For third-quarter 2017, POET Technologies Inc of Toronto, Canada and San Jose, CA, USA —a designer and manufacturer of optoelectronic devices, including light sources, passive waveguides and photonic integrated circuits (PIC) for the datacom and telecom markets — has reported revenue of US$715,420, down on US$861,545 a year ago but rebounding from US$648,382 last quarter, primarily reflecting sales of photonic sensors made by Singapore-based subsidiary DenseLight Semiconductor Pte Ltd (acquired in May 2016) for test & measurement applications.
Gross margin was 51%, down on 63% a year ago but up from 50.5% last quarter. Net loss has risen from US$2.8m ($0.01 per share) last quarter to US$3.6m ($0.01 per share). However, this included non-cash, stock-based compensation of US$1,088,170, up from just US$159,783 last quarter. During the quarter, cash and short-term investments fell from US$9.8m to US$7.5m.
“Our results in the third quarter continue to reflect our commitment to invest a majority of the company’s engineering and production resources in new product development during 2017,” says CEO Dr Suresh Venkatesan. Since May, POET has been granted six patents and submitted two new applications, bringing the total granted to 57 and the number of pending patent applications to eight.
During the quarter, POET introduced new products from DenseLight, including distributed feedback (DFB) lasers for the 100G datacom market, avalanche photodiodes (APDs) for the 10G telecom markets, and a new family of narrow-linewidth (NLW) lasers for the distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) market.
“As planned and stated last quarter, we are currently sampling our DFB lasers, APD devices and NLW lasers with customers in China and Europe,” says Venkatesan. “There is solid demand for these DFB lasers in both the silicon photonics and test & measurement markets as well as for our newly introduced NLW light modules for distributed acoustic sensing applications in the oil & gas and rail industries. Additional design, testing and qualification cycles are required prior to generating revenue, and we expect these products to augment our traditional sensing revenue in 2018. There has been an industry slowdown in the 10G GPON telecom market, so we are evaluating alternative sales channels for the APDs,” he adds.
“We are making good progress and remain on track for a mid-2018 launch of our ROSA [receive optical sub-assembly] optical engine, which utilizes our dielectric photonics platform,” Venkatesan continues. The integrated twin-waveguide 25G PIN detector under development has recently tested at bandwidths that exceed the requirements for 25Gbps channel rates. Combining four PINs into a single device (QuadPIN) will allow the optical engine to receive at a minimum speed of 100Gbps. Combining a quad-channel PIN detector and a quad-channel de-mux will form a critical piece of the ROSA. “Additional engineering, optimization and product qualification are required to complete the development of the ROSA optical engine,” concludes Venkatesan.
