AXE CEO Choucair has 2 things on his mind this past year -...

AXE CEO Choucair has 2 things on his mind this past year - protecting IP and forging new supply chains for nanotechnology. I think this is why -

The semiconductor supply chain is a major choke point for innovators. Tier 1 foundries control the economics of projects completely. You either sign over your IP to them or you don't get favourable terms. Will have to spend months and years trying to negotiate price points, IP sharing, access to clients that Tier 1s have. Tier 1s are all silicon-based. Running out of room to miniaturise. Moore's law has been kept at bay by re arranging the furniture on chips. But it will hit another wall.

He wants to be a part of disrupting silicon. This means 2D graphene that allows for shrinking that AXE keeps demonstrating. The graphene industry is in the maturing stages of quality control and batch manufacturing, which AXE has entered into with a range of graphene foundries. And these graphene foundries, like Applied Nanolayers often being start ups themselves, it's a much more level playing field. When we partner with them, it is a lot more equitable. These are the 'strategic' partnerships that Mo talks about. Forming a symbiotic supply chain that can become a global disruptor of the silicon semiconductor industry. When Mo says supply chains don't exist yet and we have to form them, he is talking about a new industry not based on silicon primarily.

What this implies for the 12CQ is hard to say - currently the strategy is still to embed qubit material in silicon. Even here, AXE has shrunk traditional CMOS tech into a newly designed BiCMOS. All the componentry has to be orders of magnitude smaller in scale. If the goal is to have 12CQs in devices like smartphones, then there's no other option than fabs like TSMC for the time being. But if the defence industry can use 12CQ, we have another option to at least find bespoke ways to scale down that Tier 1s may not still be equipped to handle.

For the bio chip the path is a lot more in the hands of new and next generation foundries and AXE, being a fabrication specialist at sub 10nm scales is innovating new ways to squeeze more onto wafers.

AXE is not trying to change the rules of the game, but change the game. How many more quarters of funding does AXE have? Enough time to demonstrate to our government that we can also start backing the shift to a new class of chip manufacture?