I had a read of the interview transcript from last year (15/11/21) between Stocks Down Under, Wilbert & Dave (partial extract from the interview is below) in regard to the failure of PL2. For unknown reasons, the misinformation that Wilbert mentioned has a slightly enhanced flavour of 'interesting' after the failure of PL3. The mind boggles.
Wilbert:"So we have focused on developing our memory cell and get the right characteristics of the memory cell. And we reported in August that we had made a dramatic improvement in the performance of this memory cell. We also reported in August that our attempt to put that cell into a memory array, where the memory cell is driven by a transistor, had failed because of misprocessing. And we had, of course, after the misprocessing you need to go analyze what went wrong. We had extensive discussions with IMEC, which is our foundry partner, and we had identified our paths forward, and we had communicated that in August.
That we were gonna switch to a different platform. We were gonna have a one-megabit array, and that was the path forward. And we said we are finalizing the date at which that memory platform we lost can start. And we had said either it’s gonna start in late September or in October. And we hadto do some pre-work to determine what was the right time to start. And that work was occurring between August and the beginning of October. By I think, October 8th we believed we had all the information.
We were digesting it internally and the company went into a trading hold for a few days to make sure we had all our ducks lined up, and we were scheduled to announce, I think on October 11, what our plan forward was. Literally, hours before we were releasing the press release, we got a message from our partner in our regular Monday morning meeting, Monday morning California time, that they had provided us misinformation. That they had looked into what they told us turned out to be incorrect relative to this new platform.
And the reasons why the prior device lot had failed,would also be the reason why this new device lot would fail. Because there was something in the design that they thought wasn’t there, and it turned out to be the same design flaw in those two types of devices. So for three weeks after that we have been negotiating with IMEC, what can we do to make sure that device problem is fixed? So that we have a high probability that the platform lots come out properly. That caused about a three-month delay in our time line that pushed all the processing into 2022.
That required us to negotiate an extension to our collaboration agreement with IMEC to make sure that we didn’t forecast a planthat was not supported by a contract so that IMEC would execute their part of the activity, and that took three weeks. And I believe actually that those negotiations were done at high speed and high pressure in order to minimize thetime but it still took three weeks before we had a resolution to all these issues, and we could announce the press release we made recently, where we saidwe have everything cleared up, we are instead of simply starting the device lot, we’re gonna do a short loop first.
Do some characterization to make sure that things we are concerned about in the processing will not cause the lot to be defective. And then we’ll start the device lot early next year and expect the device lot to come out around the July timeframe..."
