I have responded to your points in detail below, but in summary there are risks, e.g. delays from covid, commerical agreement delays, potential development issues or alternative tecnologies potentially being superior, but I think with the experience of the WBTs board and the progress they have made so far these risks can be considered low or at least low in relation to the potential rewards from investing in WBT.
> "The characteristics of the technology as it develops may limit its competitiveness with existing wider spread technologies like flash".
Emerging memories have many advantages over the existing memory technologies and most emerging memory technologies share the following attributes:
- they are nonvolatile or persistent, a decided strength against DRAM with its power-hungry need to be refreshed at regular intervals - they don’t require the high erase/write voltages that flash needs - they don’t use the clumsy block erase / page write approach required by flash memory, NAND & NOR. This allows these technologies to have read and write speeds that are similar to each other, not off each other by an order of magnitude like with flash. Currently in flash memory when you want to change a few bits you have read the whole block, change the bits and then write the block back. That is a huge operation which is why it takes time and a lot of power. It is also the reason why read time is currently a 1000 times faster in Flash than write time is - Some of them allow cost reductions through scaling that surpasses that of today’s entrenched memory technologiesIn regards to flash, think about all the times when you have copied or moved files and then had to wait. You are waiting because the memory is slow. New memory technologies are going to overtake the existing ones eventually it is just a matter of time. You can read
this post to get more information.
I think the real question here is what is the risk level of development issues happening that could stop Weebit from gaining a position in the market, i.e. what is the chance that something comes up in development that cannot be surmounted. I think this particular risk can be considered very low now based on the progress that has been made. Dadi said something like this a while ago: "A very important question to ask especially with startups is what is the risk level. With Weebit there was a huge risk level because there are technological issues that could have put a halt to everything. However, once we got to the kilobit and megabit array as well the retention and endurance levels, now we have a significantly lower risk level. We need to do a lot of work to get this module working. We will be hitting all kinds of obstacles along the way. It is guaranteed that we will, but the risk of us not being able to overcome these obstacles is now extremely low. These are the types of things where you hit them, you understand them and find a way to get around them. They are not show stoppers that could kill everything."
> "There's also the variable of time. WBT technology may still not mature for prime time for many more years, and the longer it takes, the more chance there is for a competing technology or advancements in existing technologies make it less and less relevant."
This argument could literally be made about the majority of companies that exist. There are always going to be competitors working on things that haven't been made public yet, so there is a risk, but it is hard to quantify it as it is not public information. What you can do is look at:
- the progress Weebit has made and the pace of that progress compared to competitors. The simple structure of Weebit's technology has allowed Weebit to progress rapidly in terms of technical development - the time leti has already spent researching the selector that Weebit is going to use in the discrete memory market. Leti has been developing a selector for the discrete memory market for the past several years - the publicly available information which shows that Weebit is a leader in the market - the backing that industry veterans and luminaries are giving Weebit. Coby has said before that "If you don’t know much about the semiconductor industry, look at the people who do and the backing that they are giving Weebit."> "WBT's ReRAM may for example only find a use in very specific applications where the performance, price, scale, etc are all in the ideal ratio".
I assume you don't have any issues with the current publicly available performance information. The technology has also been externally validated by XTX. Price and scale will come over time, but we know that due to it being SiOx ReRam and having a simple structure the memory should be cheap. Technologies that use standard CMOS materials and simple manufacturing processing steps and tools have the highest chance to succeed in this competitive market. We also know that Weebit are in a good position in regards to partnerships and collaborations.
Based on their plans it does not seem like the memory will only find a use in very specific applications. If there were foreseeable limits or weaknesses, then I think WBT would have plans that are very different to what they currently have.
The current markets being targeted are:
- Embedded – replace existing embedded flash, eFlash, technologies, with a market estimated to be worth US$23bn. It is forecasted to reach ~US$36bn by 2030. Targeting first demonstration to customer by end of Q1 2021. Targeting first customer agreements within 3-4 months of demonstration - External, discrete– single chip replacing NOR and NAND flash technologies and market estimated to be worth US$60bn. Targeting integrated ReRAM + selector to be demonstrated by Q3 2021.
NOR flash and System On a Chip are ripe areas for new memory technologies which is why the embedded market is being targeted first then the discrete market will come into play and then the neuromorphic computing market. In regards to the matter of value, this
older Pitt Street Research report gives some more contextual information around what they are basing the latest $4.75 valuation on. The report has:
- In August 2016, Intel announced the acquisition of US-based Nervana Systems for US$408m. Nervana is developing a hardware-based neuromorphic computing solution optimised for unsupervised learning.
- In September 2016, Intel also acquired Irish company Movidius, which develops ultra-low power vision processors for computational imaging and vision processing for use in industrial and consumer electronics, including VR devices and drones, for approximately US$400m.
- In September 2016 Intel also acquired Soft Machines, a semiconductor company that develops variable instruction set computing architecture-based processors and SoC products for all performance computing platforms, for US$270m.
The revenues of all these companies at the time of acquisition ranged from zero to minuscule, but they were all valued highly due to their strategic importance and potential end use. On average they were valued at US$360m or A$536m on average. This report was on 4 November 2019 and it said that they believe longer term that WBT can achieve similar valuations in a blue-sky scenario.
In the recent report, looking at the valuation of similar companies, e.g. BRN. and given the expectation of WBT being able to sign a commercial deal for the embedded ReRAM module by mid-2021, they have valued Weebit around $750m, or $4.75 per share on a fully diluted basis.
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