Jeff Nolan (00:00.238) That's exciting. Game face. This one's been a long time coming. Yeah. OK.

Jeff Nolan (00:07.694) Okay, let's go. Okay. Welcome everyone to now next and beyond a podcast from coherent. I'm your host Jeff Nolan. And with me today is Sanjay Partha Sarathi, the chief marketing officer of coherent. Welcome Sanjay. Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here. We're going to do, um, we're going to put the bios in on the speaker notes and in it. So I'm not going to go and burn a lot of time on that, but I do want to, um, I do want to start by saying we are coherent is finding itself at the center of some really interesting big trends.

And we're going to use this episode to talk about those, to get your thoughts and feelings, opinions about where we're going as an industry and as a company. But also how do we plan for all of this? How do you build strategy? How do you, you know, how do you intake product plans when the market itself is changing so dynamically and in often unpredictable ways? And I was reading a separate analysis about the AI market and what's coming in 2025 to 2028, which we'll talk about later that.

really could just throw a curve ball into everybody's plans. Okay. At Coherent, this is clearly not a workshop sized effort to do all of this planning and the ability to deliver the kind of products that we require, that our markets require takes years and oftentimes, and the invention of entirely new technologies, which are not foreseeable. So,

Most importantly, the ability to see the emergence of things before everyone else is a key part of your job. So I'm excited to talk with you about that today. But first, I want to get to know you at a different level. So we're going to do a lightning round... what's your favorite food? Pizza. Really? I didn't expect that. Absolutely. Any particular kind of pizza, please don't claim. Well, the kind that you get in Napoli, that's for sure. As long as it doesn't have pineapple on it. And last one, if you could be anywhere in the world for a relaxing vacation, where would it be? Tahiti. Okay. Those are great answers. Thank you. Okay. So let's go a little more serious on your background. So,

Jeff Nolan (02:33.838) You have a, you've got a really interesting background in mechanical engineering and I saw aerospace as well. And how did you get, how did you end up in optical? Yeah. How did you get there? It's a, it's a, it's been a journey. So I got a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. And, and then I, I got a scholarship and an assistantship. I was invited to the University of Virginia to pursue a master's in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

And then after completing it, well, actually I worked on really advanced materials for metal matrix composites aerospace alloys, you know, primarily for aerospace type applications and then then I after my master's degree I moved to Johnston my very first job was in Western, Pennsylvania. So I was working for a defense subcontractor, again, on advanced materials, advanced material processing, everything from high temperature superconductors to metal matrix composites, you know, the works. And it was an applied research technology transfer environment. And I was working on my PhD part time at Penn State. So I would actually drive to Penn State, you know, to do all that.

And at Penn State, I worked on thin films. I worked on amorphous silicon, polysilicon, a transition that generates a lot of revenue for us, right? Back in the day, we would deposit these amorphous films on substrates and then put it in the furnace to anneal it. And little I had known, I mean, this was in the mid to late 90s, little had I known I can do it with a laser.

which is what we do today, you know, our display of LED stuff is all that, that transition generates billions of dollars for us, it has generated. So yeah, I mean, after I finished my PhD, I was recruited to the Silicon Valley by Western Digital, where going from R &D to here, I was running basically process engineering for disk drives, high volume, 24 by seven.

Jeff Nolan (04:58.094) high tech production environment. So here a guy from R &D goes all the way to the other end. I'm woken up at 2 a .m. in the morning to solve production issues. Hey, we have a fire on the line or we have this in the line. You know, it is quite a big change. And then staying in consumer electronics, I went to Terrace Store where we are doing a removable optical drive. And in addition to managing that development process there, I was responsible for managing relationships with our partners.

These were companies, large companies in the US and in Japan. So many of my R &D friends said, that's Sanjay, that's where you move to the dark side. Because this was managing the soft side, talking about it, getting them enthusiastic about the market, the prospects, in addition to conveying what's going on in the development process. So I did that for a couple of years. And then in 2001, I landed in...

optical communications. My very first true marketing job was in 2000, not 2001. I was director of European marketing for a company called Optlink Communications. And then 2003, I went to Avanax, which was also an optical networking manufacturing and pure fiber optic communications. But I did marketing and over the years I ran pretty much one of the largest product lines at Avanax. So I was managing that for quite some time.

And, you know, long story short, you know, acquisitions, divestitures, finally, TwoSix ended up picking up parts of that business. So if you look at my paycheck, my seniority day, it was 2003. Even though we came into TwoSix in 2013. So at TwoSix, I ran product marketing and strategy for our largest, at that time, the photonic segment, which is our largest segment. And then in 2019,

While we are getting ready for the Finisar acquisition, TwoSits transformed itself. There's a transformative acquisition. We went from business units to functional structures with segments. And while we're getting ready for it, in July I was nominated and promoted to be the first chief marketing officer for the company. So that was pretty exciting. It's been 10 years of learning and...

Jeff Nolan (07:24.014) experiences and all that and I've continued on from that point of time. So it's been close to five years. So the one interesting snippet is, at Coherent now we have multiple market groups. We have industrial communications, electronics and instrumentation and within each of these market groups we have multiple verticals and I've got sort of the dubious distinction of working on pretty much all of them. Which is kind of you know...

dabbled with some, but serious work on the others. But it's been great to kind of connect. I mean, I told you the display story. It's like, well, the first time I heard about OLEDs and that processing using the Exumr laser, I go, wow, that's something I worked on. So there are a lot of those laser processing materials. I mean, I worked on laser processing materials in concurrent tech.

And of course, over the last 20 plus years in fiber optics communications, which is bulk of our business. You know, whenever I meet people in the photonics industry that have a mechanical engineering background, that catches my eye because when I first joined CMEER, I didn't have this experience in this industry, but I also didn't appreciate how photonics really is equal part mechanical engineering and physics. And as you get more of an appreciation, you see the inside of a laser, you realize there's a lot of...

really precision manufacturing that goes on. Also on the display topic, that one's another fascinating example because I remember we were talking with the optics team, TOS up in Richmond about the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors. And the question was, so we built these mirrors for this amazing generational space telescope, but then so what? What's next? And the team Brandon told me, he said, you know,

The thing was we had to figure out how to make those mirrors, which is an entirely a mechanical process. He said, once we learned how to do that, then the jump was the Eximer lasers for the optics. We make cylindrical lenses for the tubes. And he said that actually was, that jump started the OLED revolution by 10 years because of the JWST. So it really goes to the impact that as much as...

Jeff Nolan (09:43.054) In the technology industry, we talk a lot about the abstracts. The physical world of connecting things together and making stuff is very much at the core of what we do. Right. No, it's kind of fascinating, right? On one side, you see large mirrors, right? The JW, the web telescope, these are huge mirrors. I mean, we have them on the display and I'm sure a lot of people have seen it. And we also have at the other end of the spectrum,

We have micron -sized optics. One micron optics. Optics, right? One micron optics is a reference to a wavelength, but these are like tens of microns of optics. And we've got these ultra -compact, whether it's fiber optics, communications, transceivers, or line systems, we've got ultra -compact form factors.

but the 200, 300 optical elements and light has to go through them and bend and diffract and do things. A Vixel. It's fascinating. I mean, a Vixel is the size of a smaller than a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, where is my phone? My phone's not around, but hundreds of them, thousands of them in that little tiny app, you know, window. It's pretty fascinating. So when I meet someone who has the experience that you do, I always want to... I'm always curious to know like milestone developments, not for coherent, but like things that you have seen in your career. What are the...

What are some of the standout moments where something happened and you were like, wow, this changes everything? There are so many. I'm going to try and recollect a few. I think the first one is advancement trips. Back in grad school and concurrent technologies corporation, we're working all kinds of, just amorphous silicon. I mean, displays, flat panel displays were just coming out. I mean, we had CRT tubes in our labs, right? And we say, wow, if you can deposit amorphous silicon,

low temperature process so you can put it on plastic potentially. I mean, now we have roll up LED screens and we have foldable phones, but at that time, wow, if you could do that and then you anneal it, some sort of a low temperature with a process that is, I mean, laser is fantastic because it doesn't heat up the process. It doesn't heat the substrate, it doesn't melt the substrate. So you can actually deposit it on flexible films. I mean, that was kind of groundbreaking.

Jeff Nolan (11:51.694) whether it is metal matrix composites, diamond. I mean, you know, we make diamond windows for the EUV tool. And if you're a design engineer, as a mechanical engineer, as an electrical engineer, if you want to choose a material that has superlative everything, it's diamond. Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to make and it's expensive. And whatever properties, so there's some amazing material science, metal matrix composites that we use in our semiconductor capital equipment, for moving to make things lighter, stronger, and really.

the ability to move things around very quickly. In the SemiCAP tools, you want to move the wafer in, you don't want it to jiggle around, you want it to stop. You want it to be firm. There are lots of... So materials is a big one. The other one is the invention of the fiber optic amplifier for communications. Without the fiber optic amplifier, basically we can't be doing this. The world's internet relies on...

People don't quite appreciate the effect of fiber optics has, but because you're able to amplify light in multiple wavelengths, comes DWDM and comes fiber optic transmission. You can put terabytes of capacity, hundreds of terabytes, thousands of terabytes through these fibers. It all started with the fiber optic amplifier. Let's see, the fiber laser. The fiber laser, it was invented in the 60s, but I think...

It really was applications were envisioned and things started really heating up in the 90s. I mean, it's such a pervasive thing. Everything from LIDAR to shooting down drones to cutting metal and welding. That's another one. The iPhone X, the first implementation of 3D sensing. I mean, that technology AR VR. I mean, that's another wow. The iPhone X really...

Jeff Nolan (13:57.902) sparked off a whole gamut of applications, et cetera. 3D sensing, right? It's an anonymous image, right? But the photo, here you've got an image that is basically cluster points in free space. So... Intensely accurate. Intensely, amazingly accurate. Tens of thousands of points on your face. I mean, the list goes on, Jeff. I...

I wish, you know, you think about things and then you wait 20, 30 years and then things actually kind of come to fruition. Well, I think it was Bill Gates who said, you know, we always underestimate, we overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, but we underestimate it in the long term because the multiplier of all these different technologies, they come together. That's absolutely a great quote. Which is that the AR VR comes to mind, let's just say AR for, this has been Money Bites at the Apple.

There's been generations of this stuff that has been hyped up over the years. It does feel like we're kind of getting to the point where it's real now. And that is no large part, no small part because of the technology advancements that are going inside the devices themselves. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at VR, VR has been around for a while and they're getting better and better and AR is just starting to come in. In my mind, there are maybe two or three areas. One,

is the sensing, you know, eye tracking. I mean, imagine, I mean, 10 years ago, you didn't have the technology to eye track because when you're trying to gesture, you can gesture with your eyes. Eye tracking, 3D sensing, sensing the world, sensing, you know, the person. There is, and then displays. Micro LED displays is a big deal for these applications. I think that's coming up right now. It's mostly...

LCD display, the improvements in display technology, the improvements in sensing, sensing and display. Yeah. That's really it. And then of course you have battery technology and all of that. You don't want to keep charging it every few hours, but it's really sensing and display. It's pretty fascinating because we connect with the AR ecosystem in multiple ways. We have indium phosphide -based sensors for long range. So you could see...

maybe even hundreds of meters. And then you have gallium arsenide sensors for short range, where you get a very high density, high fidelity image. So it's a sensing platform. And then of course the optics, the beam, the waveguides and steering of the beam and diffractive optics. There is a lot of stuff in there that we directly intersect. It's been pretty exciting. We're working with...

a lot of different companies from startups to very mature companies. It's a lot of activity there. And on the optics side, I'm always fascinated to read more about not just what we do with the materials, but also the coatings that we develop for the optical materials, which is a whole other generation of technology that I don't think anyone could have foreseen. Yeah, no, that's a great observation, Jeff. You know, coatings, we have every one of our business units pretty much.

has some unique coding platforms. And we just made an encyclopedia, or coding's encyclopedia, location, what chambers, what materials, what properties, it's a book. And applications from semiconductor capital equipment to defense and aerospace to consumer electronics, it's pretty fascinating. Yeah, one is the world, I mean, as we experience the effects of climate change and all the other consequences of the world.

you know, coatings that extend the life of optics or optimize the performance unless ideal conditions are going to become even more important. Right. Right. Right. So let's, let's go. So we just talked about VR. Let's go jump over to AI because everybody wants to talk about AI. And when we first, you know, when this topic first came up internally, you know, part of me was like, well, okay, well, so what? I mean, so we've got optical communications and AI.

Jeff Nolan (18:40.686) But in a way, but it's no surprise, it makes total sense because as these things, as these GPUs have a voracious appetite for data, you gotta get it to them. So right now, current state of the art transceivers are 800G, correct? Yeah, absolutely. And the next jump will be 1 .6? Yes. Okay. So - It's coming very soon, by the way. It's driven by a spec process, largely, right? Sure. Yeah. Sure. But the technology, we know how to do it. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, we are in development now.

and we will be ramping.

Okay, so let me ask you this. So is there speed of light constant? Is there a theoretical limit for how much data we can transmit? Not in real, I mean, there is something known as a Shannon limit for transmission on a single fiber, but you've got multiple fibers, you've got multiple wavelengths. But let me, you brought up the whole AI, let me give you a...

Jeff Nolan (19:39.918) So in 2017, we are looking at Finisar as a potential acquisition candidate. And we're working on the deal rationale, what are the drivers, why. And Giovanni, who's our chief strategy officer and president of the material segment, in a slide, he had AI on demand as a driver. This was 2017, 2018, one of the drivers for the Finisar acquisition. And OK, so we did not call it generative AI.

But that AI and demand that generated by AI market inflected with ChatGPT in November 2022. And as soon as ChatGPT happened, Chuck, our CEO, he reached out to me and said, Sanjay, what does this mean for our transceiver business? What does it mean for our data comm business, for our communications business? And we were scrambling because I think the speed at which AI hit the entire ecosystem,

our customers are surprised, their customers are surprised. It's just, it was a rocket ship. And I think we, in March, April timeframe, you know, we've got a fantastic team and within the vertical leaders and within our data com vertical and Whipple and his team, we developed a really comprehensive view, you know, working with them and the ecosystem. I think we probably had the first views of the AI market as in terms of

what it does to our businesses, transceivers. Everything, you know, we are completely vertically integrated. We make everything within the transceiver and we sell at all levels of the value chain, right? So all of that. And, and it was, it was pretty good. Now we've been refining that view every few months. And, and, and you'd see that every time we, we kind of, oh yeah, we said that now actually it's, it's even bigger than that. And just in the last three months, we've seen the 1 .6 T transition of hasten. It's basically.

come in by about six to nine months. And the market, the implication for us is, of course it represents an opportunity to transceiver because all the GPUs need to get connected. The GPUs then need to be connected to other sets of GPUs. They form servers. Those servers need to be connected. So these AI clusters, if you will, sometimes are, they look like mini data centers. There's a lot of, and all those connections have to go at a higher speed because,

Jeff Nolan (22:05.838) You go to chat GPT and you type something and you're waiting for the answer, right? That weight will get lessen if that weight will lessen if you got faster connections. I mean, that's as simple as it gets. So Meta, I read today Meta announced they're building a cluster of 40 ,000 GPUs. And how many transceivers are required for each GPU? Oh yeah, that's a really good question. This question comes up because it's easy to track GPUs and we're trying to assess them.

We started at 1 .5. We believe right now it's about 1 .5, but it's inching towards two. We think it's going to be closer to two. And that's the GPU. So every GPU, you've got 1 .5 to two transceivers. Now there's some in the industry, you say that number can be as much as eight. That feels a little extreme. I mean, I hope they're right, which means that quadruples are more concise, but we think it's closer to two now.

So for everybody who's listening that understands what a transceiver is but doesn't know what a transceiver is, what components are in a transceiver? Yeah, so think about the word transceiver is a hybrid word from two parts, right? One is a transmitter and the other is a receiver. So you've got a fiber optic link, so a pair of fibers typically. You've got data that needs to go that way and data that needs to come this way. And so you've got a laser. That's the key.

The laser is at the heart of every transceiver because the laser technology paces the transceiver. So without the laser, no transceiver. Very few manufacturers of lasers have these advanced lasers. So for example, the laser that enables 800G transmission today is 100 gigabits per second type laser. So you put eight of them in a box. I'm simplifying it. My transceiver designers are going to kill me. But it's not as simple as just putting in a box. But...

You've got eight transceivers, I mean, eight lasers, so you get 800G transmission. Now, to get 1 .6, you can say, OK, why did I do 16? There's just not enough space. So the 1 .6T transceiver is being paced by a 200 gigabits per second laser, which we are working on. We have announced multiple. In fact, a year ago, we showcased a 200G EML, multiple types, EML, a 200G, another technology called DFP Mark Sender.

Jeff Nolan (24:30.062) We are working on a 200g Vaxel. We've not announced a product yet, but it's something that we are actively working on and and to some extent Jeff we are going to pace the 1 .6 transition because we are the ones who are Driving the state -of -the -art lasers. Are those lasers pulsed or continuous wave? Well, they're all pulsed there. They're okay So let me so the the the Vexels are what what we call directly mod directly modulated basically you turn the Vexel on and off

Simplistically said versus the the EMLs have to get you know, there's a the modulator is built in the texture absorption modulator So more modulations is pulsing Yeah, yeah, they person kind of so and that doesn't matter whether you're going a centimeter a Kilometer or yeah, it does unfortunately that it's it's that that's why we have all this alphabet soup of different flavors and transceivers their short reach, you know, good news is that

for any transceiver, a Wexel -based transceiver gives you the lowest cost, and that doesn't go very long, but most of these GPU networking and AI clusters are all connecting in the smaller areas. We have some that go up to 500 meters, kilometers. Some of the EMLs can go. In the DFA Mark Center actually goes one of the longest reach lasers that we have today. Okay. So we go, let's roll the camera forward here. So we have...

GPT -4 today, Gemini, we're going to go to GPT -5 and then two mode Gemini, two model Gemini. And then generative AI 2025, 2026. And then really we basically get to full AGI 2027, 2028. Pretty, sounds pretty reasonable to you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we are getting ready.

So we are, this is each one of these. I mean, when you look at our, you know, just from what that does to our business, right? The 800 G market was in calendar 23 was 0 .6 billion. And calendar 28 is 9 billion, 800 G and above, right? So it's at a 60, 75, 70 % CAGR. And I mean, that's our best estimate today, but you know, it's, we're just, if you listen to,

Jeff Nolan (26:52.558) to Jensen and, you know, and NVIDIA and other such pioneers. I mean, they're saying we're just scratching the surface. There's just so much of room to go. Which gets to - In terms of applications, in terms of in video, we're just getting started on video. Which, yeah, the SOROS step is really cool. Yeah. That actually gets to the heart of my question, which is the growth of AI in its current form is not constrained just simply, it's not constrained by the number of people. Like I can do more with -

on GPT and more people get on GPT. But really what we're talking about is getting to a point where these models, these systems are consuming vast amounts of information from sensors and different, yeah, envision systems and now starting to be autonomous in their own sense. Yeah, absolutely. You know, because so AI, you know, we've been, we were actually talking about this the other day. AI, the first, the,

The first jump or the first Philip for our business is really data. Right. A .I. directly. You put you put these clusters into the data center. You need to buy transceivers. But if you look at our sensing business, right, our advanced sensors, advanced sensors are the eyes and ears of A .I. Right. Sensors are the input that goes into A .I. Hey, Jeff, you're sitting here. Can we you know, somebody is looking at me from the other window. Do we know who that person is? You go, you send your 3D sensing, you pattern match you.

run it through your database, your machine learning algorithms and all of that. So sensors are pretty important. Then when you look at AI, the chip technology in AI is the cutting edge stuff, right? The really leading edge nodes. And to make those leading edge nodes, you need leading edge process tools for semiconductor capital equipment. So one of our verticals. And our lasers, optics, and materials enable those next gen.

tools to make these next gen chips for AI. So AI indirectly drives our semiconductor capital equipment business, right? And then cooling, it's such a big deal. These chips are, it's really two problems that it's really the cooling is going to determine the performance of some of these AI solutions. And we have a variety of products there for cooling metal matrix composites, even diamond.

Jeff Nolan (29:16.238) You know, the diamond he's purchased is really fascinating. Yeah, it's it's it's a it's a world's best thermal conductor. It's it's it's it's again super little properties. Yeah, if I'm a thermal engineer diamond, I make it you know, but structural engineer diamond, I'm an electronics engineer diamond. It's like diamond diamond diamond. When I told my wife that we manufacture diamonds, she didn't care about any of that. She said, Can I get it? Okay, so

Sensors, vision, world's consuming more data. Okay, do we move that communications capability? Does that just keep moving into the device, into the GPU? Well, I mean, the fact is that all this capacity, compute capacity, all the networking that happens in the data center, ultimately will drive bandwidth, right? Yeah. Drive for bandwidth. So,

So we are just starting to track it. We do expect, you know, we segment our communications market and data common telecom. So we do expect the, all the AI that that's going into these data centers, the infrastructure will drive needs for, you know, the drive demand for telecom or the long -term business. But then Jeff, I don't know whether you know, 3 .4 billion people in the world don't have internet today. Isn't that fascinating?

There's a whole world, there are all those people need to get on the internet first, which means connectivity, 5G, the submarine cables. Well, SATCOM is being an issue. SATCOM, yeah, for locations that are some of the rural underserved areas, that's the only way. SATCOM has been great.

No, I mean, I live in, and you know, we think, yeah. I mean, we think that, uh, you know, a lot of people think, especially in urban areas think, oh, well, if you're in a rural area, that means you're like, you know, you're in a part of, you know, Nebraska somewhere and there's one house, you know, for every six miles, um, where I live in South Florida, we're underserved with, um, broadband and Starlink really has been, come the most viable option. I had to bring fiber into my house to have a reliable connection.

Jeff Nolan (31:27.662) But previous to that, we were using Starlink, it worked great. Yeah, no, I mean, I'll tell you, I mean, you'll be shocked to hear this. But let me give you an example of high bandwidth, right? People often say, hey, aren't we done with bandwidth? Do you really need more bandwidth? So to do full parallax, high definition holographic imaging, meaning.

You could be sitting in your home in Naples and I could see a holographic high definition image of you and I can actually walk around you and see, you know, it's sort of, you can walk around me and do all that. You need 10 terabits per second at the user. You know, this connection that we have, that needs to be 10 terabits per second. 6G for a mobile device will not get you there. 6G is only one terabit per second. And you know,

You talked about locations. I live in the heart. We live in the heart of Silicon Valley I get a grand 30 megabits per second and we have three zoom lines going of my Son and my wife are working from home. It's a challenge. Yeah. Yeah, we've got orders of magnitude You know the applications are there and and the capacity is here. There is I mean I'm not saying You know, of course there are a lot of places where you do get fiber and high bandwidth There's still many orders of magnitude to go. Well in this actually

Reminds me like trying to get a cell phone signal on Sand Hill Road sometimes, right? It was always a challenge. Oh yeah, it still is. If I go back to the 90s when, well, the early days of the internet, but really networking as a whole, we were driven by a model where the equipment providers were producing manufacturing equipment that created more bandwidth. And then the applications filled that bandwidth. Now it seems like we hit a

an inflection point or a pivot where the applications are demanding more bandwidth and everybody's trying to catch up to it from an infrastructure standpoint. Absolutely. I think it's been that way for many years now. But you're absolutely right. I mean, remember, there was a time when, hey, what do you do with that extra bandwidth? You're doing email. Who needs 10 megabits per second? Exactly.

Jeff Nolan (33:52.206) It's a necessity. It's important to our lives. I mean, there are certain places where, for medical reasons, emergency services, there's a lot of stuff that rides on connectivity. It's a must have. It'll be nice to have an internet connection. It's like water and it's a utility. You need it. So tell it, so which is?

We've existed in a world where there's the data com providers and there's the telecom providers and the telecom providers for now a long time have really been data com providers who have telecom as a service. Now they're switching their fully moving into this unified data com space. How does how do all of the things we just talked about impact? Yeah, we call them multi service pro operators MSOs.

So you have the carriers, you have the data center operators, you have the MSOs, that whole world is still evolving. But let me, if you stick with optical, let me give you an example of how pervasive we are in terms of a component supplier. Okay, and so you make a call from your phone. Yeah, sure, we have a lot of content on the phone. There are some RF chips that use our substrates, et cetera.

But it goes to a tower. The amplifier in that tower, the 5G antenna, uses gallium nitride on silicon carbide electronics. And we make those substrates. Those are different types of silicon carbide substrates than we make for EV charging and all that. It's a different type of material. But OK, so you've got some content there. Then the signal goes down to the tower, and there is an optical transceiver or a bunch of optical transceivers. So that's when...

the signals go from the electrical domain to the optical domain. And then from the tower, it's basically aggregation, higher and higher levels of aggregation. Everything stays in the optical domain. Multiple transduers come together, multiple of those come together, so you get access, Metro, Metro Core, long haul. Then let's say you're making a call to someone in Singapore, so you go under sea.

Jeff Nolan (36:12.782) And then you come on the other side, and then the same thing happens and goes to a tower and becomes a phone. Jeff, if I tell you, you can build that entire link right from the first transceiver, the base of the optical tower, just with our optical components. You don't need to buy from anybody else. That's how pervasive you are. The switching, the amplification, the monitoring, the routing, the transmission. It's just, it's a, it's and.

Anything that we make, we are completely vertically integrated. We started the materials. In fact, sometimes we say our raw materials are powders and gases. It's true. Many of the way we started with powders and gases. So that's pretty fascinating. I don't know that a lot of people appreciate that. So let's go the other direction. So Elon is successful and we have a colony on Mars. Okay. Well, we're not going to use radio signals to have a zoom call. How do we do it?

space optical communication. So you can think of it as, so we have a lot of products into that space. It's always been challenging to go from, say one tall building to another tall building. You've got rain and fog. Yeah, light doesn't light the obstacles. But in space, you've got a perfect transmission medium. It doesn't attenuate the signal for the most part. And so,

You can think of it as basically fiber optic transmission. You need the same components that you have on either side. Let's say a point to point link, one satellite to another satellite. The only difference is you don't have fiber, you have free space. So when you're trying to point a beam into another point there, there is additional optics that you need to make sure that the beam is correctly pointed before you start transmitting.

So there are beacons and telescopes and a lot of stuff that we make in that area as well. But other than that, it is sort of a little more slower speed and it's the same kind of equipment. But lower latency. Lower latency and the structure is different. Every company has their own. We're just getting started with satellite communications.

Jeff Nolan (38:39.502) And there are a lot of people who are also looking at from the satellite terminal, from the satellite to a ground terminal in certain areas. We're doing that today on earth, though, right? Yeah, we are. We are. But the optical links are not that prevalent. Satellite to satellite optical links are more prevalent. Yeah, the new generation that we pretty much use it relies on satellite interconnects. Yeah, the satellite for sure. The satellite interconnects are, I mean, again, about five or six years ago, this was certainly not in the commercial domain.

Right now it's in commercial domain. You can actually, as you know, as you just said, you can take a portable one and sit in the beach and get internet. In a remote beach where there's no connectivity, no 5G signals. It's pretty fascinating. What's a future example? And this is actually a question I just thought of is if we go fast forward a year or two or three, what's a non -commercial technology that will actually become commercially available?

Yeah, unfortunately we can't talk about any of the work that we do in aerospace and defense. But I'm sure there are a few. What's something that you thought would happen that just didn't? I mean, there are a few examples, right? I mean, there are always examples. I mean, if you look at the LIDAR market.

about five, six years ago, we expected it to be, you know, that market inflect a lot sooner. It still hasn't inflected. We are engaged with that ecosystem. We sell lasers and detectors and windows and optics and, you know, whole bunch of components with multiple customers. But that market hasn't really taken off. We think it will. It's one of those things where it's more of a...

Will it happen in two years or three years? It's been, okay, another two years, another two years. It's been that kind of case. But I think with all new technology, two things are, one of my old bosses, you say two things will always be true. One, all new technology will replace old technology. And it always happens later than you expect. The conventional wisdom, you say, oh, it's going to happen at this year. It typically doesn't happen. It's too late. Because the...

Jeff Nolan (41:01.134) the old technology kind of extends, right? Well, and also, I mean, like think about autonomous vehicles, right? I mean, I think we all expected we'd be further along in development, you know, level three and up by this point. And, you know, we're still struggling with it for, I mean, a lot of interesting reasons. This is where then we kind of, we vector back to AI and now we have, you know, generative AI essentially replacing a lot of those rules -based systems that autonomous driving depends on. So,

Again, much like the VR example we talked about earlier, this unrelated confluence of developments comes together and then becomes the tipping point that makes something more viable. Right, right. No, that's a great way to put it. I mean, the regulatory challenges still exist. Yes. Right. I mean, the proverbial kind of question, you've got a pedestrian here with one set of characteristics and another pedestrian here, and the car has to choose.

Do I save that person or this person or the driver? I mean, those are questions that I think regulatory agencies are still grappling with. Well, I think, and as being the human in the equation, I think we're uncomfortable with machines making decisions on that affect our lives. I mean, literally in this case, our lives. Yeah, Ternier was not supposed to be a how -to guide. Yeah, exactly.

Let's talk about, we talked a little bit about engineered materials and this is an area that I have a particular fascination in because of how we make them. And I remember learning from some of the people on our crystals team how we grow these crystals, which, you know, when you know what crystals are, it makes perfect sense, but I'm like, I'm still like, we grow crystals? And what do those machines look like? And they're like, well, no, we actually built all the machines because you just can't go and buy these things. For the most part. Yeah.

And the net of it is that for these engineered materials or crystals or bulk materials, there's an incredible amount of human expertise that's required to do that in order to do them successfully. How has that factored into our development as a company? Yeah, no, it's a good question. It's actually, you're hitting up on our core differentiation.

Jeff Nolan (43:27.566) Our tagline as 26 was materials that matter. Because everything that we do today as coherent is ultimately underpinned by some unique material that we grow or it's a laser or engineering material or a compound semiconductor device. Silicon carbide is a great example. I mean, that market is growing at a 30 % category. Electric vehicles need these silicon carbide electronics.

800 volt charging infrastructures. It's just, you know, we've been scrambling to keep up with the demand. We've been doubling capacity and you heard all the new news with the investments and so on and so forth. But that crystal growth is one of the most complicated crystal growths or growths that's out there in terms of the fundamental physics of it. These are two materials that just don't want to come together. And it's a slow, complicated,

process that requires, I mean, we've been investing in silicon carbide for decades now, right? And it requires innovation. It requires lots of resources. We make our own reactors or the growth chambers. There is so much of IP and know -how that is not easy. It's not like a time and material problem. If something takes you 10 years to do,

Can you put 10 times effort and do it in a year? Absolutely not. That's exactly not how these things don't work, right? It's sort of like, so that's been a great advantage for us and some of the leaders in this market, and not many. And there are other examples of materials because it's hard to copy processes.

I can open up a box and I know if I can buy those components, I can reverse engineer and do that. But how do you reverse engineer something that is in a high temperature growth where you don't even know how that machine... You can actually take that same machine and maybe even the people and put it in another place, it may not work. It's a lot of the tribal knowledge. There's just a whole bunch of stuff. So we continue to value that and we continue to invest because that's really where...

Jeff Nolan (45:46.03) differentiation comes up. Once you have that then you can build up at all levels of value chain and you can make it. Well, the process manufacturing versus discrete. We make a transceiver, if we want to make more transceivers then we just, you know, more equipment, more facility, more people. Yeah, for the assembly process. Right, but for the laser itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's hard stuff. Well, and that's what the Crystal team, you know, explained to me is...

you know, you could spend, it could take up to six months growing one of these things. And if one variable goes, you know, haywire at any point, you could ruin it. So, I mean, there's an incredible, you know, risk or reward. So how do you scale a school with NARBIT then? We have been very successfully, right? I mean, Moore's Law says, it doubles every couple of years. You know, we've been going faster than Moore's Law. We've been doubling our capacity every 18 months for the past few years. It's a team that we have, it's, you know, people with decades of experience.

who've done it before and we're doing, and it takes capital and a lot of capital. And we just announced some time ago that we've taken the leader in the automotive market Denso and Mitsubishi is a leader in the electronics electrical market, have invested combined a billion dollars in our silicon carbide business. So that's really great. It's a great endorsement.

of our capability. It's a very, you know, it's not about just growing a wafer. It's about growing it at these larger sizes. For example, the 200 millimeter wafer, we're the first ones in the market to announce a 200 millimeter capability. Yeah. Right. With electronics, it's always, as you know, if you scale, the cost goes down significantly, right? So we've been... Which is the heart of Moore's law that most people don't understand. Yeah. It's the yield. It's the yield as a result of the edges. So we do hear a lot of people...

making silicon carbide, but it's the size of the wafer, the quality of the wafer. It's about yield. So if you have a wafer where you can use only a small area, it's on the head. Especially for electronics, great. And do you think this is the kind of market that when you achieve a generational advantage, it becomes a sustainable advantage? Yeah, absolutely. Because you are always one step ahead. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is true for our silicon carbide, right? If you follow our evolution, when we went from...

Jeff Nolan (48:08.814) making chip, we call them substrates on wafers, but I think the first substrates were the size of a fingernail. And now 200 millimeters. That was like, okay, fine, maybe 10, 15 years ago, but now we are 200 millimeters. It's pretty fascinating. And then we have gallium arsenide, indium phosphate. Indium phosphide. Phosphide.

Yeah. And silicon carbide, all rather specialized materials. Yeah, yeah. They were designed for essentially thermal and energy advantages. Yeah, we call them compound semiconductor materials. Silicon is a single element, right? Whereas these are, you have two elements and they're all compound semiconductors. It's a unique, I'm not going to call it exotic, it's mainstream today. We see them everywhere. It's a...

It's a fairly select group of companies that have those platforms. And pretty much all of them are in the US or in Europe. So if you take Gallim Arsenide as a platform, just to give you a little background on kind of how we look at, you asked about how do we look at new investments. When we invest in a platform technology, we are not looking at it for one product, one market.

We're looking at it, hey, how does this platform go across markets? Because you want to spread the investment across markets so you're not building into one market. And then you're following the vacillations of that market. You want broad -based growth. So in 2013, 2 .6 acquired a gallium arsenide platform. At that time, very few applications we were making for mice and the optical mouse.

That's about it. And from there, significant amount of investments and growing the capability and investing in R &D, there are multiple markets. So I'll give you an example. First, the gallium arsenide, with that platform, you can make vexels. The vertical cavity surface emitting laser light comes out tiny. And those go in datacom. High bandwidth, 800G transceivers based on vexels for short reach for AI networking. Right? OK, you got that.

Jeff Nolan (50:32.91) And as you know, we sell at all levels of value chain. We sell the Vexel, we also sell the Transceiver, we sell everything else that goes into the Transceiver. With the same Gallium Arsenide platform, we make telecom pumps, high -power pumps. These are very special speciality pumps, which are very high reliability. Imagine putting these pumps go under the water, some of them. Once you put it under the water, your reliability has to be fantastic because...

It's a million dollars. You know, you got to get a boat. I heard it's even more. You got to get a boat in there and these cables, I don't know, you know, Jeff, these are, they're not free floating. They're free floating. The sharks eat them. They're actually buried in the ground. So you have to dredge it. It's a nightmare. Right. So, very high reliability. So you got that and the telecom. So you've got data comm, you've got telecom. The gallium arsenide with high power edge emitting gallium arsenide lasers.

These are the pumps for fiber lasers. The heart of every fiber laser is a pump, is a dial. And then of course, you can put them, you can slice them in bars and stacks, and you can make things for wrinkle removal, hair removal, all of that aside. And then the most important application, probably the highest volume application.

is the smartphone for 3D sensing. That's also good. So one platform going across consumer electronics, data com, telecom, life sciences, precision manufacturing, and the list goes on airspace and defense. You know, I've been in that fab that does the diodes, the galvanosite diodes, and they're gold plated. And I was in the area of the fab where they do the gold plating. It's a really cool machine. But I asked the guy, I'm like, so...

Where's the gold? You know, I'm thinking it's going to be like, you know, a vault with an armed security guard. He's like, no, it's in a box under the desk over there. Yeah. Very little gold. Very little gold. But it was a, that was a really fascinating field trip I had to see end to end the process of raw material to packaging. And I was actually really surprised at how labor intensive it is to package those because of the inspection. Each diode is inspected.

Jeff Nolan (52:55.95) for defects and then packaged either a single emitters or bars. Yeah, it depends on the application, Jeff. For some of these applications, it's all automated. Yeah. So the high volume applications, it's automated. But you're right. I mean, you need to turn it on and make sure you get the light the way it's supposed to come out. Yeah. Right. So there is a lot of testing that goes into it.

What's your favorite part of the coherent business when you look at the different products? What's the one that gets you the most excited right now? Yeah. So everything is, is, I mean, we, we, let's talk about the markets, right? We kind of touched on that earlier. But industrial, we have, I'll tell you what excites me than each of the markets.

How is that? Verticals. Industrial. So within industrial, we have precision manufacturing as a vertical. But you can think of it as everything that uses a laser to modify materials for machining and manufacturing and so on. So you get carbon dioxide lasers for fading genes. That's done with our lasers, you know that. And to welding these really, really...

complex wells for EV batteries. I mean, that's the gamut and everything in between, right? Medical stands, et cetera, et cetera. I think, you know, we announced recently in our industrial markets day in December that we are re -entering the fiber laser market. We were a player in the fiber laser market or legacy coherent was with the Rofen in those days and various reasons we exited the market. Now we're really back.

That's going to be fantastic. I'm really looking forward to that because it's a very unique design. We make everything in the fiber laser, right? From the fiber, the diodes, the pumps, the isolators, the whole optics, everything. And we're also going to do it in a low -cost manner. So that's really, I'm looking forward to that business and its success. The next one is semiconductor capital equipment.

Jeff Nolan (55:17.582) where it's lasers, optics, inspection, enabling the next gen node, right? Right from EUV and all these advanced processes. And then display. Oh, semiconductor capital equipment, you know, the market's going to be a trillion dollar market by 2030. All the silicon semiconductor industry, that's their big goalpost now. But 40 billion of that is going to come from compound semiconductors. With respect to that,

That market, to hit that one trillion, there's new fabs are going in, advanced, people are not slowing down, right? Our business is dependent on capacity additions to existing fabs and new fabs. Once you have the fab, whether the demand is going up or down, we really don't. Yeah, sure, there's some service business, but that's a semi -cap, excitement around semi -cap. And I don't know whether you know, over the last four or five years, every year,

pro forma, looking back legacy current, legacy 2 .6, we've been at record revenues. Yeah. And we said in our recent one of our earnings calls that we expect fiscal 24 to be another record revenue for the semi -cap business. So it's pretty exciting. Way for inspection, all these advanced, just the use of more lasers, use of more advanced materials and semiconductor device manufacturing tools. And we are excited with all the new tools. In addition to the tools that we, in addition to laser annealing, we have additional tools for micro LED processing. So it's more content. We're actually making the entire tool. It's lift -off and cutting and marketing. Yeah, it's laser lift -off.

It is laser induced forward transfer, you know, because there's pick and place that you need to do and the best way to do it with the laser. So that micro LEDs, that market will mature in a couple of years. So, but we're getting ready, we're getting geared up. And then aerospace and defense that you will not talk about. That's under industrial. Communications, we've talked about data comm and AI. And then telecom. Telecom, you know, there's an entire market segment within telecom, coherent transceivers. The same type of transceivers that we talked about in data comm, but they use coherent.

Jeff Nolan (57:41.774) modulation, it's a different technology platform. These transceivers are a lot more expensive. They're larger and they go longer distances, hundreds of kilometers. That's a market where we are just getting started. We've got multiple new products that are ramping up. We make our own digital signal processing that goes into those transceivers. So there is, that's my excitement, just like fiber lasers in industrial, this is my excitement in telecom. Data comm, of course, we've talked about it at length and there's, it's a...

it's a big deal for sure. Then when you look at electronics, automotive electronics is really where silicon carbide is. And in addition to that, we have battery recycling and cabin sensing. You know, the European authorities at the regulatory, they had regulations for in cabin monitoring three, four years ago. Right? So many, I mean, you could do it with LEDs, you could do it with other technologies, but the, and then gesture recognition, you know, in some of the BMWs you've got,

You know, you can do this and the volume goes up and that's pretty cool. And then silicon carbide, of course, for electronics. And we also have battery, we have a battery recycling platform that we're working on. And we have battery technology, lithium, sulfide based battery platform, and then LiDAR and all of that. Consumer electronics, it's AR, VR and wearables. Okay, so that wearables go across consumer electronics and life sciences a little bit. Yeah.

And I want to come to variables because you just sparked something that I want to talk about. And then we have instrumentation, the medical laser, everything from Lasik to wrinkle removal to acne removal, which is actually hair removal, medical lasers. That should be in the beach market. Yeah, it's fascinating, working with our customers to...

generate all these new applications. Diagnostics, bulk of our revenues today is actually coming from diagnostics, where everything from PCR testing, during the COVID days. Bulk of our instrumentation revenues. Yes, instrumentation revenues from, yeah, exactly. During the COVID years, I mean, PCR testing, we had so much of PCR content. If you had a PCR test, the probability that you used equipment which had...

Jeff Nolan (01:00:02.894) Two six coherent parts in there is probably like 90, 95%. We have thermoelectrics, lasers and optics, filters. There's a lot of content in PCR and around diagnostic, you know, immunology. There's a whole range of diagnostic tools. And then variables, of course. And then we have a scientific instrumentation business, which is kind of a GDP plus kind of a business. But coming to variables, you know,

The wearables, the watch, the earbud, the AR VR, they're becoming personal health monitors. Yes. Right? The devices are now measuring blood pressure, they're measuring oxygen content, they're going to measure alcohol, they're going to measure... I mean, think about the earbud. It's such intimate contact with your human body.

I'll give you a...

Jeff Nolan (01:00:59.086) So, Geryl Dalman who runs our consumer electronics, his quote, marketing vertical, this quote is, consumer electronics devices are going to become personal health monitors. You don't need to wear something fancy. You can wear a watch. It'll tell you everything that's going on. It does the watch today. It does a lot, but there's going to be more. We believe there's a lot more coming in terms of variables and sensing. Well, and also, and then connect the dots with their...

Right because now it's a blood glucose glucose. Oh, yeah, and it's no longer now just like informing you It's actually being prescriptive. It's going yeah exactly and the data can go to your doctor So I'll talk about glucometry the the holy grail of glucometry is non -invasive the commentary Yeah, you try it's it's complicated requires a lot of AI it requires a lot of sensing but the glucose molecule

has 10 absorption bands. Okay, and these absorption bands go all the way from 9xx nanometers to 2 .7 microns. Okay, so let's say 0 .9 to 2 .0, very wide range, okay? So, okay, now what are the lasers and detectors? It's not just the laser, it's also the detector.

The semiconductor laser, to put it on a watch or put it on a, you need semiconductor lasers, right? These are tiny. So it turns out gallium arsenide we talked about from 9XX to around close to a thousand or so. So that picks up a bunch of pieces, bunch of spectrum lines. You need to cover that entire range? The more you cover, the better it is. The accuracy is higher. It's sort of like,

If I have one sensor and now I have 10 sensors. Yeah. And then, and then indium phosphide, which you talked about earlier, that goes from up to that goes up to 1 .5, 1 .56 microns. So you've got gallium arsenide, you overlap to the indium phosphide and yeah, you pick those. But guess what? Here's the kicker. There is a platform called gallium antimonide. It's an exotic, gallium arsenide has become, it's become.

Jeff Nolan (01:03:17.934) Indium Phosphide, I don't know whether I mentioned this earlier, we were the first company to take an Indium Phosphide platform, a laser platform into high volume production, very high volume consumer electronics application. So it's really, because it is an exotic platform, we've shown it can be done for hundreds of millions of devices, right? And then gallium antimonide, that's a platform we got from Coherent.

legacy coherent. It goes from mid -infrared, which is starting at about 1 .7 or so and going up to 3 plus. So you pick up those. So imagine if you had three tiny lasers, three different platforms in a little chip with the detectors and you embedded in a watch. I mean, our customers are taking advantage of, I'm just giving you a hypothetical. It's not a hypothetical example, it's a real example, but it's not.

It gives you an idea of the capabilities of our platform. Well, and it's also exciting to then jump and start connecting the dots. So we talked about the earbud, right? Well, now let's go to hearing aids that are optically stimulated, right? Yeah. And now we've got, not only did we take an existing category, but it got transformed into something it was never intended to be because of the technology capabilities that are possible. Right. No, absolutely. Optogenetics is another. I mean that...

I mean, the first time I read about optogenetics and I actually looked at some of the work that we've been doing, it was just, it was so inspirational. I mean, you're literally in certain examples, you're literally enabling blind people to see, somewhat perceive a vision, right? You put the ops in and then some of the experiments that they've done, I mean, it's fascinating. And to know that we are...

right there and enabling the researchers. And I mean, it really, you know, our mission statement is to make the world safer, healthier, closer and more efficient, right? It's, yeah. I mean, if you ask me what really makes you get up in bed and do that 5 a .m. call and stay until 11 30 p .m. Do it, you know, working. It's really the big picture here. Yeah. The degenerative neural.

Jeff Nolan (01:05:44.206) diseases too. That's another one that's close to me. And it feels like based off of the science that we have and the technology we have, we're at the cusp of really solving three major areas that have disabled, debilitated, and been devastating humanity. Cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders. I mean, I tell you, there is a...

You just touched sort of a personal cord here in the sense that my mother has been suffering from dementia for about four or five years now. It's just so sad to see that with all this investment in science and medicine, there are no, I mean, there's no cure for, I mean, there are a couple of therapeutic approaches which have a 10 % chance of working. There are no side effects, I will go for it. Right?

And, you know, there's so much progress being made in neuroscience and we are enabling it with our microscopy and lasers for those applications and all the helping the researchers. You know, I'm really looking forward to breakthroughs that are happening and in any way that we could.

Yeah. And I think they, you know, they happen slowly than suddenly, right? Like so many things in life. Yeah. Like AI. Yeah. The, um, the disabled, the hearing disabled one is really fascinating one because people today were used to the concept of a cochlear implant. Oh, we'll just get a cochlear implant. And you know, what, um, what isn't widely known about that is people who are hearing disabilities who have the cochlear implants, they do hear, but like in a crowded room with a lot of people talking, it's just all noise. Whereas in a crowded room with a lot of.

if I hear you talking because I know your voice, you're clear as a bell, right? With this new generation of implants, you know, that are optically stimulated, that clarity and vibrance in conversation really comes through. And so it's not just about the ability for someone who's hearing is able to have the ability to hear sound, but actually to interpret it in a much more, you know, clear point. Right, right, right. I mean, it's a similar talk to genetics. It's, you know, the...

Jeff Nolan (01:08:05.134) the experiment where they've... Mouse licking. Yeah, no, the mouse is one. No, this is with a visually impaired person. You wear a mask with it's got LEDs in there and then you inject an op -sin, which is so every time an LED lights up. So let's say there's a tumbler on the table. The LEDs create sort of an image of that.

and then they light up and that part of the brain that's got stimulated, there's a signal and the person is able to perceive the tumbler. It's fascinating. And it's research that, you know, again, we do sell a lot of the lasers and for some of this research, but it's really fascinating. So this gets back to one of the questions I asked you at the very top of our talk, which was about, you know,

How much work can a photon do, right? Because there are limitations here. Like we just talked about optogenetics and one of the issues there is the skull doesn't allow light to permeate it. So therefore you have to get the laser inside the brain. You can't just inject it. We talk about going transceivers, you know, getting, you know, ridiculously fast, but then.

there's fewer photons to work with when you're operating at those extremely high speeds. So what are the, are there theory? I know there's always going to be theoretical limits, but are there practical limits that we're hitting today? Yeah. I mean, we've, you know, if you take vexels as an example, right? I mean, like in every industry you have the naysayers and then you have the believers and the executors, right? Actually do the, so you say, oh, you can never make a 50G vexel. Okay. We made a 50G vexel. Oh, you can never make a 100G vexel. We made a 100G vexel.

It's involving production. I mean, it was a few years ago, but now, so I think we are pushing the envelope. Yeah, and it's leading edge, leading edge, however you want to call it. And I'm really optimistic of, you know, as a marketing guy, I cannot be but optimistic. Yeah. But leaving that aside, I'm really optimistic with the progress that we as a company and

Jeff Nolan (01:10:24.206) we as an industry are making. I mean, it's fascinating. So let's look forward five, 10, 15 years. What are major innovation breakthroughs that are necessary that either we're working on or we'll be tackling? I can tell you about what we are enabling. Things that were science fiction before. And we talked about optogenetics as an example. We talked about variables.

I mean, the variables, the sky is the limit. We're just getting started. I mean, you could, if you remember, I don't know that you're a Trekkie, but if you remember the tricorder, I mean, that thing is going to be a variable. I mean, you don't need Dr. Spock to bring that thing and then do that. You just, you know, it'll tell you what's, you know. So that is really, if you ask me, what is one thing amongst everything which we do, you know, I'd come back to that question.

All our markets are excellent and I love them and all that. But if you ask me, what is one thing that really excites me personally is our variables. Yeah, yeah. Right, because just the ability to impact our human lives, our lives. I actually left my Apple Watch on my own. I got an Ultra Watch the week before they stopped selling them with the bloodsense. Okay, okay. And I left it at home today and I'm like, all day long I've been glancing down at it. It's become such a...

essential device for you. Yeah, I mean, there's so much these devices do. There's so much more that they could do and they will do. So let's talk about something known as Pulse Laser Deposition. It's a unique platform of making materials using our eczema laser. You can think of it as playing Lego with atoms. Oh yeah, I want that atom here. I mean, that's really what you're doing.

So imagine you're going to create whatever you want, whatever properties you want. So that, we're still in the early stages and there's a lot of our customers are deploying. I wouldn't say, in the sense that they're getting these tools and making equipment using these lasers for deposition. Well, we have one that's doing fusion tape now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For Tokamak. So that's the other piece, right? The fusion tape for Tokamak. That's also pulse laser deposition.

Jeff Nolan (01:12:45.038) Laser fusion for energy fusion reactors. Yeah There there are I mean there are things that You know micro LEDs and display platforms, right? I heard an estimate for the number of lasers that are required for some of these fusion experiments. It's like Oh my god. It's like the number of lasers was was eye -popping a lot, but but at the end of the day it's about efficiency

it's energy efficiency. I mean, if you think about everything that we do, pretty much everything we do can be classified into communications or energy. And let's say when you say energy, it's about efficiency, savings, energy savings. You know, the use of a laser to modify materials, it's really an energy, you're saving energy. It's so much cheaper to do with a fiber laser than to do with an electric arc welder. Right? So, and the same thing with fusion and energy is a big deal.

It's all, it's going to be all about energy. How do you create it? How do you transport it? How do you become more efficient with it? It's kind of fascinating to think that we went from electrons to photons and now photons are enabling the next generation of electrons. It's going to be more and more about energy. So I have two children and when I, each one of them, I tell them individually, I'm like,

don't tell your brother, but you're my favorite. So you can actually pick favorites. You just don't tell your brother. Yeah, yeah, just don't, yeah. And you hope that they don't talk to each other. Sajay, it's been a fascinating talk, and I'm really glad we had this opportunity to chat. And the timing worked out, I mean, we just happened to both be here in sunny South Florida. Yeah, it's great. And we're staring at the sun here, so it's pretty great. Yeah, well, it was really fascinating to talk with you, and I look forward to continuing this discussion. Thanks a lot, Jeff. Thank you for driving all the way.

Thank you. All right.