Why are there no packaged Gen-I chips in a demo device? I asked myself the same question, and while your guess would be as good as mine, it would seem that some explanations are available if you read the announcements. E.g.:
1/7/22 - letter to ASX
"... We refer to the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on 30 May 2022 and queries from ASX regarding the status of the demonstration of the playing chips.
The Chairman’s address noted in Paragraph 6 that
demonstrations units had not been able to be achieved by the date of the Annual General Meeting due to significant delays and disruptions to our supply chain, in particular for goods and services originating in China, which among others include our speaker chips.
A limited number chips arrived at our facility in Israel only in late May 2022; larger quantities of are expected to arrive by mid-July. Most of the chips received to date have passed test protocols and are now in various stages of assembly and integration into our demonstration systems.
The announced intention of the Directors’ is that once demonstration boards are completed and tested, they will be used to demonstrate the technology to potential investors and existing shareholders. ..."
Review and 4C 29/7/22 - very interesting development stages listed here
"... MEMS Fabrication and Packaging
Over the months of June and July 2022 our fabrication partner EarthMountain (“EM”
completed 2 batches of Gen-1 MEMS wafers; half of which were characterized and extensively tested by the company, while the other half were forwarded directly for chip packaging.By any measurable standard wafer yield has proven to be excellent. An additional batch of Gen-1 MEMS wafers is scheduled to complete fabrication by the end of the first week of August. ..."
I assume a batch is 24 6" wafers.
What happened to these packaged Gen-I chips and their assembly into the demo boards described above on 1/7/22? My guess is that the manual packaging was not as quick or as successful as hoped. More importantly, we were also told on 30/1/23 that there was a noise component in the finished chips. We saw and heard what the presence of 'harmonics' in the output does, as illustrated on the recent demo video.
Review and 4C 30/1/23
"... During our extensive
work with GEN-I chips [i.e.finished chips] we discovered that
during music play an audible high frequency component (for lack of better word “noise” was produced when reconstructing certain frequencies. The root cause of this phenomena was traced to inconsistencies / lack of uniformity in fabrication. Specifically, the theories of digital sound reconstruction dictate that when superimposing the time-delayed sound pulses generated by our “pixels“, variances in the anticipated pulse magnitude caused by inconsistencies in manufacturing, can manifest into the improper reconstruction of sound and in certain cases produce an unwanted sound that is audible. ..."
"... Also included in the production version of the [GEN-II] chip is a refinement to the electromechanical characteristics of the structure that permit us to apply a
software-only solutionable to contend with adverse acoustic effects resulting from inconsistencies in the manufacturing process. ..."
"... While industry methodologies involved in mass producing semiconductors is anticipated to reduce if not eliminate such variances overtime, nonetheless the company was compelled to explore other possible means of negating the problem. The innovation ultimately conceived involves expanding the electromechanical characteristics of the devices, that when combined with a proprietary
software-only approach provide the capability of rendering any such noise inaudible.
This solution which has been tried and tested on our prototyping platforms has proven to offer meaningful improvement to the clarity of sound even though it cannot be fully utilized without the electromechanical changes incorporated in the mass-production version of the chip. [i.e. the GEN-II chip]
It is of critical importance to note that all modifications introduced in the mass-production version of the chip (MEMS-GEN-II) are not even visible to the naked eye, or more significantly GEN-II is fully compatibile with all packaging, testing procedures, functional software, algorithms, hardware and electronics that were developed, tried and tested on the prototyping platform (MEMS-GEN-I). ..."
So my thoughts here are that without final modified versions of the GEN-II chips, we could only be played the noisy GEN-I chips in the bigger demo units. But if they could demo a
naked GEN-I MEMS
without its ASIC, they could do so using the software described above. I expect the doughnut is is still the only prototyping demo platform that allows direct interfacing with the MEMS device's pixels rather than via the packaged chip with its on board ASIC. That would allow them to demo something that was close to an optimised GEN-I chip OR a GEN-II chip. This seems to be precisely what they have said above. As has already been acknowledged, a single chip like this was too quiet to demo to a crowd, but perfectly OK if you could demo it on a 'small stage', just as they did.
Hey presto: we get to hear a demo of what the GEN-II chips will eventually sound like, even if it is done in miniature. The real GEN-II will be much louder, but at least we have been able to see and hear a demo that shows the realistic differences in performance between the two technologies. Good call I think. Now we all know where the state of play is at. The DSR + MEMS works a treat, and we are close to having a final version (all fingers crossed!). That is a lot of de-risking of the stock I think.
Please understand this is all based on my reading of what has been announced. I could be wrong on several details. DYOR.
(20min delay)