Hi JB,
I can see your reasoning and believe your predictions are based on facts, but I have a slightly more optimistic view. Basing your timelines of GF is a bit problematic, because GF still have not signed a deal, so are not fully invested in progressing the tech yet. I have looked at 3 milestones being Tape Out, First Wafers and Fully Qualified and used the Skywater timelines from the date of agreement, to apply to the DBH process. My predicted date for Tape Out was 7/8/2024 so pretty close, only out by a week. Following that my predicted dates for First Wafers is 17/12/2024, which is much more optimistic than your April 2025 and qualification I had listed as 7/8/2025.
In the tape out announcement, Coby has said they are expecting qualification by Q2 2025, so say 30 June 2025, which is a month an a half faster than the Skywater process, which given that DBH is big player is plausible i guess, but I will stick with August 2025 to temper my expectations.
Global Foundries on the other hand has been much slower than Skywater. As I mentioned there has been no deal signed yet, so I took the date of the Tape Out announcement 3/01/23 as the starting point and used the Skywater timeframes from there. The estimated date for First Wafers was 15/5/23, but we did not get them till 31/12/23. Based on the wafers date, that would put qualification at 20/8/24. I am not sure if the test result on 6/8/24 will be the qualification results. It is possible that GF did not supply enough wafers initially to do the full qualification, so it might just be indicative qualification results, without the required quantity to count. Everything with GF is so murky its hard to know.
In my opinion, GF is not 100% committed to WBT yet, as they are still working on their own solution and are yet to put pen to paper on a deal, making their progress slow. I am confident that DBH will proceed quicker along the development path as they have decided this is the way forward for them.
I am not being critical of your timeframes and believe you have made perfectly valid assumptions. I am just saying I have made different assumptions and have come up with more optimistic results. I am biased though, because I am heavily invested so have my rose coloured glasses on.
Cheers
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