The decision was made by Brainchip to go for the end goal in a make or break effort to achieve the companies ‘holy grail’ and Peter van der Made stepped aside from his position on the Board of Directors to work exclusively on the final stage of the development of the AKIDA technology. The company engaged in brutal cost savings and shedding of all staff not engaged in the technology engineering side of the company.All of the knowledge and research that had gone into the various attempts at commercialisation had also driven the advance of the AKIDA technology platform so Peter van der Made and Anil Mankar had the plan already laid out as to what was required but now it became a race not just to be the first to market that would be a given but a race to finalise the research and engineering in record time before the company was no longer financially viable.The various decisions as to how to make the final push to market of this revolutionary product were brilliant. They knew that this would be make or break. They knew they had the technology but they knew from the past failures that they had to pick an area or segment of the market where they would not have any true competition. They also knew that even then they needed to have found out before they built the product what clients thought of it and what they liked and did not like about it all on a shoestring budget.The idea of the Akida Development Environment (ADE) was conceived and it was released to early access customers. Studio had been released to customers after being produced and as a result feedback from customers came too late in the cycle but nonetheless this feedback was available to inform Brainchip as to what the ADE should look like. However by releasing the ADE in advance it was intended that any further feedback would be taken on board and designed in which in fact occurred however to accommodate these customer requests the release date of the IP and the production of AKIDA1000 was delayed by twelve months as Peter van der Made and Anil Mankar went back to the drawing board.The state of the Brainchip balance sheet and the delay that this redesign caused did not go down well with many shareholders and a great deal of angst and anger were directed at the company in particular the CEO which suffice to say he fielded with a dignified air but which to those who had been involved watching the company since he took up his role clearly weighed heavily on his shoulders.In an extremely positive sign on 14 December, 2019 a joint presentation of the ADE performing hand gesture identification took place at a trade show in combination with Tata Consulting Service engineers and to the delight of many shareholders one of the presentation slides stated that the Tata engineers were looking forward to building a robot based upon an AKIDA platform. Anil Mankar has a strong background in bringing IP to successful implementation on chip and it is reported that he has over 100 successful chip designs to his credit. As a result despite the speed which was required he ensured that the company took the time to implement the AKD1000 design in FPGA before taking it to Socionext for final engineering and design prior to sending it to TSMC for production of the wafer.In an effort to contain the costs of producing the AKD1000 chip the company decided that it would share a wafer and on 8 April, 2020 TSMC commenced production.These actions of going back to the drawing board following feedback from early access customers and implementing the design on FPGA produced delays which clearly did not impress the market and it was reflected in an ever falling share price but the company stuck with what had to be done to achieve the end result.
BRN Price at posting:
42.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)