Here's the transcript of the Sequire presentation
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Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker 1
I mean, just look at the red box on the right hand side. How many times have we seen this? Have we got a poor connection? Now we have to turn off the display because we don't have enough bandwidth. And so basically this is a problem that the Internet in general is having. We need some radical innovation to actually send more data and send that data lower.
00:00:21 Speaker 1
And so when you start looking into data center, Internet infrastructure, those choke points, there's slow information going through data centers. And so you can see whether you start on the left and you follow those arrows to the right and you can see there needs to be some innovation to sort out what's inside the data centers in terms of equipment.
00:00:41 Speaker 1
We have technology to improve that.
00:00:45 Speaker 1
And so you look at some graphs here, I'm not going to go into the details of this graph. You can look afterwards, but there's red boxes and there's green boxes or sorry blue boxes on color. Blind today the red boxes show that the power is increasing almost exponentially. And we know that data centers have this Achilles heel. The other thing is this traffic's going up.
00:01:05 Speaker 1
We knew traffic went up during COVID and everybody was working from home. Now we know traffic is going up because of Gai.
00:01:12 Speaker 1
Generative artificial intelligence. And so these are the Achilles heels of the industry and they're looking for solutions in technology and products to sort that out.
00:01:23 Speaker 1
And so just taking a quick look at some Gai slides from a systems optical networking company, you can see here just on this graph here. I mean this is Moore's law, that's that red box. It doesn't look like it's growing that fast. We know it's a really fast growth and technology in real estate over the last 50 years. But just look at the large language model sizes of artificial intelligence.
00:01:47 Speaker 1
Those green boxes, it's driving everything. So in the last two years, what it's done is it's driven the data center companies to invest lots of CapEx to upgrade their equipment so they can send more information.
00:02:00 Speaker 1
Now, if we think about this for a second, you know the Nvidia's of this world have GPU chips, which is electronic computational processing. But we've got to send that information somewhere, and you typically send it in fiber optic cables across interconnects across the network. And what we do is we help the photonics.
00:02:20 Speaker 1
On the interconnects and so where I indirectly benefiting from the Gali.
00:02:26 Speaker 1
And that's really exciting for us, I guess. And so the demand drivers that increased over the last two years, 18 months to two years switch density, the need for space, these data centers are getting too big. The need for speed artificial intelligence is generating more information from machine learning.
00:02:46 Speaker 1
Neural networks and that needs to be addressed and energy usage too. I mean the power consumption is going through the roof, so there's need for green type solutions. These are the big macro trends where we're actually.
00:02:58 Speaker 1
Dressing. So what do we do? We make Electro optic polymers. You can see here. There's a little bit of chemistry on the left, but the the point is is when we make these in Denver, Co we source all the raw materials on shore. We don't have to wait for boats coming across the Pacific or anything like that. We have a manufacturing chemistry facility there.
00:03:18 Speaker 1
And we have deep experience with the characterization test in lifetime reliability of these materials.
00:03:26 Speaker 1
And so solving the problem for the data center environment where we obviously create our own materials, we got a long, strong IP portfolio. But these materials modulate the light, they switched the light really quickly, very fast. The very small to very low power and we can put them on big silicon wafers which we run in foundries.
00:03:47 Speaker 1
You can see we've got our ward on the top right hand corner of this graph and there's a couple of cross sections there of what our device looks like is a big one in the next slide or two slides on, but essentially we solved the problem using our technology.
00:04:02 Speaker 1
And there's lots of opportunities to use polymer modulators both in pluggable transceivers. You know, it's like putting a V8 engine into that little box. There's about an inch wide and three inches long. We can turbo boost silicon photonics on big silicon wafers. We can actually add faster.
00:04:22 Speaker 1
Lower power and smaller performance to different types of circuits in fiber optic communications, but essentially what we do is we enable high performance data communications.
00:04:34 Speaker 1
And the markets we're focused in were not a huge company. We're about 35 people in Denver, Co are in those four top horizontal lines. That's fiber optic communications, fibre communications, high performance computing, data center, interconnect, etcetera. You can see in the Gray area the optical transceiver.
00:04:55 Speaker 1
Markets the Tams are huge. What we are not focused on is the optical free space.
00:05:03 Speaker 1
Wireless markets, which are the ones below that Orange line below this line, you can see those are projection displays, LIDAR, optical sensing, structured light. And so we don't have the resources to cover all these markets. So we're focusing on the fiber markets right now. But if any of our partners want to use our material.
00:05:24 Speaker 1
License our material to go into those markets more happily to work deals with that. And so these markets are actually quite huge and they're really exciting, but we're focusing on the top.
00:05:36 Speaker 1
For here and so one of the things that you have to think about is when you put your material, which is a liquid material, you spin it onto a big silicon wafer, you want to be able to do that in a big silicon foundry. Now we have a small foundry in Denver, Co, but we're not going to raise two or three or $400 million to put a big factory together when there's thirty or forty of these guys.
00:05:57 Speaker 1
Around the world.
00:05:58 Speaker 1
And so obviously silicon technology goes really nice in silicon foundries because it's silicon of course, but our technology fits really nicely in terms of compatibility in silicon foundries, visa via other semiconductor technologies that are used for optical modulators. And so for us, that allows us to use the existing infrastructure and scale.
00:06:20 Speaker 1
Volume and that's really important when you want to get to volume with the new technology.
00:06:26 Speaker 1
And you know, we showed this graph for the first time about two weeks ago. This is our optical modulators on 200mm silicon wafers that come from a silicon foundry. And so this is commercial foundry. This is volume scale and these are our silicon slot modulator designs on standard wafers. And there's a little.
00:06:45 Speaker 1
Rule there that has 150mm. If you can read it, but this is really nice to see. This is what our slim modulators look like. If anybody is technically inclined what a modulator is is a little slot.
00:06:58 Speaker 1
It looks like this and the light goes in here, gets modulated.
00:07:02 Speaker 1
Goes out there. It's pretty simple and it actually gets fabricated on a big silicon wafer. You can see from the bullet points on the right, you get really high performance here. Low Dr. voltage means very low power consumption consumption. Very high bandwidth means super fast speed. These are the things that folks are looking for in the data.
00:07:23 Speaker 1
Turner environment.
00:07:25 Speaker 1
And so this slide is a bit technical, so I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but what it talks about is the modulation and eyes one of the metrics when you have a very high performance component is do you have open eyes? And in orange here open eyes means a high.
00:07:41 Speaker 1
Quality of transmission of the ones and zeros and you don't get any errors. This is what folks are really looking for and the eye is actually this but.
00:07:51 Speaker 1
Here's the eye.
00:07:52 Speaker 1
See these black?
00:07:54 Speaker 1
Areas and so those eyes are open. Then you're going to have really good communications. We just demonstrated on the next slide. This was 2, two weeks ago, world class performance, this is 200 gigabits per second at a vault. Some of the results here are less than a Volt. This is world class performance. We actually showed these results in.
00:08:14 Speaker 1
A big international trade show.
00:08:16 Speaker 1
So.
00:08:16 Speaker 1
A week and a half ago called off C Optical Fibre Conference in San Diego, got the attention of a lot of people. One of the things you see from the data here is that we have open eyes and this is what everybody's looking for. So the performance of our technology is really impressing the customer base right now.
00:08:36 Speaker 1
One of the things we also did we worked with the university in Switzerland.
00:08:40 Speaker 1
When you have a new technology and you get the new technology working at really nice performance or world class performance, one of the questions that comes back from the customers are well, is your technology good for one generation or future generations? So this slide shows that just working with our material with the university in Switzerland, they actually showed double the.
00:09:00 Speaker 1
Speed. And so it's 200G400G. And so if you look at the road maps of customers today, 400 and 800, we have a technology that goes even beyond that. So we have a technology not for this generation for future generations and that's really exciting because the incumbent semiconductor technologies are not making it. And so that's one of the things you need to do to displace an incumbent.
00:09:22 Speaker 1
Technology is to show that your technology is better, but not only better today, but better for the next decade.
00:09:31 Speaker 1
The business plan, our business plan includes two major factors, licensing our material and supply agreements and selling the modulators themselves and we can see from that center circle there we will looking at product sales as well as licensing our technology. We'll even tech transfer to big silicon foundries if they want to go off into.
00:09:51 Speaker 1
Other markets like LIDAR and projection display and sensing, but the goals are on the right hand side.
00:09:58 Speaker 1
We want to make polymers ubiquitous, just like Oleds. We all know what Oleds are these days that are organic LEDs. During all our televisions and displays and mobile phones. Those are polymers too. In those polymers, you put a little voltage across them and you generate light, you know red, green and blue and you can make a display.
00:10:18 Speaker 1
Without polymers, you put a voltage across ours and you can switch light optically really fast. You can change it to your optical refractive index.
00:10:26 Speaker 1
And we want to have polymers all over the Internet. That's our goal. We want to have different device teams use our polymers in their device designs. We want to be able to sell modulators using our material and our designs, and we won't.
00:10:40 Speaker 1
Foundries using our polymers in their PDF's, which is their process development kits or their recipes if you like.
00:10:49 Speaker 1
We're also at the bottom of this slide and I think I've got it in the next slide. We had our first material commercial material supply license agreement. I think it's this slide here and we put together our robust license agreement to supply our material and this has royalties. This has license initiation fees.
00:11:08 Speaker 1
This is multi year and this has minimum sales criteria we haven't named who our partner is in this case, but this just indicates that at least one of our customers really likes our patent Paul Filler on the technology and is willing to license our.
00:11:24 Speaker 1
Technology, this slide I.
00:11:27 Speaker 1
Was the patents that we have in place, they're not just chemistry patents for the polymers as you can see from this circle on the left hand side, we have device design packaging as well as new patents in different types of areas that support our materials and it's in the region of 70 patents plus these days. So we have a fairly.
00:11:48 Speaker 1
Sizeable patent portfolio.
00:11:51 Speaker 1
In terms of commercializing our chromophores, the the chromophores we commercialized last year are the 2-3 and five series that are very high performance, albeit slightly different parameters for different applications. We were developing number six last year and that's ready to license this year. I've colored that orange because.
00:12:11 Speaker 1
We're still working on license agreements for six. So as we move into 2025, clearly we're going to increase the number of licensees to our technology as well as provide prototype technology to different types of customers in the data center environment.
00:12:29 Speaker 1
In terms of near term commercial activities and goals, our focus is to get more commercial activity as we go through 2024 and 2025 to turn some of the prospects and leads into real customers. One of the interesting observations over the last 9 to 12 months is because of the effects of artificial intelligence.
00:12:50 Speaker 1
The drive to upgrade data centers to higher performance technologies.
00:12:56 Speaker 1
Instead of pushing a new technology platform, which is what we were doing two years ago, we're being pulled along. In fact, I think we're it's rightly to say we're being dragged along and people really want new technologies to have much higher performance. And so you can see from the green box here as we go from 24 to 25 engagement with tier ones, twos and threes.
00:13:17 Speaker 1
For both material supply licensing as well as polymer modular prototypes is just increase.
00:13:24 Speaker 1
Now, as a company that is, you know, 3035 people, we can't deal with everybody. So we are choosing the right number of tier ones, twos and threes to engage with and this is going to be an exciting time for us.
00:13:38 Speaker 1
So in terms of this growth, we have to actually increase our facility and team as well to support this. So last year we expanded our facility in Denver, Co we added about 10K square feet and that that enjoins our current facility. You can see a picture of it in the bottom right hand corner.
00:13:58 Speaker 1
The new space is being used for production, test and evaluation reliability, as well as chemistry, and so we've added some more people to the team. In addition to this, as you can see from the bullet points on the bottom. So we're actually increasing our burn rate, we're increasing our growth in terms of the size of the company and the facilities.
00:14:18 Speaker 1
To deal with this demand, and I feel that we're doing a pretty good job there.
00:14:27 Speaker 1
We have an experienced management on board. You can see from folks here we have some deep technical folks to really understand the Internet and the optical networking environment for example, where Fred there in the left hand side, he was one of The Pioneers of optical modulators, 30 maybe 40 years ago.
00:14:44 Speaker 1
I remember that far back, but he's been a a person who's really been helpful in making sure we design the right type of technology for the right type.
00:14:54 Speaker 1
Market, we have the person below him, Saraj, who ran his own transceiver company, really understands how we can put a force change of 4 cylinder engine into a V8 for these types of transceivers and we have other folks on the board that are really deeply technical. And so that's really good for us. So the key takeaways from Lightwave logic.
00:15:15 Speaker 1
We believe our polymers are positioned to become unique.
00:15:18 Speaker 1
Curtis, we certainly want to follow the OLED trend. I mean that's been very successful. We're addressing large markets in the optical networking space through pluggable transceivers. We have proprietary Electro optic polymer technology that we've patented pretty aggressively. The performance of this technologies.
00:15:39 Speaker 1
Exceeds what is out there in terms of incumbent semiconductors today in terms of faster speeds and lower power, smaller size and it certainly relieves some of the bottlenecks. These data centers are looking at, commercialization is underway.
00:15:54 Speaker 1
And so we did our initial license agreement last year. We're working on more license agreements this year. We have a robust balance sheet. We don't have any debts. We have cash on hand until mid next year and we're building a world class team for this new technology platform and I've experienced leadership. Thank you very much.
00:16:22
Plenty of time for questions.
00:16:24 Speaker 1
Yes.
00:16:25 Speaker 2
I wondered if you could help me contextualize where your technology is that's in with. There's a lot of talk about hyper scaling, obviously, and there's stuff like, you know, new generations of PCI Express and B link.
00:16:40 Speaker 2
The CXL from this company that just went public and all kinds of activity around that, can you help me understand like how your technology and and what your partners will do with it like fits into that landscape?
00:16:58 Speaker 2
Of bandwidth and.
00:17:00 Speaker 1
Yeah, there's a there's an image here. We should look at.
00:17:05 Speaker 1
There see that image on the left hand side? That's what the racks of equipment look like in a data center, so whether it's routers or switches, you have racks and racks, equipment in long corridors. Those yellow cables are fiber optic cables. They plug into the front of this equipment and you can see it's it's pretty dense.
00:17:26 Speaker 1
What those yellow things plug into is a transceiver or pluggable transceiver that looks like.
00:17:32 Speaker 1
That guy there. So you have lots of these guys. These are little metal boxes that plug into the front of that equipment and so.
00:17:42 Speaker 1
What we do is, you know, you're talking about CXL and and sort of processing type technologies that are really driven by the Nvidia's of this world, where the GPU processes what we deal with. Once that information is being generated in the GPU, it's got to be sent somewhere. And so typically it gets sent off the board.
00:18:02 Speaker 1
Down a fiber optic cable to another file server or another facility or something, some different destination in the data center.
00:18:11 Speaker 1
And so those little boxes there do that exchange. And So what we do is we make the engines for those little boxes. So the boxes won't change. It's like if that box is like you know 100 G and then you put in and you call out a 4 cylinder engine and you put in a V8 and you make it a 400G using our technology and all you've really done.
00:18:33 Speaker 1
Is you've upgraded the performance and lowered the power consumption in that little box you plug it out, you put a new one in.
00:18:40 Speaker 1
And so to try and understand where we fit, we don't fit on the boards with the NVIDIA GPUs. We fit on the edge of the boards or the edge of the equipment that sends the data to some other destination, and so that's why.
00:19:00 Speaker 2
That point to another box. Another.
00:19:03 Speaker 2
Track those kind of things. That's where you're.
00:19:06 Speaker 2
Modulation and the optical transmission is where you're.
00:19:09 Speaker 1
Going to fit exactly. So the way I try and explain it is the AI doesn't directly affect us. It indirectly affects us. And so yeah, AI directly affects the Nvidia's of this world with their GPUs and the companies doing the CX L's. But for us, if you're sending more information, you're going to be able to send.
00:19:27 Speaker 1
A lot more information, faster and you've got to be able to do that by keeping the power consumption in check. And so we're at the edge, so we're indirectly affected. So you're exactly right.
00:19:40 Speaker 1
Let's let's have a question in front first.
00:19:43 Speaker 2
Can you talk to us a little about your commercialization and pricing currently over the last year?
00:19:49 Speaker 1
So we haven't given any guidance on pricing, but our business model is, is licensing the technology. So people really want to get hold of our polymer technology. We look at it as if it's like a, you know, Coca-Cola type play. We're not going to tell anybody the formulas of how we put it all together. But if people want to use it, that's fine.
00:20:10 Speaker 1
And so that's one aspect and that's, you know, we had the first commercial deal last year.
00:20:15 Speaker 1
In terms of using that material in our own slot modulator designs to sell modulators or engines into boxes like this, we're engaged with customers that range from tier ones to tier threes. And so yeah, they're evaluating our technology. So we haven't given any guidance on revenue and pricing at this point.
00:20:34 Speaker 1
Well, what we have said is, is that we're engaged with the customer base and we're going through that evaluation phase.
00:20:47 Speaker 1
If you want to follow up with your other question.
00:20:50 Speaker 2
You know.
00:20:51 Speaker 2
No fault of your own. You know, there was a a company with a few billion dollars in market cap. That was at LD a few years ago. That was all same story. You know polymers high speed network, same a lot of the same things also based in Colorado didn't work out. So I'm trying to get at is.
00:21:08 Speaker 1
Was that that company? I don't.
00:21:09 Speaker 1
Know this company? Ohh yeah.
00:21:11 Speaker 2
I can follow up and.
00:21:12 Speaker 2
Give you the ticker.
00:21:13 Speaker 2
But.
00:21:15 Speaker 2
Is there a chance like these polymers or this polymer based approach to get to these levels of networking speed is is?
00:21:26 Speaker 2
One way of doing it, but maybe not the way, is it necessary or inevitable that we're going to need this kind of technology to reach those kind of?
00:21:36 Speaker 2
Those bandwidth levels.
00:21:38 Speaker 1
Well the the quick answer is I believe yes, and I'll, I'll I'll explain. If you look over 2 minutes where I got a short answer here. The last 10 years of technology in the optical networking, we've had silicon, we've had Indium phosphide, we had lithium niobate semiconductor.
00:21:55 Speaker 1
Solutions. Those solutions are really struggling with today's speeds and So what these technologies, they're they're trying all sorts of tricks like increasing the voltage, increasing the power consumption, using electronic DSP chips to clean up the signals. So what hasn't happened in the last decade is faster optics.
00:22:15 Speaker 1
What this represents and polymers represent is much, much faster optics and so you can either relieve the electronics to reduce the power consumption or you can just use the brute force speed of this material. And so the semiconductor technologies may survive this current generation with increased power consumption.
00:22:35 Speaker 1
But they're not going to be around for the next decade. So whether this is the right one or not, we can all argue. But from my standpoint, the potential performance of this technology can last the road maps for and expectations of.
00:22:51 Speaker 1
Fast data rates for the next 10 years, not just this generation, but for the next three or four generations. And so it's our job to make sure we have the right reliability, stability in lifetime of these polymers, just like the folks did with the Oleds. I mean we had, we had LCD displays for 10 years, right, and I didn't think they would ever change.
00:23:12 Speaker 1
And now we'll look at OLED polymer displays. We don't even question the stability or the reliability of this tech.
00:23:18 Speaker 1
Energy. And yet it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous.
00:23:22 Speaker 1
We see the same direction for this technology, so it's up to us to do the right level of homework in terms of lifetime reliability, stability of these polymers to make sure we exert the natural performance that this material has. And that's the exciting part about it.
00:23:42 Speaker 1
Real quick.
00:23:44 Speaker 3
To your comment about having cash.
00:23:46 Speaker 3
That will take you into the middle of 2025. What will it take for you to get to cash?
00:23:50 Speaker 1
Flow positive. We haven't given guidance on cash flow positive, so I can't really answer that question, but certainly we we're expecting a really exciting 2425 and hopefully we may get to that point of giving some guidance, but we're not there yet.
00:24:06 Speaker 1
We certainly have internal models, of course. So we know internally what our goals are, but we haven't made it public.
00:24:15 Speaker 1
Thank you.
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