Not sure how well this will format but here is the transcript from the Wainwright presentation (transcribed from an App)
My name is Sean Mohn and I'm an investment banking analyst at H.C. Wainwright.
I'm joined now by the CEO, Michael, of Lightwave Logic. The floor is yours.
Thank you. My name is Michael Levy. I'm the CEO of Lightwave Logic. And over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to give you an update of where we are. The title of my talk is "Making the Internet Faster and More Efficient." And today is the 11th of September. So we have our usual safe part of the slide, we're a NASDAQ listed company, LWLG.
And so an outline of what we do, I'll give a quick overview there.
I'll look into some of the market dynamics, opportunity, some competition and partnering, some commercial strategy and activity, and some AR and PR, and I'll summarize.
So what do we do? We make perkinemin electro-optic polymers.
This is a polymer-based material where if you apply a voltage, you can switch light very, very quickly.
And one of the ideal applications for this is in the data comm and telecom markets.
And so our electro-optic chromophores are the engine for modulated devices.
Modulated devices are devices that switch light.
As you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, we've been working with our material to get very high level thermal and photo stability, long-term storage, and operational durability.
These modulators that are made out of polymers are much, much faster than existing semiconductor incumbent products that you see in the marketplace today.
And they're much lower power, order of magnitude lower power than existing semiconductors.
And so what is a polymer slot modulator? Well, it's that device I'm showing in the center in the yellow square.
I've sort of shown from the right-hand bottom corner a brown bottle where we essentially put our polymer onto the device.
And that device, as you can see, we can put an optical signal in with an electrical signal.
And the optical out, which is that square wave, that red square wave, that is the information that goes across the internet.
And these types of chips end up in these cabinets on the left-hand side, as you could see in data centers.
So what this is really, a polymer slot modulator is a high-performance engine for optical networking and the internet.
And so we actually solved the problem using our polymer materials, not just for this generation, but a number of generations over the next decade.
We create our own materials.
We have a very strong IP and patent portfolio.
They switch light really quickly, much faster than, for example, liquid crystals liquid crystal displays. It's polymer-based and actually a close comparison with a different chemistry is OLEDs, organic LEDs. These are polymer LEDs. In those polymers, you put an electrical bias across them and they generate red, green, and blue light. You put an electrical bias across our polymers, they switch light really quickly. And so, yes, OLEDs are seen everywhere in TVs and displays, we want our polymers to be ubiquitous like that into modulators and the internet. They're very small, they have transformational performance, and we can integrate them into other devices into chips called PICs, which stands for a Platonic Integrated Circuit.
And so the market dynamics is really exciting these days. Some of the big demand drivers that that we see in the fiber optics market is the need for space.
That's in terms of switch density, the need for speed.
Artificial intelligence computing is really driving that.
And the need for green to lower the energy usage to keep the power consumption down.
Our modulators, as you can see from the tagline at the bottom are small, fast and low power.
And if you just look at a couple of commercial data graphs that have been out there, I mean, the one on the left interesting. I mean, it took three and a half years for Netflix to get to a million users, but chat GPT, it only took five days. And so to get to a million users, and what's really driving this is the use of computing power driven by artificial intelligence. You can see by the graph on the right hand side, which is from OpenAI, I mean, the computing power required to train these systems has been doubling every two to four months. And this is driving a lot of computational work.
Now, computational work is done by electronic IC chips, like for the companies like NVIDIA and Intel do these types of chips, but they generate a lot of information. That information needs to be sent on fiber optics. And that's where modulators that are optical can help send that information.
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>> The Achilles heels have been developing data centers.
These red boxes show you the electricity usage, which is just going up.
And you look at the blue boxes and you can see the traffic is going up.
But what that really means is, is both traffic and power needs to be reined in.
So you need to come up with solutions that have lower power consumption, as well as being able to send traffic faster.
These are the Achilles heels of the industry, which our technology really addresses.
And so drilling down into the market, The green horizontal lines are the markets we're focused on right now, which is data centers and telecommunications.
There's other horizontal lines in blue on this graph that we really haven't addressed yet, big market opportunities for us, but we're focused on the green, which as you can see is Fibrecoms, high-performance computing, data center interconnect and things like that.
And as we drill into some of the details there, this is just the Datacom Transceiver Market, which is a subset of one of those greens.
You can see in blue, this was a data reported by Coherent earlier this year.
The 800G market is going to explode because of the impact of AI.
There's supposed to be a huge market in data com, telecom, that's driving the next generation performance and our modulators fit nicely into that opportunity.
And you can see here, this is general artificial intelligence is driving rapid deployment of 800G solutions.
And as these guys, this is IDC, you look at this market, it is growing in the next two or three years.
2026 is $11 billion market, and it's already estimated at least 20% of that is going to be taken up by 800G transceivers, which is pretty fast growth.
And in fact, when we started looking at TAMs from our perspective, I mean, as you look out over the next decade, this is over 100 million units.
The blue line is the 800G, which is the one I just talked about.
And then following that pretty quickly is the 1600, which is a higher speed.
And so these are huge opportunities.
Entry segments for us, our polymer modulators are engines for transceivers.
So the 800G transceiver will look like that gray thing on the top right-hand side, but also our technology goes into silicon-photonic platforms as well as other platforms like optical and quantum computing and RF applications.
And so there's huge opportunities here for using our technology.
And in fact, we are enabling network equipment upgrades without changing the network.
You don't have to change the fiber, you don't have to change the equipment.
You just put our technology, which is like putting a V8 into a four-cylinder car, and you put it into those little boxes.
I don't know if there's a point that works here.
And those boxes all fit into the network switches and routers, and that upgrades the equipment without changing the equipment, which is really powerful.
And so the headroom in performance, this is actually in the red dotted lines.
If you look there, that's the actual commercial roadmap.
This was from Arista and our technology and their roadmap, they're showing 800G 1.6 terabit, but our technology takes it into the next generation over the next decade, which is really exciting because of our performance.
And so these electro-optic polymers, You can see from this Silicon Foundry compatibility slide, a really high in performance.
And the metric we have below is a figure of merit as low voltage gate, the power low, high bandwidth for high information transfer and a really tiny size.
And we really are nicely positioned vis-a-vis other competition.
And so we have Foundry results.
We're working with Foundry, making our polymer devices, our modulator devices.
So everything is working really nicely on that front.
These just a few SEM micrographs of some of the results.
And in terms of a commercial strategy, our business model is not just selling product.
Our business model is actually licensing our patent portfolio, because we're the only ones that create our own chromoform polymers.
And so we can license them.
And we can also do tech transfer.
And so what you're seeing here is a business model that actually use the input of technology, which is our chroma form polymer matrix IP, our device designs, fabrication, processing, high speed designs.
And then we fold that into what we call a three-pronged strategy to generate revenues.
And so one of the things that we've developed over the last few years is an extremely strong patent portfolio.
If you've got a really strong patent portfolio, then you really sort of think about the licensing because you have a really good position marketplace. We have over 70 patents issued and pending, both on materials and device designs, the packaging, and we're also looking at new patents to acquire. We've done that a couple of times and we're continually filing for new IP. In terms of what we've done in the last few months, we just put a press release out for expanding our facility in Englewood, which is just south of Denver in Colorado. It's in the tech center. You can see some of the equipment, some of the new areas we've expanded. It's really exciting for us because we've nearly doubled our square footage.
It allows us to do production device tests, production reliability. We've got an SEM analysis center. We've got the SEM, as you can see from this image here. And chemical synthesis production we've doubled the size of that so it's really exciting for us and we supported this with lots of new hires this year. In terms of near-term external activities and goals, you know when you look at the funnel, you look at the value proposition and the prospects, we're currently working to increase our customer base. We just recently had some commercial activity with license our technology, I believe I got that on the next slide, and we're building the value proposition to the customer every day now. And as we look out to 2023 and 2024, we're really focused on increasing our commercial activity, definitely through licensing materials. And so our license agreement progress, as you can see, some of the salient commercial business points, we have one commercial license in place, which we announced in May. We've got follow on licensees in progress, and that's currently a work in progress here. But generally speaking, you can see the green arrow.
You know, we started off with one, and now we're working to license more companies to use our material. This is just an example of a data sheet of our materials. This happens to be the series two. But a couple of things that I've really highlighted here is what's known as the TG, the glass transition temperature in terms of our materials is world class. And there's nothing that compares with it. And it's really what it does is it allows really superior thermal and photo stability, which is what the customers are looking for when you deal with polymer materials.
So our commercial plan looking out to 2023 and 2024 is definitely looking for adding licenses that we already have one and sort of build upon that, not only with series two, where we have a series three and five, and we're in development with series six, which is as even higher performance, higher stability and higher reliability.
Some of the things we're doing just to prove our materials to get third party verification.
Now this slide is a little bit of an eye chart for those in the audience, you're not going to be able to see all the details.
as you look at the presentation at the bottom is all the sources, so you can go online and check the sources. These are companies that have used our material into their designs, their device designs, and simply achieved world records at international conferences.
So it just gives you a third party idea that the quality of our material is really good.
And some of these designs are silicon slots, plasmonic slots, plasmonic ring resonators.
So, these different companies are using their own unique designs and getting world-class results. And these are presentations at industry conferences, not just academic.
So, this is pretty exciting. But yeah, you're not going to be able to read -- I can't even read that from here. But you can go look at the references, and this is exciting stuff.
And so, in terms of IR, we have somebody from the EMSI group here to represent us. But you can see some of activity since May, June last year. Lots of conferences attended, lots of PR about our technology. You'll find that on our website. Our institutional ownership, as you can see there, has really significantly increased over the last year and 18 months. Lots of buy side and sell side meetings. We're on the Russell 2000. So extremely active in the investor community, and it's exciting times for us. And in terms of PR, lots of PR around. So you can certainly look up Lightwave Logic, LWLG, gets lots of different activities, interviews, white papers, different types of presentations. And for Jim and I, it's been really exciting last 18 months here.
So to summarize, and I'm down to about five minutes, great material science. We're using that material science, our chromophores and our polymers, we've put that into devices called modulators. Modulators switch light really quickly, they're used on the internet everywhere in millions today. Today the semiconductor, the performance of our polymers exceeds that and you design them into a PIC. A PIC is a photonic integrated circuit as opposed to an electronic integrated circuit which is what you see microprocessors but the photonics call and picks. We've got high speed design, we've got a powerful patent portfolio, there's huge market opportunities and that's been accelerated in the last 12 months with GAI. Our business model is selling components, licensing the materials and tech transfer to foundries.
We've got material and device data sheets available and we have, I haven't gone into this too much, world-class board of directors and a technical advisory board with some of the best technical people from around the world. And so, yeah, it's for me and Jim, this is a great team.
And the takeaways, I mean, I've got four takeaways here. I mean, our technology is competitively superior and unique. We continue to increase our commercial progress. And with our partners, we are positioned to scale the polymers for optical networking and the internet.
And we have the team resources and the plans in place to really make polymers ubiquitous.
And that's really the exciting thing about this technology.
Thank you very much.
Michael, certainly appreciate you walking us through the Lightwave Logic story.
And now I'll open up for any questions.
Thank you.
Bye.
