POET Technologies (NASDAQ:POET): Interview with Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and CEO

May 27, 2024
POET Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:POET) Interview with Chairman and CEO Surech Venkatesan

POET Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:POET) Chairman and CEO Surech Venkatesan

Dr. Suresh Venkatesan is the Chairman and CEO of POET Technologies.

He joined POET from GlobalFoundries, where he served most recently as Senior Vice President, Technology Development.

Prior to that, he led GlobalFoundries’ development and ramp of the 28nm node, was instrumental in the technology transfer and qualification of 14nm, and was responsible for the qualification and ramp up of multiple mainstream value-added technology nodes.

An industry veteran with over 22 years of experience in semiconductor technology development, Dr. Venkatesan has also held various leadership positions with Freescale Semiconductor.

He holds over 25 U.S. patents and has co-authored over 50 technical papers.

He holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University.

“What POET does is make these optical transceiver products that enable this light-based communication to occur.

We’re not the first to make optical transceivers. Optical transceivers have been around for a long time, I’d say about 30 years.

But what we’re doing is transforming the way optical transceivers are manufactured.

The world of photonics hasn’t had significant innovations in manufacturing over its period of time, and what POET is trying to do is pioneer a concept that we call the semiconductorization of photonics.

We want photonics manufacturing to look like semiconductor manufacturing, which everybody is familiar with.

What we have developed is this Optical Interposer platform that enables photonics manufacturing to mimic semiconductor manufacturing, thereby bringing economies of scale, lower cost, lower form factor, and more tightly packed components to that world of photonics.

It’s been about five years for us to do the development, but it’s now increasingly clear that these kinds of manufacturing transformations in photonics are going to be essential to meet the needs of the AI segment that is growing like crazy.

The speed demands are intense, and conventional manufacturing techniques don’t come close to meeting this requirement or demand.

POET is one of very few companies that has developed a scalable manufacturing solution to address these growing needs.”

POET Technologies (NASDAQ:POET) is looking to crack the AI market through its top of the line speeds.

“I think the key highlight, from a product availability perspective, is that for the first time we’re now at the leading edge of technology in our company’s progression.

We’ve marched ourselves up from the 100 gigabits per second, and we were one of very few companies in March to demonstrate that our platform was capable of 1.6 terabit per second communication links.

That was a very important development for us that now allows us to get more premium eyes on our product, and we expect to be able to capitalize on that.

I think the big highlight over the past quarter or quarter and a half is driving the collaboration agreements that allow us to get to deploy cutting-edge products in the AI segment, showcasing the capability of our technology to be able to not just meet today’s demands, but to largely meet the demands for the next three to five years.

For our customers, they make an investment in our platform, but it’s an investment that takes them through multiple nodes of technology and multiple nodes of bandwidth increases, if you will, in these AI clusters.

So, that was really the big development for us. It was something that we’ve been wanting and working on for the past couple of years.

We’ve had some delays in our development, but I think we finally broke through, and we were able to showcase that over the past quarter, which was a very important milestone.”

Get the complete roadmap according to the CEO and Chairman of POET Technologies (NASDAQ:POET) in this 2,812 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.