Ladies and gentlemen, greetings and welcome to the Lightwave Logic Inc update conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ryan Coleman, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Lightwave Logic update call. I'm joined on today's call by Lightwave Logic Chief Executive Officer Yves LeMaitre. Please note that this call is in listen-only mode for the duration of the call and that a replay will be posted to the company's website shortly after the conclusion of this call. Some of the matters we'll discuss on this call, including statements and our business outlook, are forward-looking, and as such, this call speaks only as of today, July 31st, 2025. Such statements may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
The matters discussed on this call are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, and these risks and uncertainties could cause actual operating results to differ materially from those expressed in the call. A more detailed description of the risks our company faces is more fully described by the company under the caption "Risk Factors" included in our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. As always, Lightwave Logic assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call. Any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of replay listening or transcript reading. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Yves.
Thank you, Ryan, and thank you all for joining today's call. Let me start by covering a recent announcement and press release on our PertiMin polymer reliability and advanced encapsulation technique. We have received a lot of coverage after this press release was issued, a lot of questions, a lot of interest, and we believe it represents a significant milestone for our polymer material. Before I explain some of the details, I thought I should start with a reminder of the challenges that were faced by the organic LED industry. I found this old version of the MIT Technology Review that said, and I quote, "Organic LED suffer from reliability issues that make them unsuitable for displays." Granted, that was a long time ago, but it was at the time referring to the short operational lifespan, the extreme sensitivity to moisture and oxygen that these organic materials were facing.
Over the last 15-20 years, the organic LED industry worked really hard at solving those issues. Ultimately, the solution came from a combination of better materials, better design, and better encapsulation and moisture barriers. Now you look at where the OLED is today. It is mainstream. It is everywhere. It is in so many consumer electronics devices, in TVs, and even in the French and automotive environment. The reason I bring this up is that I believe that polymers are on the exact same trajectory. There were really three main challenges that polymers, electro-optic polymers, had to overcome. One was temperature. The second was sensitivity to light or photon sensitivity. The third one was reaction to oxygen. The way we dealt with this was that for temperature, we designed very unique structures called chromophores. They are really the structures that enable the fast modulation of the light.
Those chromophores, we designed them in mind, keeping the high temperature performance as a critical parameter. We call that high TG or the high glass transition temperature. That's how we dealt with temperature. For the exposure to photon, it was not really an issue as we were operating in a different frequency in the near-infrared space. We have done testing, and we published that in the past that showed that our devices can sustain high exposure to photons. Finally, the oxygen protection is really the breakthrough we had over the last year, year and a half, where we came up with a very unique process to protect the materials through an encapsulation technique called ALD or atomic layer deposition. This announcement that we made about the reliability of our material was really significant for our customers.
Since I joined the company, it was pretty much always the number one question I would get from potential customers in order to proceed with what we call the design win process. We started this 85-degree temperature, 85% humidity test. We call it the 85-85, sometimes referred to also as part of the GR-468 standard. We started this test on polymers on thin film. That test, we started based on a tier one telecom customer request in order to show that our material can operate at elevated temperature for a long time, but is also protected from oxygen and moisture exposure. We did that with our generation two encapsulation process, which is the one that we have released as part of our standard PDK. The results were very, very good.
Now that we have demonstrated this and demonstrated the fundamental reliability of our material, the next step for us is to do reliability on devices. By devices, we mean either a silicon photonics chip or an optical engine or some packaged devices. This is not something we do on our own. It is something we do with our customers as they ultimately design the final product. This is kind of our next step on reliability. We are not stopping there, by the way. Our materials, we are constantly trying to improve not only the materials, but also the process, including encapsulation, but other process steps as well. This is part of our culture of continuous improvement.
As part of this press release, we have also announced amazing results with our generation four encapsulation process, which is really a major improvement that will benefit future products and bring the robustness of our protection barrier to the level of what the industry calls gold box standards. Essentially, that's a term that was coined for the telecom industry primarily, where people were using gold boxes, which are essentially fully hermetic enclosures, completely protecting the materials from any outside influence. The results have been shared with key customers and received very positively, really increasing the customer's confidence, the industry confidence on the readiness of the materials. Reliability was really critical for us in order to ramp and move to the next stage of the company.
It's a slide that I have presented in the past that shows that we really move from technology and materials and R&D development to customer and product phase for the company. Of course, reliability was a critical step for that. It's a great progress, but it's also only one of the steps required. Right? We are making steady progress. The focus remains on the execution of the multiple pieces that are required for adoption and volume deployment of electro-optic polymers in the AI connectivity and hyperscale data center space. Other steps, some of the steps we do in-house, other steps will be done in partnership with customers and foundries. The market is moving extremely fast with huge investment by multi-billion dollar semiconductor companies. It is not just the good old days of optics.
Now, the semiconductor industry is taking a significant role, and I would even say the lead in integrating photonics into their solutions. We believe this is great news for Lightwave Logic as our technology lends itself to address the challenges of some of the configuration that will happen in the future. One example of this is the emergence of co-packaged optics or CPO. It is a new trend that is driven by the replacement of copper connectivity with optical technology. This is what's happening in particular in one configuration called Scale-Up, where essentially all the processors within a rack are interconnected today with copper, and we'll gradually move to using photonics links to interconnect them. This is where co-packaged optics come in. Essentially, it requires the electronics, the switch or the ASIC or the GPU to be tightly integrated with the photonic chip.
Of course, the market over the next couple of years will still be dominated by what is called Scale-Out, which is really the interconnection of multiple racks within a row or between rows in a large building. Right? That's still being done using the traditional optical transceiver modules or pluggable modules that are inserted in typically in switch or routers. The fact that this new market comes up for Scale-Up brings a completely new opportunity for optics. It is an additive market for the photonics technology. Of course, that market requires very unique performance attributes. The bandwidth needs to go beyond 200G per lane to 400G and beyond. It requires very low power. This is one of the biggest challenges that the industry is facing. We believe that our electro-optic polymer, the PertiMin material, offers some of this. Very importantly, it requires also tiny, tiny modulators.
The density of the ports you want to be able to fit on what is called the shoreline or the external border of the ASIC or the switch or the GPU requires to have really small modulators, and size becomes very critical. Not only size, but also the ability to do this modulator using integrated technologies such as silicon photonics. That's where our materials shine even more compared to traditional legacy materials such as lithium niobate or indium phosphide or other 3-5 materials. In the meantime, we also can address the traditional transceivers, module technologies that require also scaling up in terms of bandwidth, going to 200G and 400G. As you can see, we have been extremely busy working with multiple customers. The way we address these customers is kind of an engagement at multiple levels.
On the one hand, we engage with what I call the market makers or industry makers and influencers, a company who ultimately will use these technologies to build either AI factories or very large, high-scale, hyperscale networks. Those companies, we have to convince them that our solution brings them a significant advantage versus alternative technologies and get them to adopt our technology into their roadmap. We turn into the actual implementation of the products that we talk to optical transceiver suppliers or silicon photonics engines, design houses that will implement and work with us to incorporate our materials into their optical engine or into their whole solution. Finally, we also talk to the foundries so that we have an ecosystem that is ready and can enable the deployment and processing of those silicon photonics chips augmented with polymer.
At the same time, we also need to be present in the different ecosystems. I've talked about the three big ecosystems that are emerging, and they are somewhat overlapping, but they're also somewhat separate. We have one in mainland China, driven by a number of geopolitical considerations. There's a huge investment, of course, for AI and AI connectivity in China. There's the one in the rest of Asia, primarily very active in Taiwan and in Singapore in particular. You have the more traditional Western suppliers from North America, a few in Europe and Israel. We need to cover all of this. As you can imagine, we've been very, very busy in terms of our customer and foundry engagement.
Although we cannot disclose names and details of specific customer engagements, we wanted to use a few select examples in this call to provide our shareholders with a better understanding of where we stand in our path to design win. A good example is a program we have with a Fortune 500 company based in Asia, what we would call a tier one customer. We started this program a few months ago, and we are now processing their first-generation silicon photonics, 200G per lane test chips at our facility in Denver, Colorado. We are doing that by adding our PertiMin polymer material to their chips in order to validate the performance and the design of the 200G per lane slot.
Upon successful completion of this test, we expect to launch a formal program with them and move to what we call stage three in our design win cycle with a transceiver design program using silicon organic hybrid chips. What is also interesting in this program is that we are also working closely with this customer to down-select the right silicon foundry to process the silicon photonics chips, augmented with electro-optic polymer, in order to be able to produce in high volume with high yield. Another program that we have is a technical program launched with a tier one company in the AI connectivity space to integrate our polymers into a CPO configuration at 400G per lane. This is at the early stage, but will likely require some specific tuning of the electro-optic polymer materials and a fairly stringent reliability qualification campaign.
We also include specific assembly and packaging process development jointly with our customers and their manufacturing partner in order to enable a much tighter integration of the PIC or the photonic chips with the electrical IC. In parallel, we are also engaged with several silicon photonics design houses. Some of them are vertically integrated, meaning that they are designing the entire transceiver module. Some others are focusing solely on the silicon photonic PIC or the optical engine. Those customers include both tier one and new companies, either privately or VC-funded and aiming to enter the market. The goal for us is to have a mix of customers, both tier one, that will give us the credibility and the volume, but also new emerging companies that will be maybe more aggressive in bringing products to market faster.
The goal for us is to intercept the 200G per lane opportunities by augmenting their silicon photonics chips and replace the first-generation EML laser-based transceivers by providing significant power and cost reduction. Right? Of course, the goal is not to stop there. We want to continue after this initial program at 200G and migrate to 400G per lane, where we believe our technology will shine even more. We expect some of these engagements to reach stage three over the next few quarters. In addition, we continue to bring in new stage one opportunities as acceptance of EOP as a reliable material continues to grow with customers. We recently engaged, a good example is we recently engaged with a tier one hyperscaler and are planning to ship them prototype samples of our modulators to be evaluated in their lab for the transition to 400 Gb per second per lane.
As you can see, although it cannot be specific, I mean, these both types of engagements and customers give us confidence that the industry is ready to accept electro-optic polymers as a superior alternative to traditional materials. Like many new products, we still have multiple barriers to overcome to close these design wins and prepare for high-volume production, but the momentum is excellent. We are now spending quality time planning for the scaling of our production and process infrastructure to ramp up production. As part of this planning, we continue, of course, our work to assess and identify the right foundries for both the front end and the back end of line. We do this in partnership with our customers. As a result of our technical progress to date, we are reaffirming the expectation to have three to five customers at stage three by the end of the year 2025.
To close my comments, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Lightwave Logic team and in particular our technical community for the outstanding progress, the hard work, and the dedication. With that, I will turn it over to Ryan for the Q&A session.
Thanks, Yves. When we announced this call, we invited investors to submit their questions ahead of time. We'd like to thank those of you who took the time to do so. While the number of individual questions received was more than we could adequately address in this format, we've attempted to address as many as possible in our prepared remarks and selected the ones most frequently asked for the purposes of this discussion. Our first question: Is the fourth-generation encapsulation ALD a new proprietary revenue option across the photonics and semiconductor industry? How big is the opportunity and can it be attractive to Samsung, LG, and other OLED display companies like Apple?
Thank you for the question. This was not the reason for the development of this new encapsulation technique. We did this as part of our philosophy of continuous improvement, or what the Japanese like to call Kaizen. As I explained, the reliability demand on materials will continue to increase, driven by new applications such as this co-packaged optics CPO and essentially the path towards tighter integration of electronics and photonics. That is why we are constantly improving our process. I'm not ruling out exploring options for using this process in other markets in the future. I think that's a possibility. I want to be very clear. Our focus is on execution and taking advantage of the large market actionable today and right in front of us with AI connectivity. We have a lot of work to do as part of our productization and commercial engagement, and we cannot take our eyes off the ball.
Our second question is on device-level reliability. Can you clarify whether any of the Telcordia GR-468 tests have been performed on packaged modulators or full PICs? If not, when do you expect to begin those tests?
Yeah, good question. I think I covered some of that in my comment, but I think it's worth clarifying that our GR-468 test was performed on raw materials on thin film, right? These materials were not incorporated on full photonic integrated circuits or PICs or not integrated in packaged optical engines or packaged modulators, right? This is the work that we will do in partnership with our customers when they reach stage three. Actually, we are doing with the customer today with that stage three. I think it's also important that although we have not done the full reliability tests on devices or PICs or modulators, we have done what we call red flag testing on our internally developed PICs in order to build our own confidence that the excellent reliability of the raw materials would then translate into similar results when integrated and packaged. We will continue to report on our progress there as we go through the design win cycle process.
On the foundry integration timeline, what is the current status of your process design kit release for foundry partners, and are you targeting specific silicon photonics fabs for integration?
If you remember, we released our PDK earlier this year. I think it was in March. We actually intend to continue to bring new and improved kits as they become available and we continue to scale and improve our processes. We have already announced Advanced Micro Foundries in Singapore as our foundry partner and are working with several new foundries to validate their compatibility with our backend process as well as their frontend process and tool performance. We have very specific requirements that we share with them, and then we validate essentially their performance to make sure that they can process our materials and deliver not only the right performance, but also the right yield so that we can scale to high volume.
We are also evaluating partnering options for the future transition from essentially what is today most of the industry, which is 200 millimeter wafers, to 300 millimeter wafers, which is 12-inch. The industry at some point will migrate there, so we want to anticipate that we have the right partners to do that transition.
Can you outline the key technical and commercial milestones that you expect to hit over the next 12 months that would signal readiness for product-level deployment?
Yeah. The design win cycle process we outlined at the annual shareholder meeting describes kind of the key steps that need to happen on the path to volume production. I had mentioned that it is 18 to 24 months end-to-end process that is made up of a series and many technical and commercial milestones on the way. Some are directly under our control that we execute inside Lightwave Logic. Some are jointly executed with our customers. Some are firmly under the control of our customers where we are simply spectators. Some depend on foundry execution. Some are related also to the end user acceptance of our customer's product. Right? All of these pieces have to converge and are required to bring a product to volume production, which basically explains why this end-to-end process can take up to two years.
Our last question: What other tests are interested parties looking to see performed, particularly for CPO applications? If none, is PertiMin CPO ready?
Good question. As I mentioned in the presentation, CPO is a very interesting and active opportunity, but it is also very new and still somewhat undefined. It is really one of the first new product architectures driving such a tight convergence of electronics and photonics. As a result, there are really no standards yet. Multiple options are being evaluated with various proprietary products and new manufacturing processes. We are actively involved in several projects and believe, as I mentioned earlier, that our materials offer a unique and distinctive advantage, primarily size, power, integration, and performance, especially compared to lithium niobate or indium phosphide. It is a bit early for us to give more specific color on the role we will play in the CPO ecosystem as it is very much being defined as we speak.
Thanks, Yves. Thanks again to everyone who submitted their questions. I'd like to turn the call back over to our operator to conclude today's call.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference of Lightwave Logic Inc has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.