@PsyaNite Yeah, but it doesn't really seem to be helping WBT...

@PsyaNite

Yeah, but it doesn't really seem to be helping WBT much, does it. As you or someone else pointed out, there are really only a few likely players in the purchasing market, so it doesn't matter what the other competing researchers think, it matters only what those few players think. These conferences are more about hyping to the research communitee and less about 4DS's target market, I'd suggest.

There is a case to pump the 4DS retail share price a bit as it increases the base for a subsequent negotiated sale, so the investor roadshows are probably important to increase general share market awareness.

My guess as to what is hurting WBT is that their tested platform & certification scale (150) is just too big, which argues strongly for 4DS's decision to scale down to 20nm berfore really pushing to market. If I was a potential purchaser once the company announced an intention to test 20nm, I'd be holding off now waiting to see how the platform works at 20nm, as that saves me some cost and reduces my risk. It will make jack-all difference to the price I will have to pay to acquire as the minute one company makes a serious approach the others will poke their faces in if only to force me to pay a higher price.

Everything now hinges off the 20nm fab results.I agree that selling IP only is fundamentally different from selling an active manufacturer, though, and people need to be realistic about the top end of the valuation.

Having said that, the memory market will undergo a spectacular growth this year and next as the memory demands for AI - particularly the scale of nVidia's new Blackwell chip set is truly astounding. Likewise the next gen desktop computing chips coming from Intel, Apple and similar are all incorporating AI architectures at the CPU level, and the rapidly expanding growth of locally installable LLM's (see HuggingFace) are going to shift inference engines from the cloud to local hardware - and thus see an expansion of memory demand at the desktop level. Current market size estimates are thus likely to be a fraction of what they are in a year or two.