I don’t think so. It is the nature of a lab scientist/inventor to create new ways of doing things. Geoff was great at that and there are literally thousands of pages of patents providing many answers to complex problems. The equipment and the processes to build those devices from those blue prints are often filled with complex problems along the path to success.

Anyone who has listened to Suresh and how he went about tackling those problems will find that he was very thorough in his methods.

Right from the get go the first thing he did was to take Geoff’s platform and determine what it could and couldn’t do. Many people were upset when he concentrated his focus on OE conversion.  Suresh determined early on (much to the displeasure of many people on this forum) that building a processor and focusing on the high electron mobility offered by the GaAs derivatives was not a viable alternative for silicon. Charge your phone once a week was not a realistic commercial goal to pursue.

But at 850nm (980nm) Geoff’s platform could be a winning combination for monolithic integration of the VCSEL for multimode AOC interconnects. The gain generated by Geoff’s thyristor based design was pretty exceptional as demonstrated by the sensitivity of the IR detector and was something that would be of great interest by the military and the aerospace industry.

I very much believe that Suresh saw that the 850nm multimode VCSEL applications had a limited shelf life and that the window of opportunity was rapidly shifting in Datacom towards higher wavelength single mode applications.  Suresh’s vision was photonic integration and he would position his company towards that goal. And that is what he is doing.

I talked to Sam Peralta after the change of direction and he was disappointed. But he recognized the business needs to make the change of direction and go after the ROI that would be offered by the shifting needs of industry. Dr Sam Peralta was a very big believer and he knew the science behind Geoff’s inventions. I truly believe that someday the vision of monolithic integration of Geoff’s pervasive OE platform will be achieved and I expect that the expense to maintain those patents by POET will pay off.