The presso essentially says they don't want to be a manufacturer because of cost of setting up a fab (billions, with a b). However, there are many "fabless" chip companies that don't own production facilities and who contract manufacturing to outfits like TSMC.
Besides an outright sale of the IP, another monetisation path is licences and royalties. An interim step could be sale of evaluation licences that allow interested parties to undertake technology trials in their own labs. Orbital made good money in the early days doing this.
Another asset might be the IP around the process they developed to apply the PCMO layer to the wafer at low temperature. That might be a money spinner if there's no other practical way to do it. On this point I see strong similarities with what Bluglass is doing.
The wildcard is the HGST joint development agreement and the link through it to Western Digital. It would be huge if this agreement meant Western Digital itself was looking closely at the technology. But if that were true the whole deal would have been bankrolled in Silicon Valley.
FRY Price at posting:
4.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
