If it was a failure, we know their MO is to go into voluntary suspension to find out why before announcing. Thats what they did with PL3 failure.
on that basis you can almost entirely eliminate a complete "PL5 failure" from the potential outcomes.
They've already had the megabit success with PL4, so "PL5 success" has a different set of succ as criteria, much of which is not necessarily quantifiable like PL4 was.
Some of the basic PL5 success criteria:
- repeatability (no metrics - basically just a "yes we can repeat it")
- identifying opportunities to improve PL6 manufacturing (no metrics - basically just a "we learned something and applied it")
- tunability of parameters (opportunity for metrics)
The last one is tricky - you could write "we've proven it's tunable" and give out nothing or give out new maximum metrics where they've pushed beyond the PL4 results.
But giving too much insight into the tradeoffs (i.e. how changing parameters affects other parameters) would be pretty sensitive IP. By releasing you're basically giving the competition an insight as to what changes to make to improve their own tech.
so in my view we've actually got two out of three of the answers for PL5. And that there hasn't been a downside comment other than reaching the limit of imec's capabilities, I reckon the tech is still solid.
Testing upper boundaries of the tuneable metrics could take a while... For example, in the initial megabit success release (6wks after shipping from imec) they announced greater than 2bn cycles for endurance. Three weeks later in the "further megabit success" announcment it was 3bn cycles.... Not sure it's linear, but to push past their old endurance numbers they'd need say 12 weeks of testing (and remember if there are multiple iterations who knows when the max endurance iteration's testing would have started).
so to me the longer they take to share details or metrics, the more comprehensive the suite of results will likely be.
Its possible they receive PL6 before they've finished all the PL5 testing.
@Khoutam - you're much smarter at this than me, is any of this a reasonable interpretation?
(20min delay)