Lightwave Logic, Inc. (LWLG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] familiar faces. It's just incredible the Belgian contingent with the willing Dutchmen, where is he? There he is. And of course, all our great shareholders here. We -- it's our pleasure to welcome all of you and then to really try to give you a better update and is important we haven't seen the floor and I think that, that's important. So that we -- you know what our plans are. [indiscernible] and we'll follow that -- The first part is so them, so I apologize for that from [indiscernible] because the process. we'll get through the formal portion of the meeting. And then Michael on his presentation, and then we'll open it up to questions after that. [indiscernible] to introduce everybody and so and jumping back out ahead and start with you. But first all, our CEO, Dr. Michael Lebby. Then, of course, who is President and [indiscernible] the guy has been trying in the way since you saw how many people is going to use our stores. [indiscernible] I think this is a second board meeting shareholder meeting. So it's great to have a part of the team. And I'm sure you guys have already checked him out, he's with [indiscernible] and just a great addition to our Board. Unfortunately, we don't have here from our information [indiscernible] So he is not in won't join us. So we'll talk about being most important people and we in the last couple of words back here in the right side. And those are some more great employees at Lightwave Logic that are making all of that magic happens. So thanks to them. Okay. With that portion completed, so maybe just start a time to both -- so seen secretary, we're recording in the so the represented representative of Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. has been applied to serve as inspector of election for meeting -- so everybody can see who are sitting back in the room there. Mr. So has signed an oath of office, which will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. The formal portion of the meeting will now start. Calling our corporate secretary, Jim Marcelli, to establish that we have met the necessary corporate requirements for this meeting. Jim?

Thank you. Thank you, Tom. [indiscernible] notice of this meeting has been duly given and that the notice of annual meeting of shareholders, proxy statement [indiscernible] on the mail about April 29, 2022 to our shareholders available at the close of business on April 1, 2022. We have the payment together with proxy statement and proxy will be filed with the minuted. As of April 14, 2022, [indiscernible] 388,924 shares outstanding. we have 41,947,799 shares present [indiscernible] at this meeting, which is over 33% of the outstanding shares and a quorum promoting the transaction of business. Each share entitled to vote on each matter [indiscernible] All the registered shareholders entitled to vote -- Register shareholders and teas available for exoneration by the shareholders. [indiscernible] is present. I will now call to as provided for in general in some seats to elect 3 directors to the Board of Directors to serve until 2025 and our shareholders turn our successors and the elected or been qualified. Our coring to serve as the companies understood for the fiscal year end December 31, 2022, to consider and take action processes may properly come before or in oral -- so Geron's describe the voting procedures Thanks, Tom.

[indiscernible] voting by proxy ballot on our agenda items described in the process at product -- if you have a return in the proxy card to change or -- it is not necessarily to gain level as ototoxic or want to change your vote to ballot card for Mr. So in spectators to ball today. If you talk about special printer in on the ballot. And we have final proxy card and we charge on a plus that on balance. The ballots be signed by the short on completion of the palatal investor sells superstars possible as a billion that they the formal portion of the -- the first of our business is intellectually 3 Class I directors to the Board of Directors to serve until 2022 shares or to our successors and that I think should be 2025 sort until their successors duly elected and qualifies. The Board of Directors is comprised of 7 directors and is divided into 3 classes current vehicle price of 2 class directors who is onto explore in 2024 to a Class 2 neuters. -- stores were explored at the 2022 and me and then tease directors and stores expire 2023. -- annual meeting. The Board of Directors has now noted through the class team and common directors for election and recolor for the lectin Class II and common directors. -- corporate secretary will outpace the name or the case into nation. Thank you for doctors is not a full class to the trait for internal this other successes on work that qualified Michael less levy, rolled and book in C Chesla. The advanced notice must be given to the Secretary of the shareholders' 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 3 nominees for the directors receiving the highest number of votes will be worked to the Board of Directors. The proxy solicited by management will vote in favor of the directors nominees. And I hereby move that Michael S. Lebby, elected Class II directors to serve for a term of 3 years or until their successors are elected and qualified.

I second the motion.

Next line of business is the ratification of the appointment of Morris & Cogen LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2022. The vote required to ratify the appointment of Morrison Kogan LLP to serve as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2022 is the affirmative vote of the holdings 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.

I hereby move that the appointment of Morrison Kogan LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending 2022 be ratified. I second the moment -- there are 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 into Mr. Seto at this time. The Inspector of Election has tabulated the votes, and Mr. Sitel will now give us the report of the Inspector of Election. David?

Michael S. Levy Ronald A. Book and Craig Chess have been elected as Class II directors to serve for a term of 3 years or until their successors are elected and qualified. And Morrison Coke and LLP has been duly appointed as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2022.

Thank you, David. This completes the formal portion of the meeting, and we're going to now transition into the management presentation by Michael. I just want to point out one thing. I was -- 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 going to give it a shot.

I got the other half, right? So I get the black jacket and a black shirt, but not the light bands, I couldn't go all the way.

How can we go wrong with that? Go ahead, Michael.

Thanks. Here 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 3 years ago, a lot of people. I saw quite a few in Belgium last year, and that was a really fun talk and a fun meeting, a lot of excited folks. But today, over the next 40, 45 minutes, I'm going to give the management update. And I'm going to talk about what we've achieved in the last year and where we're going. And so let's get started. So of course, I've got to show this slide, and you don't have to read all the words on this slide. But we're off this slide pretty quickly. It's a safe harbor the slide. But this is it. Three words. So yes, we are really excited. And I just wanted to get that out upfront. It's been a great year for us. We've seen a lot of things occur. Everybody in this audience room has seen a lot of things happen to the company. But the next slide is really interesting. And I think most folks were aware that we went on to the NASDAQ last year. And if you think about it, my first time given this talk was 2017, which was 5 years ago. And if you look at the takeaway line at the bottom, we promised, Tom and I promised in 2017, we do an organic uplift without a reverse split and a natural uplift to the NASDAQ. Because you folks were asking, when are you going to go to the NASDAQ. And we say, we'll do this and we do it in our own way. And we're going to get our technology to the point what we could do it naturally. And that's what we did, and it's just been fantastic to do that. And in fact, this guy here, Andy all is the executive at NASDAQ. You can look at our photography. I think well, it's nobody in Times Square because these guys had all these security guards go out and clean part of Times Square so we got our photograph taken. And he said to us, he said, I've been doing this job a long time. I don't recall another company that's done this. It's so it's rare. It's really cool. So I started a 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 hang loose And it was more of a spontaneous thing. It's like, Well, this is an L, and this is another L, let's do that. And it actually happened on the day. And if you look really closely, you just can't see that I have a green ring because everybody had to be COVID-tested to go into the NASDAQ building. And I just felt really excited at the time. And look what's happened in the last 6 months, everybody is doing this, right? LWLG, I mean the company is great. It's a fun place to work out. We've got world-class folks. We're doing great technology. We've come a long way. And if you think about where we were a year ago, just if you take one metric, just take the share price, I mean, it's completely changed. And so we feel really well in the last year. And I think you see the excitement in the team, seeing the excitement today. And 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, [indiscernible] from Epic that I was in a video with him and he's like this. I just don't like that. But on this occasion, I am wearing a shirt, and you'll never see me wear any other color than black. So yes, we did great. And then while I was standing outside with Andy, I had a text come in, and I don't think I've told many people this story and the text came in from my brother in Lauren D.C., who's a financial guy. And he was watching it on the TV with his family, the whole sort of pressing the button and ringing the bell for the end of the week. And the text that came in on my phone, was why is uncle Michael showing gang signs on television. And so I show the text or Andy, he followed about a -- it's like I didn't realize this is a gang sign. But great, this has been a great start to the year, and we worked hard to get there. So to talk, if there's nothing else, 4 takeaway is what I want everybody to takeaway from this talk. You are going to hear a lot of information, there's going to be a lot of data. Some of it is going to be technical but 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. But the 4 takeaways, we've made unparalleled progress in the last 12 months. Second one, our technology is competitively superior and unique. The third one, we are positioned to have polymers to 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. So these 4 points, this sums it up. And this is -- if there's anything you want to walk away from this meeting is these 4 points. So let's look at the outline. And so there's the normal outline what we do, the dynamics, the markets. But the most important thing about this slide is the bottom part. And I actually indicated in red font new guidance because what we want to 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. And so when you see the red front, this is stuff that we haven't talked about before. So what do we do? So 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. And if you want to 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 didn't switch very fast. Our material is 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. And 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. And this is -- this next bullet point has a couple of green highlights because it's really important. 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 5 years or 10 years but decades. They have that performance, runway, if you like. And start using these things, they're transformational. And so yes, I've worked in some start-ups before, some hot start-ups in the Bay Area. And you've got great technology. But this technology is transformational. This is really cool. And then the last bullet, we can integrate other devices with our modulators. So you can do modulators with silicon photonics. You can do multichannel solutions, you can do a number of them. So they're quite flexible in how you design them. So the takeaway for the slide is polymer technology extend speeds, reduces power consumption, not just for a few years, but for decades. And when you talk to customers, this is really important. Because customers, they say, "well, this is great technology, but what's next and what's after that?" And so you need to have a road map that keeps them really excited. So 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. And the thing I've ringed here is the path to single lane. The only way you can really get to achieve these speeds is have a very fast optical switch on modulator. And that's what we have, single lane. You have to have faster optics. So the industry is putting out these road maps, and we have the technology that actually fits to these road map. This one is a complicated slide, so I'll simplify. I'm not going to go through all the details, but you can see there's 2 big arrows here. And it's the red arrow, which means the power consumption is just going up. And you can see the slope of that curve is horrific. And there's some big numbers there. And that red arrow represents data centers electricity. And if you look into data centers, you realize they are consuming tons of electricity, there'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 2 curves are in blue, where 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. And that's going up too. So that's a problem for the industry. It's a major challenge for the data centers and the service providers that provide our Internet. And so power is growing exponentially with increased traffic levels. It is the Achilles heel of the industry. And this is happening today. This is public information. And to address this, you've got to have better technology. In fact, we are at -- a few of us were at a big conference in March, called the Optical Fiber Conference down in San Diego. And this slide is from Arista is one of the big players that does a lot of data center-type transceiver modules. And 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. And there's a disconnect between the traffic and the consumption of power and we are able to address them. And so growing bandwidth brings higher power. Power needs to be mitigated as speeds increase. And we have the technology to do that. So let's have a look at the target markets. And this slide has a lot of markets, and you can see as you go down the vertical on the left-hand side, but the top 4 are colored in green because they are existing. They here now, they're really exciting and they're a perfect fit for our polymer modulators. You can see, depending on which market research you use, whether it's today or it's out to 2030, these are big markets. And there's huge opportunities here. But you also see below, there's other markets, too that we see our 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. And we know there's interest in displays, projection, automotive LiDAR, different types of sensors, we know this. But we don't have the manpower to take everything on, so we are focused in the green area. And you can see the green area is exciting enough. I mean, that's strong growth. It's existing market, there's a great opportunity for us. So market positioning. This is one of those slides where you're going to have to read it in your own time because I'm not going to go through the details. I've used this slide before, but there's a couple of really simple messages that comes from this slide. Our polymers break through the speed wall. So what is the speed wall? And if you look at that chart, you see those black and gray and some of the red circles. Those are commercial points of technology that gets used in the Internet today. And you can see that none of those points are on this side of that green wall. So our technology breaks through that wall because it's optics that go faster. In fact, it's 3x faster than the current materials and modulation. And so the takeaway at the bottom here is faster is good, 3x faster is way better. And we have the technology that breaks way through. And you can see, if you want to 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 going to go through a lot of detail, but it's just showing you the history of where low voltage is coming from in the modulated devices. And we're proud to have Dr. Leonberger here, Fred. And Fred was the person that started off with the lithium niobate modulators back in the 2000s that really drove that industry. But that was using much higher voltages, they consume a lot more power. And I think some people here are aware of that. But the industry is going to transition to very low voltage because they really have to do the high speed and the low power. And that's a great opportunity for us to change the whole industry to polymers. And so you're going from power hungry to high power, to moderate power, to low power. And you've got 2 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 the folks have designed low-power modulators before, I've seen research papers. But commercialization is expected to happen pretty soon. And so this 1 volt metric of getting to super low voltage levels to keep the power down, that transition is happening. And so our timing in the marketplace is just, as I said last week in an interview, it's perfect. We're really excited. So I got a quite -- a bunch of questions in the last 2 days about competition, and I get a lot of e-mails about who's your competitor. And it's what we've done in this chart, it is a very detailed chart. So I'm sure that you're going to 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. And the polymers are the ones in the yellow and the green on the right-hand side. And 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. And you can see that there's relative differences between each of these technologies. But in general, when we compare some of these technologies to what we have, yes, there's some C-source here. There's some -- 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 modulated technologies or different modulated technologies. And so polymer modulators outperform competitive semiconductor technologies, and that's really exciting. So when you start looking at some of the technical metrics, and I'm not going to go through each one of these, but this rigs really excited here. And then one of the important things that we talked about a year ago, and we're going to talk about a little bit more is these 3 blocks here, standard PDK fabrication. Can your technology go into a standard silicon fab. Some of these can. 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. So what's unique about our competence? Well, let's have a look at some of the advantages. Naturally, very fast switching light. These are material properties of the polymers. So that's at least 2 to 3x faster than existing solutions using modulators. Naturally, very low power. Mother Nature is working with us with our technology. So it's 10x lower power depending on how you want to design the device or the architecture, but that's important. And that's important for the system designers to get the power down. Easily fabricated using silicon foundries. And 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 want to do is go raise a ton of money, put a concrete slab 4 walls and call it a fab when there's already foundries out there. Use -- utilize the existing infrastructure as best we 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 1.5 years because of COVID. Are your polymers are generated in our plant a 1 mile away. So we don't have any security supply issues. And so we generate our polymers. So we're not dependent on other people delivering stuff in or ships being late and things like that. And so material designed and sourced directly from ourselves. And 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, could be indium phosphide. And so because we can apply easily in a silicon fab. So polymers are unique in their properties. And so this is a cross-section of a slow modulator. If you've read a lot of technical papers, you've probably seen something like this before. But let me explain the -- the light goes in between these 2 vertical stacks in the slot. But you can see this one is on a silicon wafer. There's some silicon photonics, standard silicon photonics chip, use standard photolithographic techniques, which you find in our foundry. The metalization is standard for the gates of contacts, it's been 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. And so here are some pictures of modulators and different types of features that we've come back from the foundries. And you can see, I've got some comments here. I mean it's a foundry A, and this is a foundry D. And so I just wanted to show everybody that we have stuff coming back from foundries, and it looks very nice. And so that process has begun. And I wanted to show everybody that, yes, this is happening. And in fact, you can see at the bottom there, the takeaway is standard silicon fabrication components. And so yes, 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. I think we had a press release about it 3 or 4 months ago. And a grating coupler takes the life from the waveguide and sends its vertically up. And it sended up to those little trenches there. You can see, this is just an SEM of a grating coupler. Nice picture. But look at the scale, this is 1 micron. So those channels that are 40, 50 nanometers. They're really tiny, but the quality is beautiful. And so some of the things you get from the foundry is really nice quality. And so it just gives you an example that it's -- 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 tiny weeny. In fact, you look at the takeaway, size really matters. Go fast, go low power. But you're always small, too, right? So all I'm showing here is that this is a CAD drawing, it's on modulators. This is just giving everybody -- this is a 1 by 8 array. And it shows is 1 millimeter. These things are about 0.5 millimeter high. So you array them up and you get 9 millimeters by 1 millimeter. And that's really important when you're trying to shoehorn these technologies into a box, a pluggable transceiver box. And in fact, there was a competitor at the conference, the OFC conference back in March that showed -- what they did with the lithium niobate. And this is thin film lithium niobate. And they put it into a -- you can see the pretty 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. So one laser goes into 8 modulators. So 1 into 8. It's taken quite a bit of space out. You did the same with us. You got 15, 30x more modulators in the same space. And in fact, I mean, there's a little asterisk, only 30x better. You could actually probably double that up if you really were trying to squeeze stuff in. And so what does that say? Not only are you high speed and low power, but we have a capability of sending a lot more traffic through that module. And the modules are really small or the boxes are really small. And that is -- 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. But where would you use this stuff? Well, where we enter the market is you have our modulators that go into these boxes. These boxes go into the switching and the router equipment in the data centers and the telecommunications network on the Internet. And so you can look at this as polymer engines for pluggable transceivers because we have high-speed engines that are really small. So this one here shows the road map that came out of Arista for the transceiver boxes. I mean yes, this is what these things look like. And if you look at the technical interest today, everybody is talking about 400G and there's various ways to do that. And so the shoehorning, all these technologies to get into the small box. And it's pretty tough. I mean they're consuming a lot of power, and they're generating a lot of heat. But look at the road map, and this is what Arista showed back in March. They said, we're talking about 800, and we've got to go to 1.6 and then we have to go to 3.2. And quite honestly, I don't think folks are really understanding the technology that's going to go into these boxes. But if you start thinking about what we could do to this business, and so all I did was sort of modified that chart a little bit. And you can see, you start using that technology, you start extending that road map more than just a year, more than just 5 years, more than 10 years. And 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. And so 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. So the road map is enabled by high-speed, low-power and tiny footprint polymers. So most important part of the talk, the business strategy, and I'm sure everybody is interested here. So 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. And so what's number 1, prototype testing underway to a 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 our generating licensing royalty and discussing tech transfer as part of our process development kit, PDK with the silicon foundries. So we said we were going to do this last year, and we're doing this, this year. And the takeaway is to become a leader in the engineering and manufacturing of organic polymers, we use the term OLED. We too, used the term organic LEDs. Why can't we use the term organic mods or organic modulators, because that's really what we're doing. And I showed this slide before, but I've added some new things. And the new things are in red, the red font. And yes, we have a great patent portfolio. We're building on that patent portfolio and we're filing patents. And 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. And the other 40%, as you can see, are devices, high-speed pit designs and packaging designs. And so we've built that up aggressively over the last few years. Because when I joined the company in 2015, it was mostly just materials. So we've actually beefed up that side of things, and that's important to do. And then about 50% of our portfolio is international. So the other 50% is U.S. patents. So that gives you some idea of our portfolio. And then there's 2 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. So yes, we are reviewing opportunities and if we do things, then we'll let you know about it. And 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 the tech transfer, you've got to be filing and you're going to be putting your new ideas down. Of course, if there's trade secrets, then we're very careful about that. But the things that we feel are worth patent then we do that. So partly in for success, we can't do everything ourselves. I mean it will be inefficient to raise tons of capital to do everything ourselves. So we've got to work with foundries and we go work with the transceiver manufacturers. And you can see that in the first bullet there. And then 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. And honestly, the unwritten thing that gets -- 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? And it's the same thing here. When you're using foundries, they do get it wrong. But nobody really talks about that because you can't talk about that business model. So you've got to be very careful about who you choose to work with and think really carefully about risk mitigation. Because you've got some magic recipe and using somebody else's kitchen, you may not go right because something you haven't taken into account. And so 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. But it's not something where you just say, "yes, we're working with the foundry. This is a piece cake." Because they make mistakes, too. And as engineers, we've got to manage that risk. And that's what we've been doing over the last year. And then, of course, again, tech evaluation and feedback. 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. But 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. So this is a new slide, and we haven't really talked about foundries much. But the first thing and I 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. And the reason we used the plural term of foundries a year ago is because, if you're working with one foundry, and everybody knows this, the cycle time of a foundry is 6 to 9 months. So you're putting your designs, any way 6 to 9 months for it to come back. And what happens if it doesn't work? What happens if it doesn't have the performance you really need, and then you've wasted 9 months. And it's a slow process. And we've all heard, I mean, there's been supply issues. So even the foundries that said they can deliver in 6 months, typically, they're a couple of months late. And so we're working with a number of foundries to mitigate that risk. And if you work with more than one and if somebody is slow or it doesn't work right, then you've got another one. And so a year ago, we made a decision. It's not going to be one foundry. It's going to be a number of foundries. But what's the upside of this? It is more than just 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. And so the right thing to do is to do what we've done here. And you can see foundry A to foundry E. And I've given a little bit of details. At this point, we don't feel comfortable saying who the foundries are. But 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. And 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, given some guidance. And so this is when we expect results in the foundries. So you'll see these slides online. But 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. So deep activities. But if you think about these things for a second, it's not cheap to work with the foundry, but we have the resources to do that. But it's a lot cheaper to work with the foundry than it is to build your own fab. So 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. And I put in some foundries on this. But the interesting part of the marketplace is we can enter the market in many verticals. So 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 to foundry X, go to foundry Y or go to our contract manufacturing and work with them. That's typically what happens with the big guys. And so we've got to be in a position. We've got to be flexible enough that we can address this market in many verticals. And this is really what this chart is saying. And in fact, 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 road map. And I've -- in red font, I've given some time lines. And so that's new. So what's at the bottom. We've shown this slide before, but we've never given any time lines before. And so you can see where we're going in terms of our unique 4 layers of uniqueness in our technology platform and some time lines to go with it. Now this is a technology road map, this is not a product road map. And so we haven't got to the point of the product road map yet, but 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 time lines to it because we didn't show time lines last year. And so we're giving guidance and when are we going to be ready in terms of customer interaction, customer qualification, design verification partnership. And so the current engagement includes foundry partner. And you can see it's not just one foundry, it's a whole bunch of foundries. So that takes a lot of work. And I felt it's appropriate that we give some guidance now. And the same thing on the next slide. And I've got a lot of requests to go see an update of the TRL slide. And so what I did on this one is we're in that phase. There's no question, we're not in a high-volume manufacturing phase, we're in this phase. We're in the prototype and piloting phase. And there's been some questions about what does that really mean. And so 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. So we're on track. Engineering samples using silicon foundry fabrication. So we're on track to that one, too. But we're giving time lines to make sure everybody is aware. License and supply agreements, we've given a time line there. And tech transfer definition and qualification, we've given a time line there. So we now are planning on the key milestones, but we're actually giving some guidance as well. Now I think everybody is aware that we did some work with this company called Polariton in Switzerland, a 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 that we were doing. So we get 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. And so if you change the device design, but you're still using our polymer, you can still do World records, isn't that cool? And 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. But they're comparing their plasmatic modulator using our material with micro resonators, silicon micro resonators. This is what everybody is talking about in the silicon world, silicon micro resonators. And 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. And so World record performance and outperforming competitive modulator designs and materials, and we didn't even ask them to put this slide together. They just did it. And so that's just our material, and it's so exciting when you see that. And in fact, the next presentation they did, which is March this year, they actually emphasized it even more. So these micro modulators, they indeed is -- the temperature insensitive and high-performance polymer modulators outperform them and the competition of very temperature-sensitive, which limits their performance. So here, we have the big guys are saying the best thing about these ring resonators. But we just -- a company we worked with have our material and they just outperformed them just like that. And so that's third-party verification. That's not us. We're just providing the material. So depending on how your device design, I mean, our stuff could probably go even faster. So they're 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. And I'll just go through quickly. In terms of high speed, Lightwave has the road map for decades in these 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. So we have the technology to use the wavelengths that the Internet uses. Implementing 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 polymer is pretty easy to use. Polymers make silicon photonics much more exciting. Hybrid is clearly the direction. So hybrid means when you put a different material with silicon. So you got 2 different materials, polymer and silicon. Scaling wafer size makes a lot of sense. So if you're on a silicon platform, then you can scale the wafer size. The reliability and robustness of polymers have come a long way, we expect them to be reliable. And look at this one here, I just had this 1 about 5, 6 weeks. Your polymers will be really great for AR/VR goggles. And at which point, I didn't have time to like dig into this. But the fact that there's some technical person said, I see a huge opportunity here, it means, wow, this is another opportunity we can look at. Wouldn't electrooptic polymers be a great solution for optical switching? Yes, I absolutely agree with that. And so the feedback has been strong and constructive. Okay. Now the tough slide. Because one of the things we do as a company is we try and be honest with ourselves, and we try to be honest with you. And where do we get to on the promises we gave you a year ago. And a year ago, we said we're going to go do qualified sampling progress with commercial partners, deeper commercialization. I mean these were some tough goals given where we were a year ago. And obviously, we didn't get 8 out of 8, but I think we did really well. And you can go through these. We are testing foundry chips. We've got package prototypes in progress. We have qualified partners. We are continually testing the QA and reliability test is ongoing. We're engaged with customers. The last 2 in discussion. I'm not going to give any public guidance. But the guidance I'm going to give is that we're in discussion there. So I can't give us a tick but I think we've come a long way since last year. The next slide is where we going next year. So we have to have beta and call plans, especially in terms of sampling. So I think that's part and parcel of looking at guidance over the next 12 months. And I think that's important. We're at that stage now where I think that needs to happen. In terms of commercial partners, there's a lot of call in this room to say who you're working with as a foundry, who you're doing to 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. So that's sort of giving you an idea of our expectations. In terms of deeper commercialization and call of a product, yes, we're going to give a lot more data and specifications. And I really would like to see the business model with somebody licensing the technology and the tech transfer, of course, if you got a business model to do that, you need to prove it. And so I think that's -- 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 we're really accelerated after -- we've accelerated over the last 12 months. So the focus is on commercializing polymers. And so let's have a look at some of the things that I'm going to try and preempt the Q&A session, so it doesn't go on for about 3 hours. Well, there's nothing there, yet. Hold on. So these are some of the questions we always hear, and I want to thank the retail investors here because you always send in those questions. I know we can't answer all of them. We've had a lot of interest in the company. And 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 want to thank everybody. And yes, I can't answer all your questions. I know you asked a lot of detailed technical questions and I'm trying to do the best I can. So do you have more room for partners? Question 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 time lines. So we're trying to address that question as best we can. Do you have revenue guidance for '22, '23? Well, internally, of course, we do. Free revenue guidance clearly is difficult, and we are reviewing that. And we know that's a question that comes up all the time. So that's in progress. Announced sort of a business deal. Well, as you can see from our goals, we're currently engaged with deal discussions. We're not at a point to announce anything yet. I know there was a lot of sort of anticipation what are you going to say today. But I think the best thing we can say today is this stuff is ongoing. And over the next 12 months, you're probably going to hear some more. Announcement of license in the polymer technology. There are interested parties, and discussions are ongoing. So at this point, I can't say too much, but yes, that's in progress. Announcement of tech transfer to -- can I just do that one, tech transfer to a foundry. And that's the same sort of answer. 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 road maps. So this year, we've provided a lot more detailed timing. And as we get closer, we're going to give more guidance towards that. So that process is already started and 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? we believe it is, given the vertical nature of the customer base. And the customers, when I say vertical in nature, a lot of the customers have everything in place. So they design the chips, put the chips in boxes, put the boxes on pretty circuit boards, put the boards into switches and routers, make the systems. And so they do everything. They know what they don't have. They know what that we can. And so as a company, you have to be flexible. They may say, yes, we want to 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 because we were already go to prenegotiated 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 LW? And the right answer is some may. And others will ask us to use their OEMs, CMs and their relationships with foundries. And that's clearly what's happening. And that's well known today. How many folks do you expect to hire in the next 12 months? We expect to grow about 5 to 10 folks. So we've got good resources. We're careful who we hire. We're picking world-class people. I think John's here, our VP of Engineering. I worked with John 30 years ago. World-class people, you need world-class people to be so, you just have to. And the more you have, the more people will get interested in your company and you want to join you. And so that snowball is rolling, and it's really exciting to see. Finance. And I think if you got finance questions, I'll let Jim do those afterwards. But how much financing is needed to be -- to breakeven. 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. And 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. And so yes, we're comfortable on that point. What is your runway? I think in our 10-K, it says Jan 2024, given the cash we have on hand right now. And our burn rate is roughly about $1 million per month. So that burn rate has gone up over the last year. But 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. And so 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. Polariton got a world record with our current polymers, but we always strive to improve our performance to help customers. So that's not going to 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 in a long-term Telcordia testing on the devices. So that's in place. How does the polymer compare to the -- polymers plus compared to polymer slot? Well, both are additive to silicon photonics to boost the speed in 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 gigahertz which is 2 to 3x current today. And then 100 gigahertz much higher is capable because we're using polymers. In fact, our testing system, as we said, last take 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. And so 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 are folks we trust with our technology. So you're going 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 going to actually -- if you think about what does a foundry do, they're in a business that's just running wafers. All they want to do is run more wafers. So what we are providing is a new technology and the potential to run more wafers. And so you have to trust them. It's not our fab, it's their fab. You have to work with them. And we will provide updates as commercial progress matures. As you have seen from the goals, we'll go do that. How easy is it to use polymers in the foundry with the PDK? We believe it's straightforward. There's no new tooling. I mean our polymers in liquid form, you spin it onto a wafer, you cure it in ovens, use, photoliths just like normal foundry processes. In terms of competition, how do we compare to thin film, lithium niobate and other technologies, including Byram Titan. And I showed you a chart that we've compared that. We believe we're a smaller, faster and low power. And you saw that from the chart I put together. Are we still the fastest and lowest pulse 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 going to jump in, in any way they can. And so yes, we're going to see people try and do polymer plays, try and keep up with us. We're going to see people doing semiconductor plays, [indiscernible], this-film Lithium niobate, of course, we are. Because this space is so hot because now everybody is realized the Internet guys, the telecom guys, the datacom guys all need what we have, high-speed and low power. And people now realize that and they all, well, if Lightwave's got a leadership, we're going to 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. So 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. 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. And the last one here is, what is the thing customers ask for the most? They all want the hardware. We have people asking for hardware. And some people ask for hardware, I'm not sure who they are. You get people out of the blue asking for hardware. So you have to qualify who you give your hardware to. But yes, people want the hardware. So last few slides, leadership. Craig is the new person on the Board. This is Craig's background. He's been an innovator in optics, microfluidics, electronics and nano fabrication. He's had his own company. I worked with Craig for at least 20 years. And so 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. And we worked together at Intel, and we worked at the start-up together after that. And then John. John, can 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, way back. And 35-plus 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 80s. And since then, he's worked on pluggable transceivers, silicon photonics, all the qualification, very technical. Sycamore and JDSU as well. And so since January, we were really proud to have John on the team. And our team is truly world class. It's great. So John and Craig are new members to the team. And 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. And so 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. And we probably will be expanding this because it's -- what we've discovered over the last 3 or 4 years is we've got some really smart technical people. And we want to be surrounded with the best technical people to make sure we're doing the right thing and the vector is going in the right direction. If we're barking up the wrong tree, I want to hear about it now, so we can do something about it. And you've got the best technical people, that's really good. So yes, we're really proud of our advisory board and our full board. And so to summarize, a bit of a sort of a complex slide, but 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. And so you can see some of the things here that make us really excited. So let's go to the slide I started with, which is the 4 takeaways. And what comes out of this slide, right? It's unparalleled progress. We've seen that. We have a unique technology platform. And of course, ubiquitous, right? We want it everywhere. And so if you think about it, those are the 3 words. If you're going to walk away with the 4 comments, walk away with 4 comments. If there's too much, walk away with the 3 words. So one of them, you already know ubiquitous, right? So unparalleled, unique and ubiquitous. Thank you.

Jim, do you want to come up and talk 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 tech-related stuff, I'll do that. So yes, we welcome for questions.

Yes. And so anyone 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, but if anyone has a question, just -- we can take them now.

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. So the move to single lanes, as I indicated, is important. One of the biggest impediments that we're going to see is not from the optics because we have the optics solution is from the electronics. How do you get CMOS to go that fast in a single lane? And so the way people address that is they have multiple lanes. And so 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. But in doing so, the power consumption from the electronic chips, the DSP chips is huge. And they have to use 5, 6, 7-nanometer technology from foundries like TSMC and it costs a fortune. So it's really expensive, consumes a lot of power. Now if we provide an optical solution with this road map, it eases the constraints on the electronics. And allows power to go down, but I haven't checked to see if electronics can go that much faster. I think it can. -- but I think they will utilize lanes. But the good news is they will utilize much simpler symbol rates. So instead of going immediately to PAM4 or the QAMs. I'm talking technical because this is a technical person, so excuse me for a second. But I think you're going to allow people to think about using NRZ as well as PAM4, which are much simpler, symbol encoded schemes with electronics in order to get the speed up if you have faster optics. So what we're actually doing is we're alleviating some of the electronic issues. But I haven't really started to think about how fast electronics could go. It's going to keep on improving because everybody is talking about 5-nanometer and going faster with CMOS. So that's not going to stop, and it never has. It's just what we're doing from an architecture standpoint is making life a lot easier for them. Sorry, it's a bit technical, everybody.

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 going to be a really exciting year for stockholders. You remember saying that? Well, I mean, it's been written. Okay. Okay. So if you had to gauge that, if I said from 1 to 10, how excited are you for us and the company, could you gauge it on a scale of 1 to 10 for us? 10 being it's beyond words of excitement.

Yes. Nothing like being put on the spot. So the first part of that question is do I look sad? Do I look unhappy? We are really -- I mean, we said in Slide #3, we're really excited. So I don't know if that's a high number or a low number in your scale. But in -- the more I'm with this company, and it's been, what, 5 years at the helm now, the more exciting it has become. So maybe we exceeded your 10 scale, I don't know. But 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 a good way to look at this. I mean, I've been in other start-ups, but this technology is transformational. So we're not going to just do some new widget that goes faster, we're going to change people's lives. And in one of those interviews last week, is it Authority Magazine? They had this odd question. And the question was, what do you think is going to be the Black Mirror moment? And it's like I've had some tough questions and like, wow, how do I deal with this question? And I was fortunate because last year doing COVID, I saw the British TV show Black Mirror. So I understood the question. And Black Mirror is if you look into the future, what's the negativity that could happen, how bad could it get? Or do some things that could go, that's a Black Mirror moment And when you see something that is transformational as our technology, what I put in at article is what happens if we get information overload. Some of us can deal with it. I deal with it. Jim deals with it. But some of us don't want to have information overload. It's tough. And so what we're providing is an Internet and I can deliver a lot more bandwidth to everybody's home. So you can have 5 televisions running at the same time if you want to watch 5 televisions running. I won't do that, but that's the type of thing you can have running. You mean 1 video platform here and other video platform there, kids have another video platform. You've got the bandwidth to deal with all this. And so that's -- as we look out 5 or 10 years, it's like, yes, there might be some negativity there. But in terms of bringing our technology to the forefront and enabling a much more faster and lower power Internet, yes, this is really exciting. And so I am. And the reason I am is because 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 1 to 10. I would say it's more than 10.

Could you further define what the difference between partnership and commercialization mean with regards to revenues? Because seeing the time frames, I'm just curious, should we expect actual revenues coming in closer to 2024 on a commercial time line based on the slides?

So we said we're not going to provide revenues, so I'm not going to provide revenues. But if you've got a commercial -- let's say for argument sake, you do a commercial business deal with the foundry and the foundry accepts your PDK, then yes, the foundry can generate more business. So that way, you can bring in revenues. So when you look at the business model, you can -- the traditional way of 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 that business. That may still be the customer. As I indicated, customers may not want you to sell directly to them. Just say go out your stuff in the foundry, and that's fine with us. And they will buy from the foundry. So it may not be a direct. But yes, it does have a relationship to revenue. And the more we get comfortable, the more we will give guidance to them.

No, I think I go to mic on. But the other thing, when you take a look at the royalty plan, I guess, is a layout the we but I don't want any feedback on this anyway. They're both working right. if I get it to close -- anyway, there's dollars that come into our pocket when somebody signs up, okay? And then there will be royalty based upon the devices that they sell. All right. And I think the tech transfer really gets into where you're working with the foundries -- working very tightly with the foundries that come up with the different PDKs, which means you just don't hand them a recipe in 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. So I think that's where the tech transfer is versus this. We have all these patents, do you want to use it for Type X work, then we could market a segment, we'll just give it to you and you just pay us a fee for doing that. The tech transfer means we work very closely with them, and we're doing that today. And by the way, they're excited to work with us.

Would you say that the foundries are in competition with one another at all? Are they aware of their status between the 5 that you mentioned, 5 to 7?

So we haven't given any guidance on our foundries, and I don't know if foundry A knows what foundry B is doing in relation to ourselves. So we haven't knowingly given any information now. Could they compete competitive with each other? Perhaps. But this is an opportunity for foundries to take a new technology and run with it. So 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? And so a model to mitigate the risk of success with using foundries is used more than one. And so yes, you're seeing a bunch there that we put up. And I dare say there may be competition. I want to see the technology everywhere. I mean it's okay to have a great technology, but it's like OLEDs. I want to like OLEDs, I want it everywhere. So yes, there's going to be competition, I'm sure, but 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 brushed on it very quickly. But in the industry today, we've heard from a lot of different players speaking about building a new ecosystem. So 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.

So just because we have a polymer technology that does really good things, it doesn't mean it automatically goes into the industry. You've got to have the electronics and the packaging to support you. So like, for example, you get a modulator working at 100 gigahertz. That's a special package. So 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. So we can't do the electronics, we're going to have to work with electronics, chip manufacturers, going to have to work with the packaging guys, the transceiver guys. And so we're aware of that. And the interesting thing to address the ecosystem question is, is when a few of us were at the Optical Fiber Conference in March. We have been told by customers over the last 18 months, you have to have high speed and low power modulators. But it actually came out into the open at this year's conference and everybody was talking about it. And so when things come out into the open like that, then the race has started, right? Competition has started. People realize that where we are is we're in a really hot space. And that's just -- and so now the infrastructure of the ecosystem, the electronic guys, the packaging guys, the foundries, they all now realize. And you look around, you'll see in press releases by foundries now. You've seen people talking about silicon photonics more in the last 6 months than we have in the last 5 years. So the ecosystem is now aware that it has to upgrade. And we're in a nice position. So yes, you're right. And we can't do everything, but we have to work with people, and we have to partner with people, and that's happening. You want 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 or whoever to expand the ability to test it at higher bandwidths?

So the best way I can answer that question is we have a pretty tight relationship with the test equipment manufacturers. And for the test equipment manufacturers that have higher performance equipment, they need higher speed optical devices. I'll leave it at that.

Your market size projection is $40 billion, $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?

So in a transceiver, which is a box, basically a metal box with the printed circuit board inside, the majority of the bill of materials goes into the optics. And so depending on the speed and the complexity, it could range from 20%, 30%, up to 80%, 90%. And so 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 percentages of bill on materials is much higher. And so yes, it can range. But when you start looking at 800 and 1.6 terabit per second, I mean, it's going to be a big part of that bill of materials. Now we haven't given any guidance on details. But 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 going to leave it on the table. So yes, we were aware of that. But it's a good question. One more question? I'm never going to wear white ever again, right? Okay. Yes, 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 technologies? I just want to try to wrap my head around the process that you will share with your with this retail group has been extremely loyal. How will that process take place from your side?

So as we indicate, we expect that process to mature in the next 12 months. And you could have a number of interesting scenarios. You could have the scenario where we would want to put a press release out with Foundry X because we want to. Or the other way around, Foundry X comes to us and said, we want to get a head start in this technology vis-a-vis other foundries, and we want to go do a press release. And so that process is going on. But at this point, we haven't reached that threshold in our comfort level to give guidance. But each foundry has their own way of dealing with it. So if you look at different foundries across the board, they have their own ways of announcing where the single company, joint venture, partnership or a bunch of companies they're working with. But we also -- when it comes to foundries, we have to think about what that business model is. If you look through the optics of them, all they want is more wafers. They want more wafers to run through that fab. So that's what motivates them. And so you have to think about that and how you are impacting them or how they see themselves generating their own revenue. So 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 in the back. Let's do one last.

So to this gentleman's question on the management and the announcements you just mentioned it was within 12 months, there would be some guidance. I just wanted to make sure I heard that correctly. It seems like positive guidance that what was said. The other thing too on the wafers and these foundries pumping out wafers, it would seem that, yes, they would want to 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 half the power, they could charge 10x on that wafer because it would be that much more wanted in the marketplace. So I 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. So yes, we'll make announcements as we feel comfortable. So I think that was pretty clear. But in terms of foundries, I mean, they have a bunch of process steps. If you want to get a wafer to a faster -- let's say it's a cycle time of 6 months. You put in your design, it takes them 6 months to run through the foundry, you're getting 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 and it costs a lot more money to do that. And so 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. And so yes, if they really want this stuff out there and the customer drive is strong, yes, they can do the cycle time instead of being in 6 months, they can take it down to 4 months or even 3 months, depending on who the foundry is and what sort of availability they have. And so hot lotting is certainly something that occurs in foundries, and we're aware of that. So it's something we do take into account.

I think you're also asking about cost performance, are you. So one, they're going to get what the market will bear. I mean, if you could -- if you're adding that much better performance, they're going to be able to get more money to those chips. And in the end, that helps us because it will be a royalty-based program.

All right. Well, I want to thank everybody, and we'll be here to answer, I guess, a few more questions, if you wish. But thank you for listening.