A Fairy Tale or Not?
Current modulators found within transceivers turn laser light into discrete 1’s and 0’s that carry information via fiber cable throughout the Internet’s mesh network. The data load on the Internet infrastructure, however, has reached the point where the network is throwing up periodic blockages and less than needed data rates. Along comes a small company named Lightwave Logic with its electro-optical polymers and a Photonic Industry thought leader CEO who develops industry roadmaps.
The Naysayers and naked shorts rise up in opposition and do their things. LWLG keeps its nose to the grindstone, hires PhD staff and enlarges its industry network partner relationships. Its polymers and modulator devices demonstrate that light can be switched 3x faster (creating larger bandwidth and faster data flow rates) than legacy semi-conductor modulators and do so at significantly less power consumption.
Some LWLG investors initiate a call for instant stockholder gratification and the technology be damned. They demand production at scale now and ignore that industry adoption, while gaining momentum, is not quite at a tipping point.
At the end of 2022, at several industry confabs, LWLG presented the results of third party research experiments in which its e-o polymers played pivotal roles in generating record speed switching results. The company’s 2023 roadmap includes, in part, turning those results into development prototypes which will be tested by its foundry, packaging and transceiver partners, then enhanced and refined as further steps in the ever closer goal of commercialization. To this point, LWLG’s CEO Michael Lebby expressed his vision of the time when “Polymers on the Internet will swap out semi-conductor modulators.”
