ: Sure. It has been for decades.
ML: So, we would compete with modulators made from silicon or Indium Phosphide.
CJ: Which companies though? Is what I'm saying.
ML: The companies that really drive silicon photonics, silicon modulators are companies are like Intel's and Cisco's of this world. The companies that handle the Indium Phosphide modulators are companies like the Lumentum's of the world. There are plenty of other companies out there too, like for example, I think in Japan Fujitsu has Indium Phosphide modulators. What we represent is a company having a device that is much much faster and much lower power. Lower power is actually one of those key hot buttons, when you talk to anyone in fiber optics who's dealing with data centers and different type of switch scenarios, servers and routers. Keeping the power consumption down is actually key these days.
CJ: You'll sell to the makers of the boxes that go into the switches and routers of the internet? You’ll sell to them to the Cisco’s and the Ericson’s of the world?
ML: The customer base will include those types of companies you just mentioned. But you also have to remember, these customers today are vertically integrated. What I mean vertically integrated is they have pretty much everything in their portfolio. They can design chips, they can package chips, they and put them into modules, they can make line cards, they can do sub-systems. As a company trying to sell components, we have to be flexible not only to sell components, but some of these customers will say “hey we’ve already got our own big fab, or we have our own manufacturing site, or we have our own contract manufacturer, we need you to work with them so we can use your product.” So we have to be flexible enough, with this type of technology, that we can do tech transfers, or licensing our technology to some other big CMOS Silicon foundries, for example. It just depends on what type of customer you talk to.
CJ: Talk to me about how old the companies is. When I looked at it through the financial filings, it says the company was formed in 1997 in a Nevada Corp. Is that right?
ML: That is true, the original founders, they are not with us anymore. The original founders actually came from Dupont. They started an entity in the late 1990’s. I believe we were first informed to the public markets around 2006. And from 2006 to when I joined in 2015, the company really focused on developing the materials, the chemical materials. The electro-optic polymers. The polymers that can switch light when you apply a voltage to them. And then when I joined, we really built out the company to turn the chemistry material into devices. Into actual modulator devices, where you can actually physically use in the internet.
CJ: What was you record, what were you doing before that?
ML: My background is obviously, well I’m a techy and I’ve been a techy for a very long time. When I started off in this country, as you can probably tell from my accent, I’m came from London. I came here in 1985, worked at Bell Labs, then worked at various other places like Motorola and Intel in corporate research and development. That means I haven’t been a professor, per se, but I’ve worked in taking new innovate ideas in industry and turning them into products.
CJ: So, you’re a doctor. What’s your doctorate in?
ML: My doctorates in…
CJ: I hope it’s something really really geeky.
ML: Actually, when I got my doctorates, I was doing Gallium Arsenide and Indium Phosphide materials and I was fabricating those materials into both electronic transistors as well as LEDs and lasers.
CJ: I was going to say it’s mostly semiconductors with Gallium Arsenide.
ML: Yeah semiconductors.
CJ: Is this fundamentally different then other optical devices, because optical switches and optical devices have been in the market for a very long time.
ML: It’s relative, take liquid crystals. They’re an optical switch. You use them in televisions and displays like LCD displays. But if you notice the displays actually get a blur, because you can’t switch light very quickly. And so, yes there are other materials that switch light, but there’s very few that switch light at the speed that is required for the next generation of internet type systems. So, the materials that we’ve developed and optimized, switch light super fast and they do it at voltages less than a volt. There’s very low voltage. Now if you think about that for a second, most modulators need their own driver, driver chip. When you have a driver chip, you have to purchase your own IC or an independent IC to drive the modulator. If the modulator can be driven with voltages of a volt or less, you can drive it from any CMOS circuit. So if you got an ASIC or a DSP or even an FPGA you don’t need a driver chip.
CJ: Which is to say that those are chips, that are in chip land, are dumb chips. An ASIC chip or an FPGA, a fully programable logic, is a chip that really doesn’t do too much, doesn’t require a lot of power, it’s not very complicated. It’s not like the CPU in your personal computer or phone that’s doing incredible tasks. It’s a dedicated chip that does very simple tasks. Where it operates at low power, doesn’t take up a lot of space, doesn’t get too hot.
ML: Some of that’s true. What I think the message of what I’m trying to say is the customer doesn’t need to buy independent driver chips, they can driver their modulators from any silicon circuitry. Now one of the other things that you mentions is power, DSP chips, digital signal processing chips, are actually used today and they consume tons of power. Because they are 5/6/7 nanometer nodes. And so they’re very expensive silicon. They’re used to clean up the optical signals because today’s optical devices don’t go very fast. And so what we have today, if you look out there into the network modulators, work roughly 30-40Ghz in bandwidth. I’m slowing down here as I’m getting into some technical terms. To get a higher speed, a 30Ghz goes 50Gbits a second. That’s fairly fast. You want to double the speed, you use a PAM 4 encoding. Which is a special encoding of the optical signal where you double the speed. You need electronics to do that. Electronics that consume a lot of power. Now this is where we are today, if you had a device that went three times as fast, and I just showed results this morning that showed our devices with bandwidths with over 100Ghz, that’s 3 times faster. You may take the choice, that hey maybe I don’t want to use the expensive electronics. Or maybe you do and you go double or triple the speed. So you’re giving the customer more options of how they would plan their network.
CJ: Now you sold even more stock, the company sold another 30 million dollars of stock this summer. Is that right? In July?
ML: We certainly put a deal together with Lincoln Capitol and out of that deal they invested 3 million dollars of cash to us. So why would we want to do something like that? Because once you get onto NASDAQ, and we were listed on NASDAQ as of 1st of September, NASDAQ gives you the opportunity to work with big institutional banks, raise more money. And if you can do that, then you can get to the market faster. Really, the goal here, is to make our technology ubiquitous into the optical network. To do that you need to have scale.
CJ: Yeah, which gets back to my original question. When does that happen? When do you think you’re going to actually start selling product?
ML: So, we haven’t provided that detailed guidance as of yet. What we have done this year is we have provided guidance on working with big CMOS foundries, silicon foundries. You need the partnership with the big foundries to get the scale for commercialization. It would be silly for us to go put a big silicon fab together ourselves, because they cost a billion dollars and that doesn’t make any sense.
CJ: Takes a minute to build too.
ML: If you can partner with the folks who already have the building and facilities in place, then you can get to market faster. So, I haven’t really answered your question because we haven’t provided public guidance, but we are certainly working that problem as hard as we can.
CJ: Dr. Michael Lebby, thank you very much for your time. He’s the CEO of Lightwave Logic, and thanks for coming by.
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