Well good bye to all those who've given up. I trust you had no difficulty selling.
But this is very good news and a very good announcement IMO. I won't be parting with a single one of my shares!
I confess to being a little surprised that the indications we were previously given, namely that the packaging issues had been solved long ago proved to be an exaggeration or underestimation, which for me at least borders on being misleading. But the result sounds realistic.
This from AGM in May 2017:
" ... I should also point out that in addition to completing our 2nd generation ASIC, we were able to utilize the faulty Phase IV MEMS chips to complete the 3+ year effort developing an automated chip packaging assembly process. In fact just prior to my departure from Israel we received the first samples, which I brought with me here today.
While not quite yet demonstrable, we are clearly seeing all our efforts coalescing toward achieving the results we all hope and expect. If all goes as planned you should expect to see us back here in the relative near future, as no one more than our shareholders deserves to celebrate our accomplishments. ..."
Readers will recall that these were the completed and packaged devices that I held in my hand and have posted photos of on here a number of times. Of course the fact that that was 2017 - 4 years ago is also not lost on me.
If anyone thought that packaging a MEMS die would be straightforward they might be surprised at this, but I don't think they should be. As the announcement makes clear it is anything but. And that is because of what a MEMS physically is. If you did not understand this you did not do your reading. But there are lots of other MEMS devices out there, from gyroscopes to accelerometers, lenses to pumps, and most will have had comparable issues, all of which have been solved. It's complicated, sure, but not impossible. Clearly AP has also been surprised by this difficulty and has learned quite a lot from the process. It is a shame they have not explained or acknowledged that their previous announcements have proven to be less than reliable in hindsight.
Sensibly AP used its imperfect and otherwise worthless devices to work out how to do it. And from the sound of it they are almost there, and will shortly be committing the newer good ones to the process. But from the announcement even the better older ones are able to be used to demo working devices outside the cleanroom.
" ... Nonetheless despite all these limitations the demonstration systems work as intended, and will continually improve in the coming weeks as the packaging process is optimized and we begin to introduce newer generations of MEMS dies into the chip packaging process. ..."
This is the major news I have been waiting for.
(20min delay)