Familiar faces. You know, it's just incredible, the Belgian contingent, with their one Dutchman. Where is he? Yeah, there he is. Of course, all our great shareholders here. We, you know, it's our pleasure to welcome all of you and then to really try and give you a good update and some things that you probably haven't seen before. I think that that's important so that we let you know where we are and what our plans are. All of you have an agenda on your seats, and we'll follow that agenda. The first part is very scripted, so I apologize for that. I hate reading from scripts, but we've gotta go through that because that's the beginning of the process.
We'll get through the formal portion of the meeting, and then, Michael will give a presentation wherever he went.
I'm here, you can see me.
Michael will give his presentation, and then we'll open it up to questions after that. I do wanna take a minute to introduce everybody. Since he decided to jump in the back, I'll go ahead and start with him. First of all, our CEO, Dr. Michael Lebby. Of course, my COO, Jim Marcelli, who is our President and COO of Lightwave Logic. Ron Bucchi, who is the chair of our Audit Committee. Dr. Frederick Leonberger, who is the chair of our Nominating and Corporate Governance. Siraj Nour El-Ahmadi, who's the chair of our Compensation Committee.
Last but not least, the guy that's been trying to fly under the radar since he saw how many people were here, so let's go to Craig Ciesla, who's our newest board member. Craig just joined us. I think this is his second board meeting, and obviously his first shareholder meeting, so it's great to have him part of the team. He's, you know, I'm sure you guys have already checked him out, but he's with Illumina, and just a great addition to our board. Unfortunately, we don't have her here from our auditing firm, Morison Cogen LLP, Oksana Hrudobasji. She had a schedule conflict, so she is not here and won't join us. I also wanna talk about the most important people in the room.
It's the last couple of rows back here on my right side, and those are some of our great employees at Lightwave Logic that are making all the magic happen, so thanks to all of you. Okay, with that portion completed of the formal things, so I'm gonna just start reading. Jim and I will tag team up here, and we'll go from there. Jim Marcelli, our corporate secretary, will be recording the minutes of this meeting. David Sido, the duly appointed representative of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Incorporated, has been appointed to serve as the inspector of the election, for this annual meeting. Mr. Sido, would you please stand and so everybody can see where you are. He's in the back of the room there. Mr.
Sido has signed an oath of office, which will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. The formal portion of the meeting, we're now set. I will call on our corporate secretary, Jim Marcelli, to establish that we have met the necessary corporate requirements for this meeting. Jim?
Thank you. Thank you, Tom. I have proof that notice of this meeting has been duly given, and that the notice of annual meeting of shareholders, proxy statement, proxy were mailed on or about April 29, 2022 to all shareholders of record at the close of business on April 14, 2022. The affidavit, together with copies of the notice, proxy statement, and proxy will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. As of April 14, 2022, the record date of the meeting, there were 101,388,924 shares outstanding.
We have 41,937,299 shares present by personal proxy at this meeting, which is over 33 1/3% of the outstanding shares and constitutes a quorum for doing the transaction of business. Each share entitles the holder to vote on each matter that may come before the meeting. All registered shareholders at the time of the vote. A list of the registered shareholders entitled to vote is available for examination by the shareholders.
Thank you, Jim. Since a quorum is present, I will now call the meeting to order. The meeting will proceed as provided for in the agenda that's on your seats. The items to be voted upon are to elect three directors to the board of directors to serve until the 2025 annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors have been duly elected or appointed and qualified. Second item is to ratify the appointment of Morison Cogen LLP to serve as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31.
Any agenda thereof. Jim, would you please describe the voting procedure?
Sure. Thanks, Tom.
We will be voting by proxy ballot on the agenda items described in the proxy statement previously sent to you. If you have already turned in your proxy card and you do need to change your vote, it is not necessary for you to vote again. However, for those of you who did not turn in your proxy card or if you wish to change your vote, please get a blank ballot card from Mr. Sido, Inspector of Elections, to use to vote today. If you take a ballot, please be sure to print your name and the number of shares you're voting on the ballot. If you have previously sent in a proxy card and you are changing your vote, please note that on the ballot. The ballot must be signed by the shareholder.
After the completion of the ballot card, please give it to Mr. Sido as soon as possible, as the result of the voting will be announced at the end of the formal portion of the meeting.
The first item of business is the election of three Class Two directors to the board of directors to serve until the 2022 annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors, and that I think should be 2025, Sandy. Until their successors have been duly elected or appointed and qualified. The board of directors is comprised of seven directors and is divided into three classes, currently comprised of two Class One directors whose terms expire at the 2024 annual meeting, three Class Two directors whose terms will expire at the 2022 annual meeting, and then two Class Three directors whose terms expire at the 2023 annual meeting. The board of directors has nominated three Class Two incumbent directors for re-election and recommends a vote for the election of the Class Two incumbent directors.
The corporate secretary will now place the names of the nominees into nomination.
Thank you. The board of directors has nominated the following Class Two directors to serve for a term of two years or until their successors are elected and qualified: Michael S. Lebby, Ronald A. Bucchi, and Craig Ciesla. Advanced notice must be given to the Secretary of the shareholder's intent to nominate other persons as directors of the company. No such notice has been received. Accordingly, nominations for the directors are now closed. The three nominees for the directors receiving the highest number of votes will be elected to the board of directors. The proxy solicited by management will vote in favor of the directors' nominees. I hereby move that Michael S. Lebby, Ronald A. Bucchi, and Craig Ciesla be elected Class Two directors to serve for a term of two years or until their successors are elected and qualified.
I second the motion.
The next item of business is the ratification of the appointment of Morison Cogen LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2022. The vote required to ratify the appointment of Morison Cogen LLP to serve as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2022 is the affirmative vote of the holders of a majority of the votes cast at the annual meeting entitled to vote on the matter. The board of directors recommends a vote for approval of this matter.
Thanks, Tom. I hereby move that the appointment of Morison Cogen LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending 2022 be ratified.
I second the motion.
There being no other items to be brought before our shareholders for a vote at this meeting, voting is now complete. All ballots must be turned in to Mr. Sido at this time. The Inspector of Elections has tabulated the votes, and Mr. Sido will now give us the report of the Inspector of Elections. David Sido.
All of the votes have now been counted. Based on these preliminary results, Michael S. Lebby, Ronald A. Bucchi, and Craig Ciesla have been elected as Class Two directors to serve for a term of three years or until their successors are elected and qualified. Morison Cogen LLP has been duly appointed as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2022.
Thank you, David. Well, this now completes the formal portion of the meeting, and we're gonna now transition into the management presentation by Michael. I just want to point out one thing. It was appealed to me and several of the board members that we should bring out our inner Michael Lebby, so I have gone all black today. I don't know if I can carry it off as well as Michael does, but I'm gonna give it a shot. I have a little more hair.
I got the other half, right? I got the black jacket and a black shirt, but I'm not the light pants. I couldn't go all the way.
How can we go wrong with that? Go ahead, Michael. Thanks. Perfect. I will go with that.
Welcome. I use this microphone.
There we go. Well, good morning, everybody. This is a really exciting time. We've had a great year. In fact, I think the last time I saw everybody was three years ago. A lot of people. I saw quite a few in Belgium last year.
That was a really fun talk and a fun meeting. A lot of excited folks. Today, over the next 40-45 minutes, I'm gonna give the management update, and I'm gonna talk about what we've achieved in the last year and where we're going. Let's get started. Of course, I've got to show this slide, and you don't have to read all the words in this slide. We'll get off this slide pretty quickly. It's a safe harbor slide. This is it. three words. Can I sit down now? We can. Yeah, we are really excited. I just wanted to get that out up front. It's been a great year for us. You know, we've seen a lot of things occur.
Everybody in this audience room has seen a lot of things happen to the company. That next slide is really interesting. I think most folks were aware that we went on to the Nasdaq last year. If you think about it, my first time giving this talk was 2017, which was five years ago. If you look at the takeaway line at the bottom, we promised. I know Tom and I promised in 2017, we'd do an organic uplist, you know, without a reverse split and a natural uplist to the Nasdaq. You folks were asking, "When are you gonna go to the Nasdaq?" We said, "We'll do this, and we'll do it in our own way.
We're gonna get our technology to the point where we could do it naturally." That's what we did, and it's just been fantastic to do that. In fact, this guy here, Andy Hall, he's the executive at Nasdaq. I mean, you can look at that photograph and you think, "Well, there's nobody in Times Square." It's 'cause these guys paid all these security guards go out and clean part of Times Square, so we got our photograph taken. He said to us, he said, "You know, I've been doing this job a long time. I don't recall another company that's done this." It's rare. It's really cool. I started our photograph on the top left. I mean, where does this come from?
Because of COVID, I had to take my wife to Hawaii a couple of months earlier, and everybody was doing the hang loose. It was more of a spontaneous thing. It was like, "Well, this is an L, and this is another L, so let's do that." It actually happened on the day. If you look really closely, you just can't see it there. I have a green ring 'cause everybody had to be COVID tested to go into the Nasdaq building. I just felt really excited at the time and, you know, look what's happened in the last, you know, six months. Everybody's doing this, right? It's amazing. Oh, LWLG. I mean, the company is great. It's a fun place to work at. We've got world-class folks. We're doing great technology. We've come a long way.
If you think about where we were a year ago, I mean, just in, you know, if you take one metric, just take the share price. I mean, it's completely changed. We've done really well in the last year. I think you see the excitement in the team. You see the excitement today. This is very unusual. I don't usually get this excited. I'm quite a conservative person. I mean, I don't usually wave my hands. I mean, one of my colleagues, I think you remember last year, Jose Pozo from EPIC. I was in a video with him, and he's like this. I just don't like that. In this occasion, I mean, I'm wearing a white shirt, and you'll never see me wear any other color than black. We did great.
Then while I was standing outside with Andy, I had a text come in. I don't think I've told many people this story. A text came in from my brother-in-law in D.C., who's a financial guy. He was watching it on the TV with his family, the whole sort of pressing the button and ringing the bell at the end of the week. The text that came in on my phone was, "Why is Uncle Michael showing gang signs on television?" I show the text to Andy. He's falling about laughing. It is. It's like, "Oh, I didn't realize this is a gang sign." Great. This has been a great start to the year, and we worked hard to get there.
The talk, if there's nothing else, four takeaways is what I want everybody to take away from this talk. You're gonna hear a lot of information. There's gonna be a lot of data. Some of it's gonna be technical. You know, the slides will be available, so you can look at the slides afterwards, and you can pull them apart, and I'm sure you will. The four takeaways, we've made unparalleled progress in the last 12 months. The second one, our technology is competitively superior and unique. The third one, we are positioned to have polymers become, and I think everybody knows this word, I've been using it, ubiquitous, right? And the last one, which is really important for tech companies, we have the resources and the plans in place to succeed. These 4 points, this sums it up.
This is if there's anything you wanna walk away from this meeting is these four points. Let's look at the outline. There's the normal outline, what we do, the dynamics, the markets. The most important thing about this slide is the bottom part. I've actually indicated in red font, new guidance, because what we wanna do in this presentation is give more guidance. I mean, everybody's been asking for guidance. I'm sure there's 5,000 questions in Q&A about guidance. When you see the red font, this is stuff that we haven't talked about before. What do we do? This is a simple slide, and there's not a lot of detail here, but let me go through the points. We create our own materials that are unique. These are polymers. Our materials switch light really quickly.
If you wanna try and compare that to something else, you compare that to like liquid crystals that used to get used in TVs, but they don't get used in TVs anymore, and they could switch light, but it doesn't switch very fast. Our materials are ideal for faster, lower power internet. Our materials are polymers. In fact, we look at polymers every day when we look at our televisions and our phones because of the OLED displays. They're polymers. Our polymer materials are used in modulators. Modulators are the devices that get used in the internet to switch the light. Our modulators are very small, and so they fit easily into the boxes that are used in the internet called pluggable transceivers. This next bullet point has a couple of green highlights here because it's really important.
Polymer modulators, polymer modulators have transformational performance and headroom for decades. So what does that really mean? It means the performance of our modulators using polymers are not only good for today, not only good for five years or 10 years, but decades. They have that performance run, runway, if you like. Start using these things, they're transformational. Yeah, I've worked in some startups before, some hot startups in the Bay Area, and you've got great technology. This technology is transformational. This is really cool. Then the last bullet, we can integrate other devices with our modulators. So you can do modulators with silicon photonics, you can do multi-channel solutions, you can do a number of them, so they're quite flexible in how you design them.
The takeaway for the slide is polymer technology extends speeds, reduces power consumption, not just for a few years, but for decades. When you talk to customers, this is really important 'cause customers will say, "Well, this is great technology, but what's next? And what's after that?" You need to have a roadmap that keeps them really excited. Market dynamics. This is a slide from the Ethernet Alliance. I've used it a couple of times, but what it shows here is that everybody is looking at standards to go higher speeds. This relates to the speed of the internet. The thing I've ringed here is the path to single lane. The only way you can really get to achieve these speeds is to have a very fast optical switch or modulator. That's what we have.
Single lane, you have to have faster optics. The industry is putting out these roadmaps, and we have the technology that actually fits to these roadmaps. This one is a complicated slide, so I'll simplify it. I'm not gonna go through all the details, but you can see there's two big arrows here. There's the red arrow, which means the power consumption is just going up. You can see the slope of that curve is horrific, and there's some big numbers there. That red arrow represents data centers' electricity. If you look into data centers, you realize they are consuming tons of electricity, and it's a problem. You use a lot of power, then you've got to get rid of a lot of heat, and you've got to cool these places, so you're looking for low power solutions.
The other two curves here in blue, or the blue arrow there, traffic, that's the internet traffic. That's because we're all using video platforms these days, and so we're using more data. We want more bandwidth. That's going up, too. That's a problem for the industry. It's a major challenge for the data centers and the service providers that provide our internet. Power is growing exponentially with increased traffic levels. It is the Achilles' heel of the industry. This is happening today. This is, you know, this is public information. To address this, you've got to have better technology. In fact, we are at, a few of us are at a big conference in March called the Optical Fiber Conference down in San Diego.
This slide is from Arista, who's one of the big players that does a lot of data center type transceiver modules. This is the slide they put up. Cloud network bandwidth and power. The cloud bandwidth is growing at 50%-60% a year. You've got to figure out how to get the power per bit, and it's declining. There's a disconnect. There's a disconnect between the traffic and the consumption of power, and we are able to address that. Growing bandwidth brings higher power. Power needs to be mitigated as speeds increase, and we have the technology to do that. Let's have a look at the target markets. Now this slide has a lot of markets, and you can see as you go down the vertical on the left-hand side.
The top four are colored in green because they are existing, they're here now, they're really exciting, and they're a perfect fit for our polymer modulators. You can see, you know, depending on which market research you use, whether it's today or it's out to 2030, these are big markets. There's huge opportunities here. You also see below there's other markets too, that we see are opportunity for our technology. We're not a big company, we're a small company, so we are focused on the green. We need to go nail that green. We know there's interest in displays, projection, automotive LIDAR, you know, different types of sensing. We know this. We don't have the manpower to take everything on. We are focused on the green area. You can see the green area is exciting enough.
I mean, that's strong growth. It's existing market. It's great opportunity for us. Market positioning. This is one of those slides where you're gonna have to read it in your own time, because I'm not gonna go through the details. I've used this slide before, but there's a couple of really simple messages that come from this slide. Our polymers break through the speed wall. What is this speed wall? If you look at that chart, you see those black and the gray and some of the red circles. Those are commercial points of technology that gets used in the Internet today. You can see that none of those points are this side of that green wall. Our technology breaks through that wall because it's optics that goes faster. In fact, it's three times faster than current materials and modulation.
You know, the takeaway at the bottom here is faster is good, 3x faster is way better. We have the technology that breakthrough. You can see, you know, if you wanna get technical here, you can see how you can utilize some of the higher data bandwidths. This is really exciting. The next slide is a new slide. It's a technical slide, so I'm not gonna go through a lot of detail, but it's just showing you the history of where low voltage is coming from in the modulator devices. Now we're proud to have Dr. Leonberger here, Fred. Fred was the person that started off with the lithium niobate modulators back in the 2000s and really drove that industry. That was using much higher voltages. They consume a lot more power.
I think, you know, some people here are aware of that. The industry is gonna transition to very low voltage because they really have to do the high speed and the low power. That's a great opportunity for us to change the whole industry to polymers. You're going from power hungry to high power to moderate power to low power. You've got two curves here. One is a commercial curve and the other one is an R&D curve. You can see there's R&D work showing that folks have designed low power modulators before. I've seen research papers, but commercialization is expected to happen pretty soon. This one volt metric of getting to super low voltage levels to keep the power down, that transition is happening.
Our timing in the marketplace is just as I said last week in an interview, it's perfect. We're really excited. I got a bunch of questions in the last two days about competition, and I get a lot of emails about who's your competitor. What we've done in this chart, and it is a very detailed chart, so I'm sure that you're gonna analyze it a little bit more later. Maybe some of these metrics are not perfect, but they're the best ones we put together to look at how we stack up vis-a-vis the competition. The polymers are the ones in the yellow and the green on the right-hand side. On the left-hand side you've got silicon modulators in that vertical.
You've got indium phosphide, you've got lithium niobate, and then you've got TFLN which stands for thin-film lithium niobate, because there's been some talk in the technical community about using this type of technology. You can see that there's relative differences between each of these technologies. In general, when we compare some of these technologies to what we have, yeah, there's some seesaws here, there's some, you know, maybe we're about the same as other technologies, but there's a lot of tick marks. Our technology has a lot of merits, and it outperforms modulator technologies or different modulator technologies. Polymer modulators outperform competitive semiconductor technologies, and that's really exciting. When you start looking at some of the technical metrics, and I'm not gonna go through each one of these, but this makes me really excited here.
One of the important things that we talked about a year ago, that we're gonna talk about a little bit more, is these three blocks here, standard PDK fabrication. Can your technology go into a standard silicon fab? Some of these can't. I mean, yes, the silicon one on the left can, but that's a really good advantage because that allows you to scale and to get volume. What's unique about our competencies? Well, let's have a look at some of the advantages. Naturally very fast switching light. These are material properties of the polymers. That's at least 2-3x faster than existing solutions using modulators. Naturally very low power. Mother Nature is working with us with our technology. It's 10x low power depending on how you wanna design the device or the architecture.
That's important for the system designers to get the power down. Easily fabricated using silicon foundries. That's really important. As you saw in the last slide, you've got to be able to use the existing infrastructure. The last thing we wanna do is go raise a ton of money, put a concrete slab, four walls, and call it a fab when there's already foundries out there. Utilize the existing infrastructure as best you can, and that's a capital efficient process. The process is standard and does not require special toolkits. This one here has come up a lot in the last year and a half because of COVID. EO polymers are generated in our plant one mile away, so we don't have any security of supply issues.
We generate our polymers, so we're not dependent on other people delivering stuff in or ships, you know, being late and things like that. Material is designed and sourced directly from ourselves. The last one here is it's a low cost addition to other integrated platforms, integrated photonic platforms. Silicon photonics, for example, can be boosted in performance, and that's really cool because our technology is additive. It doesn't really matter if it's silicon or silicon photonics. It could be indium phosphide. Because we can apply easily in a silicon fab. Polymers are unique in their properties. This is a cross-section of a slot modulator. If you've read a lot of technical papers, you've probably seen something like this before. But let me explain. I don't know if there's a
The light goes in between these two vertical stacks in the slot. You can see this one's on a silicon wafer. There's some silicon photonics, standard, silicon photonics chip. You use standard photolithographic techniques, which you find in a foundry. The metallization is standard for the gate source contacts. You spin on the polymer, which is actually colored in yellow, and then you protect it with dielectric passivation on top. I mean, fairly straightforward. The tools you'd use to do this are nothing special in a fab. It's the same tools, and that's why it's really exciting. You don't have to invent anything special to go into the foundries to do this stuff. Here's some pictures of modulators and different types of features that we've come back from the foundries. You can see I've got some comments here.
I mean, there's a foundry A, and there's a foundry D. I just wanted to show everybody that we have stuff coming back from foundries, and it looks very nice. That process has begun, and I wanted to show everybody that, yeah, this is happening. In fact, you can see at the bottom there, the takeaway is standard silicon fabrication components. Yeah, this is what we've done since we announced working with foundries a year ago. In fact, the next slide doesn't have much information on it. This is a grating coupler. You know, I think we had a press release about it three or four months ago. A grating coupler takes the light from the waveguide and sends it vertically up, and it sends it up through those little trenches there.
You can see this is just an SEM of a grating coupler. Nice picture, but, you know, look at the scale here. This is one micron. So those channels there are 40, 50 nanometers. They're really tiny, but the quality is beautiful. Some of the things you get from the foundry is really nice quality. It just gives you an example that it's, you know, you work hard with the foundries, you can get good results. The next slide is interesting. If you look at the size of a silicon slot modulator, it's teeny-weeny. In fact, you look at the takeaway, size really matters, right? Go fast, go low power, but you want it small too, right? So all I'm showing here is like, you know, this is a CAD drawing of the slot modulators, and it's just giving everybody a.
This is a 1-by-8 array, and it shows it's 1 millimeter. These things are about, you know, half a millimeter high. You array them up, and you get 9 millimeters by 1 millimeter. That's really important when you're trying to shoehorn these technologies into a box, a pluggable transceiver box. In fact, you know, there was a competitor at the conference, the OFC conference back in March that showed what they did with lithium niobate, and this is thin-film lithium niobate, and they put it into a module. You can see the printed circuit board, and you can see the thin-film lithium niobate, which is that sort of gray chip. It's 9 millimeters by 15 millimeters, and it has 8 modulators on it. There's a laser there in gold. You can see some of the fibers that bring in the light.
One laser goes into eight modulators, one into eight, and it's taking quite a bit of space up. You did the same with us. You get 15, 30 times more modulators in the same space. In fact, I mean, there's a little asterisk, only 30 times better. You could actually probably double that up if you really were trying to squeeze stuff in. What does that say? Not only are you high speed and low power, but we have the capability to send in a lot more traffic through that module, and the modules are really small, or the boxes are really small. That is, you know, this is really exciting. This allows you to start thinking about these numbers called Ts, terabits per second, not gigabits per second. It takes you an order of magnitude higher in data rate, and that's cool.
Where would you use this stuff? Well, you know, where we enter the market is you have our modulators that go into these boxes. These boxes go into the switches and the router equipment in the data centers and the telecommunications network or the internet. You can look at this as polymer engines for pluggable transceivers, because we have high-speed engines that are really small. This one here shows the roadmap that came out of Arista for the transceiver boxes. I mean, here's this is what these things look like. You know, if you look at the technical literature today, everybody's talking about 400 G, and there's various ways to do that. They're shoehorning all this technology to get into this small box, and it's pretty tough.
I mean, they're consuming a lot of power and, you know, they're generating a lot of heat. Look at the roadmap, and this is what Arista showed back in March. They said, "You know, we're talking about 800, and we've got to go to 1.6, and then we have to go to 3.2." Quite honestly, I don't think folks are really understanding the technology that's gonna go into these boxes. If you start thinking about what we could do to this business, so what I did was sort of modified that chart a little bit. You can see, you start using our technology, you start extending our roadmap more than just a year, more than just five years, more than just 10 years.
If you look at the vertical column, we're not talking about 1.6 T or 3.2 T. We start climbing that vertical ladder. That's incredible. What the technology is doing is enabling much higher speed with low power, and it's tiny. We can get it into the form factors. The roadmap is enabled by high speed, low power, and tiny footprint polymers. Most important part of the talk, the business strategy. I'm sure everybody's interested in. I think you've seen this slide before. It hasn't changed. I mean, I think I've got some bullet points here. Selling components, licensing polymer materials, tech transfer to foundries. What's number one? Prototype testing underway for future modulator sales as part of a silicon photonics platform. Working with the foundries to do that.
Negotiating supply agreements for polymer materials as part of a generating licensing royalty and discussing tech transfers, part of a process development kit, a PDK, with the silicon foundries. We said we were gonna do this last year, and we're doing this year. You know, the takeaway is to become a leader in the engineering and manufacturing of organic polymers. I mean, we use the term OLED. We use the term organic LEDs, right? Why can't we use the term organic mods or organic modulators? Because that's really what we're doing. I showed this slide before, but I've added some new things, and the new things are in red, the red font. Yeah, we have a great patent portfolio. We're building on that patent portfolio, and we're filing patents.
Every time we have a patent issue, we do put out a press release and explain it. But in terms of issued patents, 60% of our portfolio are materials-related patents. The other 40%, as you can see, are devices, high-speed PIC designs, and packaging designs. We've built that up aggressively over the last few years, because when I joined the company in 2015, it was mostly just materials. We've actually beefed up that side of things, and it's important to do that. About 50% of our portfolio is international, so the other 50% is U.S. patents. That gives you some idea of our portfolio. There's two other areas here.
We are always looking to acquire new patents, because if your business model is based on licensing and tech transfer, then any opportunity to strengthen your patent portfolio is important. Yeah, if there's we are reviewing opportunities, and if we do things, then we'll let you know about it. On the filing here, we're very active, and we have to be very active if you're in this space. If your business model is based on licensing and tech transfer, you've got to be filing, and you're gonna be putting your new ideas down. Of course, if there's trade secrets, then you know, we're very careful about that. If things that we feel are worth patenting, we do that. Partnering for success. We can't do everything ourselves. I mean, it will be inefficient to raise tons of capital to do everything ourselves.
We got to work with foundries, and we go work with the transceiver manufacturers, and you can see that in the first bullet there. The second bullet there is, and I talked about this last time, you've got to be able to qualify your polymer process. It's your polymer recipe. That's what it is. A PDK is your recipe of how you fabricate these things with the foundries using standard fab techniques. Honestly, the unwritten thing that doesn't get talked about with foundries is it's not easy. I mean, you can do things in your own fab, and you can cook things in your own kitchen, but when you ask somebody else to cook the same thing, they may not get it right because they don't use the same techniques that you do, right? It's the same thing here.
When you're using foundries, they do get it wrong. Nobody really talks about that because, you know, you don't talk about that business model. You've got to be very careful about who you choose to work with and think really carefully about risk mitigation. Because, you know, you got some magic recipe, and you use it in somebody else's kitchen, it may not go right because of something you haven't taken into account. That is something that we've actually focused on a lot for the last 12 months, and I'll give you some more detail in the next slide. It's not something where you just say, "Yeah, we're working with a foundry. This is a piece of cake." Because they make mistakes too. As engineers, we've got to manage that risk, and that's what we've been doing over the last year.
Then, of course, we're getting tech evaluation feedback. You know, we're looking at licensing the polymer materials because that's the right thing to do as part of the business model, and the last one here is tech transfer. The partnering allows us to really focus on our uniqueness. It's efficient use of capital, and it allows us to prepare for volume because these foundries are huge, much bigger than our little facility we have a mile down the road. This is a new slide, and we haven't really talked about foundries much. The first thing you're gonna say is, "Well, we thought you were working with Foundry X," because everybody keeps asking me, "Who is Foundry X?" It's not one foundry. There's a lot of foundries here.
The reason we used the plural term of foundries 1 year ago is because if you're working with one foundry, and everybody knows this, the cycle time of a foundry is 6-9 months. You put in your designs, and you wait 6-9 months for it to come back. What happens if it doesn't work? What happens if it doesn't have the performance you really need? You've wasted nine months, and it's a slow process. We've all heard, I mean, there's been supply issues. Even the foundries that said they can deliver in six months, you know, typically they're a couple of months late. We're working with a number of foundries to mitigate that risk. If you work with more than one, and if somebody's slow or it doesn't work right, then you've got another one.
A year ago, we made a decision. It's not going to be one foundry, it's going to be a number of foundries. What's the upside of this? It's more than just, you know, mitigating your risk. It's going to help you to become ubiquitous because more people have your PDK, more people can utilize the technology, more people are going to want to license the technology. The right thing to do is to do what we've done here. You can see Foundry A to Foundry E. I've given a little bit of details. At this point, we don't feel comfortable saying who the foundries are. You know, as the year progresses, we'll see. You can see silicon wafers. We've even got planned for indium phosphide, because our technology doesn't have to go on silicon, it can go on other materials.
You can see on the right-hand side, we've now put dates, because we feel we're at the maturity level where we're comfortable giving dates now, giving some guidance. You know, this is when we expect results from the foundries. You'll see these slides online. You know, we didn't do this last year, but I think it's time to give a little bit more detail about where we're going, what we're doing, and when we are going to have results. Deep activities. If you think about these things for a second, it's not cheap to work with a foundry, but we have the resources to do that. It's a lot cheaper to work with a foundry than it is to build your own fab. That makes a lot of sense.
This slide you've seen before, but I've changed it a little bit. I've added some companies, and I'm sure some of you will notice that. I put in some foundries on this. The interesting part of the marketplace is we can enter the market in many verticals. You work with foundries. You might want to work with a customer, but a customer doesn't want to deal with you directly. They say, "Go, go to foundry X, go to foundry Y, or go to our contract manufacturer and work with them." That's typically what happens with the big guys. We've got to be in a position, we've got to be flexible enough that we can address this market in many verticals. This is really what this chart is saying.
In fact, you know, original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers, and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test. This is the packaging guys. The next slide you've seen before, but we've updated it. It's the technology roadmap, and I've in red font, I've given some timelines, and so that's new. What's at the bottom? We've shown this slide before, but we've never given any timelines before. You can see where we're going in terms of our unique four layers of uniqueness in our technology platform and some timelines to go with it. Now, this is a technology roadmap. This is not a product roadmap. We haven't got to the point of the product roadmap yet.
This gives you a really good idea of the technologies that's going to go into the products, and it gives you a good idea of when we're going to have that stuff ready. This one here, you've seen this slide before, but I've added timelines to it because we didn't show timelines last year. We're giving guidance on when are we going to be ready in terms of customer interaction, customer qualification, design verification, partnership. The current engagement includes foundry partnering. You can see it's not just one foundry, it's a whole bunch of foundries. That takes a lot of work. I thought it's appropriate that we give some guidance now. The same thing on the next slide. I got a lot of requests to go see an update of the TRL slide.
What I did in this one is we're in that phase. There's no question. We're not in a high volume manufacturing phase, but we're in this phase. We're in the prototyping, piloting phase. There's been some questions about what does that really mean. What I tried to do here is like, well, proof of concept prototypes with fabrication from silicon foundries. Second half this year, we have working modulators from foundries. We're on track. Engineering samples using silicon foundry fabrication. We're on track to that one too. We're giving timelines to make sure everybody's aware. License and supply agreements. We're given a timeline there. Tech transfer definition and qualification. We're given a timeline there. We're now planning the key milestones, but we're actually giving some guidance as well.
Now I think everybody's aware that we did some work with this company called Polariton in Switzerland. Small company, got some really interesting device designs using plasmonics, and we just wanted some third-party verification of our material. It's a different design than what we're doing. We gave them some material, and look what they did. They came up with a world record using our material. I mean, it's just. It's incredible. If you change the device design, but you're still using our polymer, you can still do world records. Isn't that cool? Look what they did in that slide. Now, you can't see it really from the back there. The next slide has it a little better. They're comparing their plasmonic modulator using our material with microring resonators, silicon microring resonators.
This is what everybody's talking about in the silicon world, silicon microring resonators. Look at the performance of their devices in our material compared to what all the big guys are talking about is the best thing. We're beating them. World record performance and outperforming competitive modulated designs and materials. We didn't even ask them to put this slide together. They just did it. That's just our material, and it's so exciting when you see that. In fact, the next presentation they did, which is March this year, they actually emphasized it even more. These microring modulators, they need heaters, they're temperature sensitive and a high-performance EO polymer slot modulator outperform them. The competition are very temperature sensitive, which limits their performance.
Here we have, you know, the big guys are saying the best thing about these ring resonators, but we just let a company we worked with have our material, and they just outperformed them just like that. That's third-party verification. That's not us. We're just providing the material. Depending on your device design, I mean, our stuff could probably go even faster. Sort of cool. Sample market reactions. I gave this slide over the last couple of years in the virtual format, and I think it's good to do it again because these are the things we hear. I'll just go through quickly in terms of high speed. Lightwave has the roadmap for decades in its polymers. Low power. We have to have low power modulators going forward. Optical network and an internet section. Your timing is incredible. The market needs your technology.
We heard that back in March a number of times. Both 1310 and 1550 wavelength windows will be important, and polymers can do both. You know, we have the technology to use the wavelengths that the internet uses. Implemented them into silicon photonics. We did not need to create special fabrication recipes for the electro-optic polymers. Obviously, that came from a foundry. Electro-optic polymers are pretty easy to use. Polymers make silicon photonics much more exciting. Hybrid is clearly the direction. Hybrid means when you put a different material with silicon. You got two different materials, a polymer and silicon. Scaling wafer size makes a lot of sense. If you're on a silicon platform, then you can scale the wafer size. Reliability and robustness. Polymers have come a long way. We expect them to be reliable.
Look at this one here. I just had this one about 5-6 weeks ago. Your polymers will be really great for AR/VR goggles. At which point, I didn't have time to, like, dig into this, but, you know, the fact that some technical person said, "I see a huge opportunity here," means, wow, this is another opportunity we can look at. Wouldn't electro-optic polymers be a great solution for optical switching? Yes, I absolutely agree with that. The feedback has been strong and constructive. Okay, now the tough slide. Because, you know, one of the things we do as a company is we try and be honest with ourselves, and we try and be honest with you. Where did we get to on the promises we gave you a year ago?
You know, a year ago, we said we're gonna go do, you know, qualified sampling, progress with commercial partners, deeper commercialization. I mean, these were some tough goals given where we were a year ago. You know, obviously, we didn't get 8 out of 8, but I think we did really well. You can go through these. We are testing foundry chips. We've got package prototypes in progress. We have qualified partners we're continually testing. Our QA and reliability test is ongoing. We're engaged with customers. The last two are in discussion. I'm not gonna give any public guidance, but the guidance I am gonna give is that we're in discussion there. I can't give us a tick, but I think we've come a long way since last year. The next slide is where are we going next year.
We have to have data and call plans, especially in terms of sampling. I think that's part and parcel of, you know, looking at guidance over the next 12 months. I think that's important. We're at that stage now where I think that needs to happen. In terms of commercial partners, you know, there's a lot of call in this room to say who you're working with as a foundry, who you're doing a deal with. Well, we're not at that point where we're comfortable yet, but over the next 12 months, I think we will be. That's sort of giving you an idea of our expectations. In terms of deeper commercialization and qual of a product, yeah, we're gonna give a lot more data and specifications.
I really would like to see the business model with somebody licensing the technology and the tech transfer, of course. If you've got a business model to do that, you need to prove it. I think that's you know these are tough goals for the next 12 months, but I think we're up for it. We have a great team. We have a world-class team just a mile down the road and, you know, we've really accelerated over the last 12 months. The focus is on commercializing polymers. Let's have a look at some of the things that I'm gonna try and preempt the Q&A session, so it doesn't go on for about three hours. Well, there's nothing there yet. Hold on.
These are some of the questions we always hear and, you know, I wanna thank the retail investors here because you're always sending us questions. Now, I know we can't answer all of them. You know, we've had a lot of interest in the company. I think, was it 48 institutionals now? 43? But really, it's the retail investors that have supported us over the last decade. I just wanna thank everybody. Yes, I can't answer all your questions. I know you ask a lot of detailed technical questions, and I'm gonna try and do the best I can here. Do you have more info on partners? Question that comes up all the time. We are partnering with foundries.
We haven't provided the guidance yet, but they are part of our goals, and what we did today is we've given a lot of insight of the type of foundries we're working with and some of the timelines. We try and address that question as best we can. Do you have revenue guidance for 2022, 2023? Well, internally, of course, we do. Pre-revenue guidance clearly is difficult, and we are reviewing that. We know that's a question that comes up all the time. That's in progress. Announcement of a business deal. Well, as you can see from our goals, we're currently engaged with deal discussions. We're not at the point to announce anything yet. I know there was a lot of sort of anticipation, "What are you gonna say today?" I think the best thing we can say today is this stuff's ongoing.
Over the next 12 months, you're probably gonna hear some more. Announcement of license in the polymer technology. There are interested parties, and discussions are ongoing. At this point, I can't say too much, but yeah, that's in progress. Announcement of tech transfer to a foundry, and that's the same sort of answer. Yeah, we are in discussions with foundry partners, and that's ongoing this year. Product availability. We are providing better granularity on product availability in our roadmaps. This year we've provided a lot more detailed timing, and as we get closer, we're gonna give more guidance towards that. That process is already started and, you know, over the next 12 months, you'll hear a lot more.
In terms of the business model, is tech transfer and licensing the best model for us? Well, we believe it is, given the vertical nature of the customer base. The customers, when I say vertical nature, a lot of the customers have everything in place. They design the chips, put the chips in boxes, put the boxes on printed circuit boards, put the boards into switches and routers, make the systems. They do everything. They know what they don't have. They know what they're weak in. As a company, you have to be flexible.
You know, they may say, "Yeah, we wanna buy product," or they may say, "No, go work with our foundry and go do a deal with them, and then we'll buy from the foundry 'cause we've already got a pre-negotiated deal." So you have to be flexible in your business practice in order to be successful in today's environment. Will customers purchase directly from LWT? The right answer is some may, and others will ask us to use their OEM, CMs, and their relationships with foundries. That's clearly what's happening. That's well known today. How many folks do you expect to hire in the next 12 months? We expect to grow about 5-10 folks. You know, we've got good resources. We're careful at who we hire. We're picking world-class people. I think John's here, is our VP of engineering.
I worked with John 30 years ago. You know, world-class people. You need world-class people to be successful. You just have to. The more you have, the more people get interested in your company and wanna join you. That ball, that snowball is rolling, and it's really exciting to see. Finance. I think if you've got finance questions, I'll let Jim do those afterwards. How much financing is needed to be easy to break even? Well, we haven't provided that guidance yet, so that's a tough one to answer. Although we are comfortable with our access to friendly capital. Yes, we've been talking to lots of different types of bankers over the last 6 months. We've been going to a lot of these conferences, as everybody's seen. Yeah, we're comfortable on that point. What is your runway?
I think in our 10-K it says runway into 2024, given the cash we have on hand right now. Our burn rate is roughly about $1 million per month. That burn rate has gone up over the last year. Why has it gone up? Well, we increased the team a little bit, and we're working with lots of foundries, and they're not cheap. Rather than put the money into buildings, we're putting the money where we can have the biggest impact for our technology. All right, next set of questions. Technical ones. Will the polymers get better in performance? Our performance is sufficient. We've seen great performance. You know, Polariton got a world record with the current polymers. We always strive to improve our performance to help customers. That's not gonna stop.
We're getting great performance, but I think we can get a lot more. What is the reliability? Our latest results are exciting and stable with good lifetimes. I think we put out a press release yesterday morning, and we're really happy with the way things are going there. Are you doing Telcordia testing? Yes, we're doing long-term Telcordia testing on the devices. That's in place. How does the polymer compare to the Polymer Plus compare to the Polymer Slot? Well, both are additive to silicon photonics to boost the speed and low power. There's no question. The Slot has the smallest footprint, and that's really cool. As you can see, I mean, you can just do so much more with a tiny modulator. How fast do the devices run?
Well, initial bandwidth, 70 GHz, which is 2-3x current today, and then 100 GHz much higher is capable because we're using polymers. In fact, our testing system, as we said last year, goes up to 110. You can't buy anything any faster. I mean, that's the fastest there is. You have to extrapolate after that. We're at the end of the test equipment. Is the yield good? Yes, we've seen excellent yields from the foundries. In terms of the foundries, who are our foundries? I mean, I think everybody wants to know this one, right? They're folks we trust with our technology. So you've got to have a good relationship with them. Some of them are more inflexible than others, but you have to trust your technology with them because in the end, you're gonna actually.
If you think about what does a foundry do, they're in the business of just running wafers. All they wanna do is run more wafers. What we are providing is a new technology and the potential to run more wafers. You have to trust them. It's not our fab, it's their fab. You have to work with them. We will provide updates as commercial progress matures. As you've seen from the goals, we're gonna do that. How easy is it to use polymers in the foundry with a PDK? We believe it's straightforward. There's no new tooling. I mean, our polymer is in liquid form. You spin it onto a wafer, you cure it in ovens, use photo lifts just like normal foundry processes. In terms of competition, how do we compare to thin-film lithium niobate and other technologies, including barium titanate?
I showed you a chart that we've compared that. We believe we're smaller, faster, and lower power. You saw that from the chart I put together. Are we still the fastest and lowest power modulators? Yes. We have an incredible platform, and we see this not only extending for this year or next year, but for a long time. We think we're on the right technology for the marketplace. Do you expect other polymer companies to compete? Well, of course. I mean, if people see us being successful, they're gonna jump in in any way they can. Yeah, we're gonna see people try and do polymer plays, try and keep up with us. We're gonna see people doing semiconductor plays, barium titanate, thin-film lithium niobate. Of course, we are.
This space is so hot because now everybody's realized the Internet guys, the telecom guys, the datacom guys all need what we have: high speed and low power. People now realize that and they go, "Well, if Lightwave's got a leadership, we're gonna have to try and catch them up." The good news is, we're in the leadership position, and that's exciting. In terms of the customer, how is the feedback? It's positive. Our technology is attractive and it's an enabler for them. We're actually, with our technology, we can enable their business. You know, when you think about the added value to the customer, it's not just low cost or it's high performance or it's low power. It's can you enable their business with your technology? And that's exciting. What is your level of interest from customers?
We have many requests for parts, so the interest is high. The last one here is what is the thing customers ask for the most? They all want the hardware. We've had people asking for hardware. Some people who ask for hardware, I'm not sure who they are. You get people out of the blue asking for hardware. You have to qualify who you give your hardware to. Yeah, people want the hardware. Last few slides. Leadership. Craig is a new person on the board. This is Craig's background. He's been an innovator in optics, microfluidics, electronics, nanofabrication. He's had his own company. I've worked with Craig for jeez, at least 20 years. We understand each other very well. Craig is extremely technical, and I think he's a great addition to the board, and feel free to introduce yourself afterwards.
We worked together at Intel, and we worked at a startup together after that. John, will you just raise your hand? Hopefully, you don't get mobbed afterwards, but John joined us in January, and I worked with John at Bell Labs and Tyco way back, and 35+ years in telecom and datacom. John was one of the key pioneers of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers that we used for WDM systems back in the eighties. Since then, he's worked on pluggable transceivers, silicon photonics, a lot of qualification, very technical, was at Sycamore, JDS as well. Since January, we're really proud to have John on the team. You know, our team is truly world-class. It's great. You know, John and Craig are new members to the team.
The person who was on our board, who retired from our board, but we convinced to stay on our technical advisory board is Joe. I think Joe has been with the company many, many years, but his knowledge base of chemistry and materials is phenomenal. Yes, we still interact with Joe. We still get advice from Joe. He's not on the full board, but he's still very active, and this is great to have. We probably will be expanding this because it's what we've discovered over the last 3 or 4 years is, you know, we've got some really smart technical people, and we wanna be surrounded with the best technical people to make sure we're doing the right thing and the vector's going in the right direction.
If we're barking up the wrong tree, I wanna hear about it now so we can do something about it. You got the best technical people, that's really good. Yeah, we're really proud of our advisory board and our full board. To summarize, a bit of a sort of a complex slide, but you know, you can see here some of the things that we've talked about material science, fab and testing, high speed design, patents, huge markets, some of the Achilles heels of the industry. You can see some of the things here that make us really excited. Let's go to the slide I started with, which is the four takeaways. What comes out of this slide, right? It's unparalleled progress. We've seen that.
I mean, we have a unique technology platform, and of course, ubiquitous, right? We want it everywhere. If you think about it, those are the three words. If you're gonna walk away with the four comments, walk away with four comments. If that's too much, walk away with the three words. One of them you already know, ubiquitous, right? Unparalleled, unique, and ubiquitous. Thank you. Yep.
Jim, do you want to come up and help, too?
Okay. What we've done before for the Q&A sessions, if there's numbers-related questions, I'll let Jim do that. If it's techie-related stuff, I'll do that. Yeah, we're open for questions.
Anyone who has a question, you can raise your hand. I'll note due to technical issues, this is the only microphone we can use, so I'll have to walk over to you and walk back. Anyone who has questions, just, we can take them now.
I've only walked it once. I thought you had hundreds of questions.
I think you covered them all.
Did I cover them all, I guess. Oh, I guess I covered them all. There's got to be something.
Thank you for the presentation, Michael. That was really good. We've heard a lot about the multiple lanes, parallel lanes, particularly in silicon, so that they can get their bandwidth up a little bit higher. What do you see as the maximum lane count of a reasonable nature that the silicon folks can do, as well as what Lightwave can do and still maintain a certain degree of reasonable complexity?
Technical question. The move to single lanes, as I indicated, is important. One of the biggest impediments that we're gonna see is not from the optics, because we have the optics solution. It's from the electronics. How do you get CMOS to go that fast in a single lane? The way people address that is they have multiple lanes. It's an interesting sort of area because electronics is actually helping the optics or has helped the optics over the last few years and get to higher speeds. In doing so, the power consumption from the electronic chips, the DSP chips, is huge. They have to use 5, 6, 7 nanometer technology from foundries like TSMC, and it costs a fortune. It's really expensive, consumes a lot of power.
Now, if we provide an optical solution with this roadmap, it eases the constraints on the electronics, and it allows the power to go down. I haven't checked to see if electronics can go that much faster. I think it can, but I think they will utilize lanes. The good news is they will utilize much simpler symbol rates. Instead of going immediately to PAM-4 or the QAM, and I'm talking technical because this is a technical person, so excuse me for a second. I think you're gonna allow people to think about using NRZ as well as PAM-4, which are much simpler symbol encoded schemes with electronics in order to get the speed up if you have faster optics. What we're actually doing is we're alleviating some of the electronic issues.
I haven't really started to think about how fast electronics can go. It's gonna keep on improving because everybody's talking about 5-nanometer and going faster with CMOS. That's not gonna stop, and it never has. It's just what we're doing from the architecture standpoint is making life a lot easier for them. Sorry, it's a bit technical, everybody.
I don't need a mic.
Okay.
Well, okay. You said in a recent interview, and I can't remember, it was like within the last 2 or 3 months. You said something about, 2022 is gonna be a really exciting year for stockholders. Do you remember saying that?
You would, Fred. I don't.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's been written.
It's gonna be an exciting year.
Okay. If you had to gauge that, if I said from one to ten, how excited are you for us and the company, could you gauge it on a scale of one to ten for us? Ten being it's beyond words of excitement. Yeah, there's nothing like being put on the spot. The first part of that question is, do I look sad? Do I look unhappy? You know, we are really, I mean, we said in the slide number three, we're really excited. I don't know if that's a high number or a low number in your scale. The more I'm with this company, and it's been, what, five years at the helm now, the more exciting it's become. Maybe we exceeded your ten scale. I don't know.
The point is, you can look at me and you say, "Is this guy really excited about what he's doing?" Of course, I am. I mean, this is. You know, this is a good way to look at this. I mean, I've been in other startups, but this technology is transformational, right? We're not gonna just do some new widget that goes faster. We're gonna change people's lives. In one of those interviews last week, was it Authority Magazine? They had this odd question, and the question was. What do you think is gonna be the Black Mirror moment? It's like, I've had some tough questions, and it's like, wow, how do I deal with this question? I was fortunate because last year during COVID, I saw the British TV show, Black Mirror. I understood the question.
It's like, whoa. Black Mirror is if you look into the future, what's the negativity that could happen? How bad could it get? What are some things that could go wrong? That's a Black Mirror moment. You know, when you see something that's as transformational as our technology, you know, what I put in that article is what happens if we get information overload? Some of us can deal with it. I mean, I deal with it, Jim deals with it. Some of us don't want to have information overload. It's tough. You know, what we're providing is an internet connect can deliver a lot more bandwidth to everybody's home. You can have five televisions running at the same time if you want to watch five televisions running.
I won't do that, but, you know, that's the type of thing you can have running. I mean, one video platform here, another video platform there, kids have another video platform. You got the bandwidth to deal with all this. That's, you know, as we look out five to 10 years, it's like, yeah, there might be some negativity there, but in terms of bringing a technology to the forefront and enabling a much more faster and lower power Internet, yeah, this is really exciting. I am. The reason I am is because, you know, we're doing great work, and we can see the impact. There might be some negative impacts, but the positive impact is huge. I don't. I haven't really given you a number from one to 10. I'd say it's more than 10.
Could you further define what the difference between partnership and commercialization mean with regards to revenues? Because, you know, seeing the time frames, I'm just curious, should we expect actual revenues coming in closer to 2024 on a commercial timeline based on the slides?
We said we weren't going to provide revenues, so I'm not going to provide revenues. If you've got a commercial... let's say for argument's sake, you do a commercial business deal with a foundry, and the foundry accepts your PDK, then yeah, the foundry can generate more business. That way you can bring in revenues. When you look at the business model, you know, you can... The traditional way is selling components, right? I mean, you make a component, you sell it to the customer. The model we're looking at is, can you generate revenues from royalties, and royalties of transferring your technology to a foundry, so they can use your material, and they can further their business. That may still be the customer. As I indicated, the customers may not want you to sell directly to them.
Just say, "Go have your stuff in the foundry, and that's fine with us, and then we'll buy from the foundry." It may not be a direct, but yes, it does have a relationship to revenue. The more we get comfortable, the more we will give guidance to that.
Yeah. No, I think I got a mic on. No, but the other thing, when you take a look at the royalty plan, I guess it's a layout that we-
I can't hold that in.
I don't want any feedback on this. Anyway. They're both working, right? Anyway, there's dollars that come into our pocket when somebody signs up, okay? Then there'll be royalty based upon the devices that they sell, right? I think the tech transfer really gets into where you're working very tightly with the foundries to come up with the different PDKs, which means you know you just don't hand them a recipe and turn them loose. We have to work with them and get lots of wafers back, test those wafers, go back to them, because we have to give them feedback on everything before.
I think that's where the tech transfer is versus just we have all these patents. You want to use it for, you know, type X, you know, work, then we could, you know, market segment. We'll just give it to you and you'll just pay us a fee for doing that. The tech transfer means we work very closely with them, and we're doing that today. By the way, they're excited to work with us.
Thank you for the presentation. Would you say that the foundries are in competition with one another at all? Are they aware of their status between the five that you mentioned, 5-7?
We haven't given any guidance on our foundries, and I don't know if, you know, foundry A knows what foundry B is doing in relation to ourselves. We haven't knowingly given any information out. Could they compete competitively with each other? Perhaps. This is an opportunity for foundries to take a new technology and run with it. From my standpoint, how do you get to being ubiquitous? Is it just one place that does it or is it lots of places that do it? A model to mitigate the risk of success with using foundries is use more than one. Yeah, you're seeing a bunch there that we put up, and I dare say they may be competitors. You know, I want to see the technology everywhere.
I mean, it's okay to have a great technology. It's like OLEDs. I want it like OLEDs. I want it everywhere. Yeah, there's got to be competition, I'm sure. We'll work through those things.
First of all, thank you for having us here. It's a very exciting day. Thank you to the whole team who's been working on this. I think you touched on it very quickly. In the industry today, we've heard from a lot of different players speaking about building a new ecosystem.
When I see Lightwave Logic within that ecosystem of companies that are trying to do something very transformational, as you say, how affected were you in the last 12 months, or do you expect in the future to be held back by other companies within the ecosystem that maybe do not progress at the same speed you do? I don't. I think you've maybe touched on it during the presentation, but if you can shed a little more light on this.
Sure. Just because we have a polymer technology that does really good things doesn't mean it automatically goes into the industry. You've got to have the electronics and the packaging to support you. Like for example, you got a modulator working at 100 GHz , that's a special package. That's something that you have to work with the rest of the industry players, and this is why we have to partner. We can't do everything ourselves. We can't do the electronics. We're gonna have to work with electronics chip manufacturers, gonna have to work with the packaging guys, the transceiver guys. We're aware of that.
The interesting thing to address the ecosystem question is when a few of us were at the Optical Fiber Conference in March, we've been told by customers over the last 18 months, you have to have high speed and low power modulators. It actually came out into the open at this year's conference, and everybody was talking about it. When things come out into the open like that, then, you know, the race has started, right? Competition has started. People realize that where we are is we're in a really hot space. That's now, you know, the infrastructure, the ecosystem, the electronic guys, the packaging guys, the foundries, they all now realize. You look around, you're seeing press releases by foundries now.
You're seeing people talking about silicon photonics more in the last six months than we have in the last five years. The ecosystem is now aware that it has to upgrade, and we're in a nice position. Yeah, you're right. We can't do everything, but we have to work with people, and we have to partner with people, and that's happening. Oh, you want an extra question?
One more technical question. The limitation that I see right now is Lightwave is unable to see truly how fast the modulators go because we are running into the bandwidth of the testing equipment that's available out there, whether it's Keysight or Tektronix, whoever it may be. Is Lightwave currently working with the Keysight's of the world to expand the ability to test it at higher bandwidths?
The best way I can answer that question is we have a pretty tight relationship with the test equipment manufacturers. For the test equipment manufacturers to have higher performance equipment, they need higher speed optical devices. I'll leave it at that.
Your market size projection is $40-60 billion for telecom and data centers. That includes the total revenue of transceivers. Could you add some color as to what portion modulators are of the transceiver market?
In a transceiver, which is a box, basically a metal box with a printed circuit board inside, the majority of the bill of materials goes into the optics. Depending on the speed and the complexity, it could range from 20, 30% up to 80, 90%. If you have a technology that enables that box to do something the competition doesn't do, then the value you get out of the optics in terms of the percentage of bill of materials is much higher. Yeah, it can range. But when you start looking at 801.6 terabit per second, I mean, it's gonna be a big part of that bill of materials. Now, we haven't given any guidance on details.
Generally speaking, if you've got a technology that enables your transceiver box to do something that nobody else can, then you can extract that value, and we're not gonna leave it on the table. Yeah, we were aware of that, but it's a good question, yeah. One more question. I'm never gonna wear white ever again, right? Okay, good. Yeah, go ahead.
What is the process that management or your investor relations will give? Say a foundry C decides, okay, we have a customer, they want your product, we're using it, and there is a revenue stream starting to appear. Will it just appear on a filing? Will you come out in a press release? Will there be a joint press release? Does the foundry come out and say, we are now using Lightwave Logic technologies? I just wanna try to wrap my head around the process that you will share with your—with this retail group that's been extremely little. How will that process take place from your side?
As we indicate, we expect that process to mature in the next 12 months. You could have a number of interesting scenarios. You could have the scenario where we would wanna put a press release out with foundry X because we want to. The other way around. Foundry X comes to us and said, "You know, we want to get a head start in this technology vis-à-vis other foundries, and we want to go do a press release." That process, you know, is going on. At this point, we haven't reached that threshold, you know, in our comfort level to give guidance. Each foundry has their own way of dealing with it.
If you look at different foundries across the board, they have their own ways of announcing whether it's a single company, joint venture, partnership or a bunch of companies they're working with. When it comes to foundries, we have to think about what their business model is. If you look through the optics of them, all they want is more wafers. They want more wafers to run through their fab. That's what motivates them. You have to think about that and how you are impacting them or how they see themselves generating their own revenue. I would say that there's no one solution here, but it's something we're working with each of the foundries, and if we feel comfortable, we'll go do one of those things.
There was one last question at the back. Let's do one last one.
To this gentleman's question on the management and the announcement, you just mentioned it was within 12 months there would be some guidance. I just wanted to make sure I heard that correctly. Seems like positive guidance than what was said. The other thing, too, on the wafers and these foundries pumping out wafers, it would seem that, yes, they would wanna pump out as many wafers as possible, but if you were able to allow them to pump out the same amount of wafers at twice the speed with less than half the power, they could charge 10x on that wafer because it would be that much more wanted in the marketplace. Just wanted to hear your comment on that.
Typically, wafers. Well, the first part of your question is I've written down what our goals are in the next year. That's, it's in stone. Yeah, we'll make announcements as we feel comfortable. I think that was pretty clear. In terms of foundries, I mean, they have a bunch of process steps. If you wanna get a wafer through faster, you know, let's say it's a cycle time of six months. You put in your design, it takes them six months to run through the foundry, you get your stuff back. You can pay more money. You can do hot lots to get it go to the top of the queue to get it come out faster, but it costs a lot more money to do that. Foundries do offer that type of service.
In terms of assuming that you have the same steps in the recipe, and you want that wave to come through twice as fast. That does happen, and it just depends on the need of the customer. Yes, they, if they really want this stuff out there, and they, and the customer drive is strong, yeah, they can do the cycle time. Instead of being six months, they can take it down to four months or even three months, depending on who the foundry is and what sort of availability they have. Hot lotting is certainly something that occurs in foundries, and we're aware of that. It's something we do take into account.
I think you're also asking about cost performance, aren't you? Yeah. One, they're gonna get what the market will bear. If you're adding that much better performance, they're gonna be able to get more money for those chips. In the end, that helps us because it'll be a royalty-based program.
All right. Well, I wanna thank everybody, and we'll be here to answer, I guess, a few more questions if you would. Thank you for listening.
You did great.