I’ve been looking into the circumstances around the “blowout”...

I’ve been looking into the circumstances around the “blowout” in the analysis of the Second Platform Lot.

On 13 May 21, while announcing the extension of the WD/HGST JDA, the Second Platform Lot was “in the final fabrication stage at imec that we will receive in early June for analysis.”There was no mention of a timeline for results.

Previous announcements had mentioned the receipt of wafers in early June and results late that same month.

So, something changed in the three-four weeks between this announcement and early June.

We know what changed: the announcement on 21 June the wafers had been received, with an additional six Platform Lot and 23 Non-Platform wafers now pushing analysis out to an unknown time.

What instigated the change? In my opinion, the clue lies in the 13 May 21 announcement. Guido said, “…Western Digital and HGST have renewed our joint development agreement following a review of our significant progress during the past twelve months. This progress includes the Second Platform Lot…”

To me, it looks like the change was driven by WD/HGST. The Platform Lot was baked and showed great results, so they wanted to verify it with additional data sets. I find it very difficult to interpret significant progress including the Second Platform Lot as anything other than functioning pretty bloody well.

The recipe works, let's get it into mass production!!