Joel, thanks for your post!

I really do appreciate your views because they challenge us and put our own views into perspective – regardless of whether your opinion have any solid foundation or not.

I do even more appreciate that you have not been put off by the rude tone, personal attacks, and name calling of some here in this forum. Thanks for not insulting back but answering with a calm and factual post.

You voiced valid concerns and they deserve to be dealt with. Let me just pick a single one: I agree that setting up a whole GaAs ecosystem will take some time. But the earlier you start, the earlier it will be established. This is especially true if you are a fab or foundry, because if you don't do it, someone else will. In my opinion the question is not if, but when. And let us not forget that going from one Si node size down to another also takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Well, POET promises to avoid the latter or at least have it heavily reduced.

Your post seems to raise doubts whether GaAs chips really could be manufactured at all. Well, BAE Systems has managed to create and test GaAs wafers and an integrated infrared device using the POET process, as announced recently. So we have an independent verification that it really can be done. This gives me a lot of confidence a) that the POET platfom works and b) that more complicated designs can be achieved, e.g. whole microprocessors, even though this might take more time than some of us anticipate.

The fact that POET and select partners are currently putting together Technical Development Kits (TDK) in order to deploy POET, speaks volumes. So does the fact that some potential industry partner obviously finds is sufficient to go down to 100 nm instead of, say, 40 nm.

Besides all these details, please consider my main question: Do you see any viable alternative? If it is not POET, is there anything else?

Best regards and thanks again for posting here!

Andrea ("Powered by POET")