Outshining flash: Weebit Nano Chairman Dadi Perlmutter on the future of memory

Weebit Nano Limited (ASX:WBT) Chairman Dadi Perlmutter discusses the company's innovative ReRAM technology as a superior alternative to flash memory. ReRAM has huge market potential, usable in devices from cars to smartphones.

Abbey Phillipps: I'm Abbey Phillipps with the Finance News Network, and today I'm talking with Chairman David, aka "Dadi", Perlmutter, from Weebit Nano (ASX:WBT). Weebit Nano is a leading developer of semiconductor memory technology. Dadi, welcome to the network.

Dadi Perlmutter: Thank you for having me here.

Abbey Phillipps: First up, you're a veteran of the semiconductor industry. You worked for a company that people might be aware of called Intel. Could you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Dadi Perlmutter: Well, thank you. I don't think you have enough time. I'll try to be very short. I am working in the semiconductor industry for 45 years now. I started my career, nobody knew what a semiconductor is. It was considered as some bizarre technology on the side, who will care. And in the 45 years, it became to be probably the most important. It's like semiconductors for the digital world is like oil to the industry world. You can't consider factories without oil. The world will not move, literally, without semiconductors. This is how important it is. It's a trillion-dollar business. As part of my career at Intel, I basically developed or led the development of the most important products from the Pentium, that was the charger for the PC revolution. I created products that created the cloud and data centre. I created a product that brought mobility to notebooks and Wi-Fi. Anything that people use today and live with it without even thinking and thinking that always happened and existed, it generated in the past 30 years or less. And I'm very proud and happy to be part of this.

Abbey Phillipps: Now most people are familiar with flash memory storage and SSD drives, but your ReRAM technology is a little different. Could you tell us more?

Dadi Perlmutter: The way a flash stores memory is by capturing electrons, whoever remembers what they have studied in physics in some place. Electrons are the parts of the atom that are circling around the atom. If you capture them and store them and hope that they will not move away, if you have enough electrons, then it's considered to be one. If you don't have electrons, it's a zero. You could hear that it's very tough to get it smaller because the amount of electrons being stored in a memory cell is getting smaller and smaller when you try to shrink the sizes, and there's a lot of reliability because electrons don't like to stay in one place. It's like little children. You move the eye away from them, they disappear.

What we do, our technology, is we have a very unique technology that changes the resistance of a cell. The resistance is a resistance to move electricity. If it doesn't move electricity, like you turn the switch off in your light bulb at home, no light. If you turn it on, there is light. That's what we do. That allows us to shrink the cells and make them more reliable because their ability to store information is now not dependent on this elusive particle called electron. It's easier to store. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but it's a completely different way to store the information because, at the end of the day, what you want to know, do we have a one or a zero in this digital world? And the moment you have that, you could store pictures, you could store music, you could store whatever information, whatever you want.

Abbey Phillipps: And, Dadi, what are the advantages of ReRAM over flash?

Dadi Perlmutter: You mentioned SSDs and storage and device like that. We are not focusing on this world. It is a more complex technology for us. We are focusing on what we call embedded memory, where you have a device that wants to store information into this one. The advantages are in multiple parameters. I start with the easier one to understand. It is more reliable, it stores information for longer period of time, and for non-volatility this is important. It has significantly lower power. It has ability to integrate, to be embedded into other semiconductor devices in small geometries, which means you could go to a more advanced technology and still use a memory inside your chip, which is very important when you talk about especially small devices. And the last but not least is cost. In this market especially, people expect to have lower costs so they could make more money and sell higher volume. And I think with in all those respects, ReRAM is way better than flash.

Abbey Phillipps: And could you comment on the possible applications of ReRAM? Where could it be used?

Dadi Perlmutter: It could be used everywhere. We talk to people that are planning to develop devices for the automotive car industry. So, it could be in cars. One of the big things for every device operated by battery is called power management. You can hold your phone and you think everything is wonderful, but you need to manage when it's on, when it's off to save the battery. It's a very complex device. We are talking to people to put ReRAM inside these devices. We talked about internet of things, devices that people are putting and storing. It goes into small devices that try to do artificial intelligence calculations. In order to do this calculation, there's a lot of parameters that have to be stored on a chip, and you want to make it on a chip. I always give comparisons of, you know, when I joined semiconductors, there used to be 40,000 devices on a chip. Today, there are more than 200 billion units called transistors on a chip. So, this is, you know, orders of magnitude. So, this industry is continuously looking for the ways to improve, get things better, smaller, more cost-effective, that you could do more things and less power-consuming.

Abbey Phillipps: And given there's such a wide range of applications for ReRAM, what sort of potential customers have expressed interest so far, and what are the areas you're targeting in regards to commercialisation?

Dadi Perlmutter: Well, I'm not going to talk anything about a customer before we have something to announce, but we're talking to customers in all the areas we talked about. There's a huge amount of interest to move away from flash in this market because flash is not fulfilling many of the parameters that they need for the future. And I think ReRAM is a huge opportunity, probably as a replacement to flash. It comes out to be probably the only or most significant way to replace flash in these markets.

Abbey Phillipps: And what's the future roadmap, and what should investors keep an eye out for in the next six months?

Dadi Perlmutter: You know, between the time we create the technology until it goes into your hands, let's say it takes a lot of "gates". First gate is what we call a foundry. These are the big factories that manufacture semiconductor devices. This is huge. To build a semiconductor factory could be multibillion dollars into the very top-notch, tens of billions of dollars of cost to manufacture. So these are big, and they're very conservative. They want to make sure that everything is perfect. So this is our first stage, this is the first gate we need to do. We already signed two deals with factories. So, our first job for the coming year is to sign up more foundries. And we are getting paid for signing up with a foundry. We get paid because we give them a licence fee to use our technology. And then, in parallel, we work with their customers, who are developing products. So, this is another thing that we spend big time on for the next year in order to create this. And they pay us licensing fees. And then we go into when we have a product that is sold into devices, and then we are going to get paid royalties. But that's not going to happen next year. But I think the opportunities are huge and we are working very hard. And we have an extremely experienced and talented team that do understand this business and this technology and this market. It's not easy. The customers are extremely technology-dependent. They understand technology. They'll go into every small nuance, and in some cases they need to spend money in the factories to adapt to this technology. So, this is a big deal. It's a tedious process, but I think we are progressing quite well to make sure that we do all that. But it requires patience.

Abbey Phillipps: Finally, Weebit Nano is supporting Semiconductor Australia 2024. Could you tell us why you are involved?

Dadi Perlmutter: This is a very important move because we are almost 10 years now in the Australian market, and there's a huge amount of training to explain to the Australian public what a semiconductor is. Semiconductor was brought into the light of day to most people in the past two years because of this geopolitical problems between China and the US. And most of the factories of semiconductors are in Taiwan. You could understand the anxiety of situation. The semiconductor industry has its own, as I try to explain in a very tough manner, a lot of complexities that will require first understanding of the public that are the investors, what is it? How would they measure and understand that this is a good deal or a bad deal or what do they do? If they don't understand it, they either make wrong investment decisions or don't invest at all. And even sharing together, I think this is a very complex situation. So, in the semiconductor industry, there's a big term called competition. By the way, most of the companies we don't even compete with because we are in different markets. But even if we compete, there's a lot of space to collaborate and cooperate, because a few things have to be promoted together because it's too tough for a small company or even big companies. When I worked at Intel, we used to talk to even competitors because we had to promote some regulations with respect to semiconductor manufacturing. If you don't do it together, you are all dead. If you're doing it together, you have opportunities, and now you go compete. And I hope that the Australian market will get better understanding and better success for these Australian companies, some of which are quite young and trying to break out to the world as big companies.

Abbey Phillipps: Dadi Perlmutter, thank you for your time.

Dadi Perlmutter: You're welcome and have a great day.

Ends

Click here to visit the Semiconductor Australia 2024 website.
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