This is exhausting.
Is everyone disappointed? Yea...and mostly just because of the share price.
I am mostly disappointed because I didn't get a concrete answer on when we'd see an EOP based transceiver prototype. Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing to be disappointed about. The progress they've made in the last 12 months is nothing to be disappointed about. The new lab and production facility, the hires, the equipment and internal capability to scale, one of the several foundry partners revealed, slot modulators progressing from 30-50Gbd (80G and 2V) to 100Gbd (200G and 1V) within the last 12 months, poling thousands of devices at a time INSIDE a foundry in a seamless process. Oh by the way...the engineer who discussed the wafer scale poling with me was more than an engineer. He was extremely polished and well spoken. Enthusiastic. Almost seemed like he's being primed for CTO. Also...you won't find him on LinkedIn but my sleuthing revealed why he's under wraps at the moment. Don't worry Polymer Paul...this isn't a carrot or anything potentially stock-moving. Just me having fun poking around looking for info. OK here's a carrot unrelated to the aforementioned info I found...he's buddies with some developers of next-gen products at NVIDIA. I don't know why he mentioned that. Probably nothing. I tongue in cheek asked if any of their next-gen products have EOP inside. He laughed and basically said he wouldn't be allowed to tell me that.
To me, Lebby saying there are other "issues" they're concerned with besides poling means "topics". Not that they're actually issues. Again, maybe "challenges" is the correct word to use here.
Hermeticity could be what he was referring to. He mentioned that in the first question in the Q&A. Also, maybe it's the new set of challenges they're facing in designing/building the 4x200G PIC chip. A different engineer mentioned they are sending "arrayed modulators" to "customers". Why the hell did Lebby only say the 4x200G is "in progress" during the Q&A? I don't know. He's not wrong. But just because he was vague doesn't mean he's lying or it's not making progress in the right direction. The challenges likely are not device performance related because they're at their targets. And we know it isn't poling. Anyone have any other ideas?
We'll learn more about the hermeticity topic after next month's ALD presentation. Again...the successful photo stability data we've seen was 4,300 hours and Marwan (sp?) told me they went beyond that. THIS IS LITERALLY AND PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO ACHEIVE IF THE ALD DIDN'T WORK AND OXYGEN WAS AN ISSUE.
I will bet money to anyone here that a transceiver company collaboration is announced this year. That will satisfy many. I also bet with the immense pressure on LWLG to deliver something impactful right now, Lebby is more inclined than ever to announce a customer. Maybe he'll convince the customer that "it makes business sense" to announce it.
We also just learned via another engineer that by the end of the year we should have the second 200G modulator revealed and then will have BOTH short-reach and long-reach capabilities covered.
Long term...I have zero doubts about this technology commercializing. Short term...I am admittedly worried because too many dumdums and loose cannons own this stock.
