4DS - Anything but Charting, page-17474

Plenty of amazing technology that never gets up for whatever reason.

If I was WD I would go the license route until my hand was forced and a competing bid was on the table. A bid might be a while coming because WD might be seen as the test user for the tech in a real world application. Some boffin might buy some commercially available WD gear with 4DS RERAM in it and have a bit of a hack at it to use it in other test cases.

The company isn't then stressing about making the cost of the acquisition back - there's a fixed price per unit associated with the license for 20 years. It may be that the license fees end up being more than what they would have paid in the first place, but if this ends up being a high margin product you wouldn't worry about that so much.

It all depends on who the competing bid is from - Samsung - WD might say, "well they want it for DRAM/embedded device memory - not really our wheelhouse - we just want to focus on data centre infrastructure."