4DS Memory (ASX: 4DS) (OTCPK: FRDSF) shares are up 90% today. 4DS shares are up because they’ve announced that their new memory tech seems to actually work. Work in the engineering sense that is, not in the lab sense. Yes, this all gets a bit technical and those of us not wholly au fait with the terms can get a bit lost here. But the essential point is that there are lots of things that work on a lab bench. But which are either very difficult or even impossible to transfer to a large scale production run. If you can’t make the whatever it is at scale then of course you can’t really sell it at scale either. This is the problem 4DS has been facing with its memory and the announcement today is that they seem to have overcome this. Or, to be ever more precise, that’s how the market is taking this announcement.
This might not make much sense to us non-technical types either but the potted version of what they’re doing at 4DS Memory: “4DS Memory Limited engages in the research and development of non-volatile memory technology. The company develops interface switching ReRAM products for storage class memory in mobile devices and cloud data centers. It has a collaboration agreement with the imec.” No, we didn’t think that would be terribly illuminative.
So concentrate less on the details and more on the basic problem. As 4DS points out: “In an ASX announcement released on 5 October 2022, 4DS stated that the etch process had induced damage to the crystallinity of the 4DS PCMO layer resulting in the write voltage needed to program the cell exceeding the write voltage that the circuitry of the imec megabit memory array could provide. Since prior wafers had shown successful programming of cells of the same size as present in the megabit memory array, the focus would be on
further optimizing the etch process to ensure both residue-free etching and no crystalline damage to the 4DS PCMO layer. On 27 February 2023 4DS announced it had undertaken a number of optimization changes which were incorporated into the schedule for manufacturing of the Fourth Platform Lot at imec.” Again, leave out all of the tech-speak. They’d something that worked on the lab bench. But they couldn’t manufacture it in volume. That’s clearly a problem.
4DS Memory share price from Google Finance
But now we get the news that having changed those things it all does now work: “MEGABIT SUCCESS 4DS Memory Limited (ASX:4DS) (4DS) (the Company), is pleased to inform shareholders that it has successfully completed the analysis of the Fourth Platform Lot and the results obtained are significantly better than the Board and management team at 4DS were expecting.” Which is excellent, of course it is.
All that needs to happen now is that they can line up some customers for this tech which now works. Which could be the difficult bit if we’re honest about it.
