I guess it's 3:30 P.M., so welcome, welcome everyone. Always good to see familiar faces again. Is there an account here? Or what is it?
Is there an account?
Oky. Or someone from the online there. [audio distortion]
What is AI ? That's a resonance, not yet under discussion. So. And AI, in my view, is probably the biggest transformation that's happening. And like any other transformation, it was enabled by semiconductors. Like in the 1980s, it was very much the personal computing. And then in the 1990s, it was the data centers and the start of the software. In the 2000s, it was the devices, the smartphones and the tablets. And now is AI. And each of one of them was created by the semiconductors' capabilities. And each time there are more capabilities of semiconductors, more things could be happening in the market. And as a result, there's huge demand to semiconductor products as a result of the big boom of the new transformation. And AI is not any difference.
Now, every time there's some more different players coming in, and usually the old players don't always know how to jump on the next big evolution, and they fade away. Some of them know how to do the transformation. Microsoft, one of the good examples, was very big in the personal computing. They kind of missed the smartphones and got themselves back into the big Internet and the, and the AI. Very good move. So, as a huge demand coming in, it's a lot of opportunities.
Coby's going to talk about more details, but the first thing that happens in semiconductors are the big data centers because the computation of what they call the AI training, you know, all these analysis people do to make sure that they understand, quite similar in a sense to the way we do learning, put a lot of energy, read a lot of material, trying to make a lot of sense of everything, trying to memorize it, something we write on a paper, something we just remember. And then what is going to be a huge, even bigger than the data center, of new devices or existing devices will come much more AI capable, because they're all what we call the inference. That now that the machine is trained, they have a lot of knowledge. Now they see something on the street and they know what to do.
Good example could be a car. There's a lot of training. They need to differentiate between what's a red light, what's a green light. Is that a cat or is that a human being? Is it crossing the road or staying on a pavement? It looks very trivial because all of us will do that on each time we drive. We do all this computation in this small engine. But it is because we have a lot of experience before. If you have never seen a pavement, never seen a red light, never seen a human being, we won't be able to make all these decisions. But this is what has to be made, and like that. And this is going to be the edge AI, which is predominantly inference, making sense for what they see, using the knowledge that they got from all these data centers.
They've done all this learning from them, and then make a decision, give you insights, and what have you. So this is a big deal, and, I think it creates a lot of opportunities. The less pleasant discussion is what's happening in Israel. I'm not gonna as I said, I'm not going to get to any political analysis. The unfortunate situation is that we in Israel are extremely well trained in such situations. This is not the first thing that happened, probably not in that scale, but nevertheless, there've been terror attacks. There've been missiles coming from Iraq by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. Many people think that the first time people worked from home, was during COVID. I operated the Israel Design Center for Intel from home, during the 1991 Gulf War. No notebooks and no phones. It was desktop, desktops and terminals.
The Internet was connected by telephone jacks. Whoever remembers what they look like, the old ones. If you laugh, you're old. If you don't know anything, I'm talking about you're young. But it is what it is. Yeah, these are the stone ages of technology. And you know, it's kind of in many senses it's getting things to work. You know, there's the people and the fighting and the army and all that. But we all know that battles are won not just by military power. It's called by what we call the civil society power, holding the economy, making commitments. You know, Intel has decided to invest and build another factory, another fab in the southern part of Israel, investment of $25 billion for the next few years.
He was interviewed by CNBC, and they asked him, "Why do you do that?" He gave a similar answer that I gave. In his experience for the more than 40 years that he's been working with the Intel factories and R&D centers in Israel, he's never been people losing a single commitment, a single day of work, no matter what happens. If you look at COVID, for example, the Israeli tech industry was probably one of the big gainers of the situation of the COVID because their ability to adapt to what's going on was probably faster and better than almost anybody else on Mother Earth, where everybody was arguing, "Should we work from home? Not work from home? Should we work at all?
What should we do?" people just move on and created new business models, giving services from remote other than flying over, became more efficient, etc. So to make the long story short, Weebit is a big part of it. You know, commitments and work have been held and sustained, as if nothing happened on the outside, a lot happens. Mood is not the wonderful thing that we would love to be. But nevertheless, the company executes through the past few months and continues to execute, not losing any single commitment, not a single work. So if Coby tells you it's because of the war, don't trust him. There's some other reasons of not hitting commitments. So this is about it. As I said, not an easy time to be at, but something we know how to deal and cope with.
We are going to take the best interest of the investors to make sure that the company continues to deliver and do whatever they are committed to do. Now Coby will tell you what he's committed to do and what he's doing.
Okay. Thank you, Dadi. And, again, thanks everyone for being here. Actually, maybe before I start, you know, in the retail meetings that we had in Perth and Melbourne, a lot of people had questions about ASX and things like that. And I guess some people might have questions now about also that article that came out, but anyway, I wanna thank Blair from the ASX who's joining us now here. And, you know, he'll be also learning about Weebit and what we do. So thanks for coming. So, you know, I'll dive in. And actually, since most of you maybe unlike Blair, but most of you already know a lot of these slides by heart, I'll be skimming through some of them. Eric, is there a way to drop this picture?
Yeah. I see you going into that.
Okay. Well, I'll keep going, but I kind of blocked part of the slide and stuff. So you know this slide. You know everything here. The market data is updated now. You know, as we move forward, the projections of the size of this market are constantly growing. No big surprise. And you know, non-volatile memory market, now it's expected to be already $165 billion. You know, the board and management team, actually, I'll just focus on the one new face that we have here. Issachar Ohana joined us as our Chief Revenue Officer. In the past, people used to call this VP sales. But basically, he's overlooking now all of the activities to generate revenues. And we have now so much going on with so many foundries and product companies, etc., that you know, until now, I was managing it with Eran.
So he's taken over. Issachar is really an amazing person, well-known in the industry. He's been doing sales of semiconductor IP for many, many years. And he actually joined CEVA in the beginning. He was part of founding CEVA, who's a DSP IP company, set up their sales from zero, built up the sales organization. Today, CEVA is selling already something like $140 million per year. So and he hit the ground running. Two weeks ago, the two of us were already at DB HiTek, talking to their management. I'll discuss that in a minute. He's already been on other business trips and talking to so many customers. And really, I mean, the volume of activity now in regards to foundries and product companies has really grown significantly already. You guys know this slide, and I won't dive into it too much.
We have so many different advantages over flash. You also know this slide about how RRAM is applicable to so many of these different market segments. So I'll, I'll dive again, and the few people and Blair, you'll excuse me as well that I'm skipping, but most of the people here know these things, can give the presentation for me. The big the big progress that we have is really moving forward through the qualifications. More recently, we received these wafers. We announced that we achieved now 150 degrees. I think this was a major milestone for us. So not qualified yet, but we're demonstrating it. You know, this is a very big thing. You know that we're qualified at 125, and we told you that's already automotive grade. Actually, you know, I'm guessing something like 80% of the automotive needs are serviced by 125.
But the critical parts of automotive and what really the automotive makers are always looking at is that extreme, and they need the 150 degrees. So I can tell you that, you know, when this was announced, more or less, a VP from one of the top three automotive companies in the world calls us up and, you know, he says, "Did you really achieve that?" And I said, "Yeah, we have it now. We're demonstrating it." He said, "Great. I can get rid of that MRAM finally. The only reason I was using MRAM is because that's the only memory that gave me 150 degrees." So, you know, that's kind of the type of reaction that we're getting. We also, you know, we're constantly pushing now the endurance level.
You know, this is already endurance of, you know, the whole module and bigger and bigger modules and showing that we can really achieve that. So really, a lot of R&D work on constantly pushing the limits and showing just how strong our technology is and how robust and, and competitive it is. You know, with DB HiTek, you know, we signed the agreement. I guess it's almost half a year now. And, we have a very, very good relationship with them. I can tell you it's night and day compared to what we have with SkyWater. These guys are so serious, and they're running forward and, and pushing and, and even doing more than we expected. So we had a great meeting with them two weeks ago. There was a, a technical summit followed by a business summit.
We already sat with them to identify kind of the profile of who would be the best, the best initial customers to approach, what's the profile of the people that would we can work with. We identified that. They sent Issachar the contacts for the sales managers in the U.S. and in China, they have a lot of customers over there as well. And, you know, he's now working with those sales managers to identify exactly which customers we wanna approach. And so this is really moving much nicer, much better. Of course, DB HiTek, the whole issue that we have with SkyWater about, you know, the IP libraries and things like that, that issue doesn't even exist here. They have so many customers and such a rich IP library. So it's really great to work already with this big company.
Actually, we came to the meeting already with a list of more than a dozen product companies that have requested to work with us, that are interested to work with us and manufacture at DB HiTek. Some of those, by the way, are people who wanted to manufacture at SkyWater and got stuck. And so now we're basically transferring them to DB HiTek. So there's really great, great work here. It feels so much better to work with them relative to SkyWater. And not to say that we're stopping the work with SkyWater. And maybe good opportunity for me to clarify what's happening also on the SkyWater front. With SkyWater, first of all, they have a big business of R&D services.
Actually, that's part of our challenge, that they put such a focus on their R&D services, at a higher priority and on the project that they are doing under the CHIPS Act with the DOD and so on. So the foundry service is kind of the lower priority for them. We're benefiting. We're actually one of their big customers on the R&D side. Now that they know how to manufacture our technology, we transferred. I kinda say the R part stays at Leti, but a lot of the D part we're doing now here because it's faster, it's cheaper, and we can really achieve more at SkyWater. So we have a great relationship with them on the R&D side. Unfortunately, we're struggling with them too on the foundry side.
We are. I still plan to bring customers who will manufacture at SkyWater, despite all of the challenges that we have there. So that's kind of just a comment because I know many people are asking, "So where are you with SkyWater?" We just announced that we.
I don't think you made the money earlier than someone else.
Well, I'll take the money. So we just announced that we now have a demo showing the GlobalFoundries chip that we manufactured. So you know that we're working with GlobalFoundries. We've actually been working with them for a long time, and we manufactured a demo chip there. I remind everyone I think most of you remember GlobalFoundries acquired whatever was left of that desktop technology. And they're actually trying to make that work in parallel to working with us. So right now, we're kinda working in parallel. That's one of the reasons why we're not getting top priority. Things are taking longer in respect to GlobalFoundries. But the good news is the first chips that came out, they are operational. They're showing good signs. And now we have them at the point where we can actually demonstrate them.
the beginning of April, in 2 to 3 weeks, there's going to be a very big conference in Germany, the Embedded World Conference. That's gonna be the biggest activity for Weebit on the marketing side this year. Many companies have already approached us even before we made the announcement. They knew that we have the GlobalFoundries chips. They were interested in them, what's happening. So we already have almost a full schedule in our demo booth for this. We're gonna have even; we're gonna take more than one demo system cause we can already see we're gonna be doing some parallel demos over there. It's really exciting for us. You know, GlobalFoundries haven't made a formal decision to work with Weebit. They're still looking at both options of, you know, whatever they have from Adesto and us.
And I mean, they’ll need to decide if they wanna use one, the other, both. There’s no contradiction in using both, right? I think you guys already know that foundries don’t have a problem to have many multiple offerings in the same space. So we’re working with them, making progress. By the way, it may be a good place to point out. I think you remember, a few years ago, everyone was asking me about the competitive landscape. At the time, I was saying there are four smaller companies that are developing RRAM. And I mentioned Adesto. I mentioned Crossbar and Weebit and 4DS. So Adesto was acquired, as you know ,was acquired by Dialog, was acquired by Renesas. Whatever was left is now in the hands of GlobalFoundries. We benefited. We have a couple of people from there.
One of the co-founders of Adesto, actually, Ishai, you know, our CTO, came from Adesto. I can tell you now that Crossbar again, they basically ran out of money. The Chinese government got their hands over this. They're basically funding whatever is left of Crossbar. We don't know really. I mean, they haven't been making anything public for a long time now. So, we don't know where things stand there. Obviously, most people don't wanna touch anything that the Chinese government is involved in. We're happy that one of the co-founders of Crossbar is now working for Weebit as well. So that kinda shows you how the industry is, is evolving. And, you know, so that's, that's more or less, where we're at. And, kinda looking at, at moving forward and you know, the semiconductor space, is gonna be more than $1 trillion very soon.
As all of you know, memory is the discrete memory is second only to logic. Embedded memory is actually relevant to all of these domains. I want to point out specifically, you know, analog and sensors. You can see analog itself is number three already. For me, they're basically the same. You know, it's, it's basically one domain of $100+ billion. The reason why I'm pointing them out is in DB HiTek, in DB HiTek, the process that we're using is 130nm BCD. BCD basically indicates that it's tailored for its, you know, the strong spot is actually analog and sensors. So that's the domain that DB HiTek is focused on and what we are, what we're working with them on. You know, sensors. I guess you can understand what sensors are. The world is so full of sensors.
Again, you know, just as an anecdote, I think I started three or four years ago. I gave the example that the advanced cars have 100 semiconductor components in them. Today, I think the number is already more than 1,000. I think it's 1,300 now. So you can see how it's growing exponentially. And the key part is all the sensors that you have. I mean, the cars are just full of sensors. Anywhere you touch the handle, they open the door, the lock. You have all the sensors around sensing the lanes and everything and a million other things. So, on the analog side, a key part behind this is what's called PMIC or power management. Today, almost everything is working on batteries charged. You have, you know, these boxes that are on the cables, that connect to charging, the laptops and things.
That's power management. Power management is really evolving rapidly. It's not just charging. It's, you know, it needs to do a smart charging. Sometimes it charges faster. Sometimes it charges slower, etc., etc. In the past, they always did it on a separate chip. They had one chip for power management, another chip for the MCU, for the microcontroller. And they would, you know, be either together in one way or another in the package. Everyone wants to put them on one chip. The challenge was with flash that flash technology is front-end of line. It actually sits right next to the design of the power management or the analog. And you can't ignore the fact that you have flash next to you. You can't do the most optimal analog design when there's a flash next to you. Our technology, as you know, is back-end of line.
It actually comes on top of the design. So they don't give a damn about the RRAM. They can do the most optimal design. There's a lot of activity now in the power management domain. We have a lot of other advantages beyond what I just said. We, you know, we're lower voltage and other things that really enable the power management to get a lot of benefits from RRAM. And a lot of the customers that we're talking to, especially since our focus right now is on DB HiTek, is in that domain. I'll skip this slide so you know that we're going down. I mean, you know, we reached now a demo on 22nm.
We've already demonstrated to some of the foundries that we can work on what's called FinFET technology, which is actually in the teens, and continuing to push forward also on this, right, looking forward on this front and looking at how we can progress there. You guys know this slide and how RRAM is really taking over. I mean, the example that I gave on the automotive is something that we're seeing now really across the board. I've had many meetings. Consumer companies, I can say pretty much, are vetoing MRAM, okay? They are just saying, you know, now that there are more and more horror stories. I don't know if I gave you the example. The most recent one that I heard about a company that in their smartwatch, they put a system to open door locks.
And turns out the door locks have a lot of magnets in them. And over time, the memory the MRAM was erased. So MRAM is still a good technology. There are domains where it will continue to be used. They have very high endurance. But it's pretty obvious now and we're getting this message more and more from the industry that people are looking at RRAM. It's cheaper. It's simpler. It goes straight into the fab. You don't need a separate manufacturing facility. And people are really looking forward to this. So yeah, this number, I believe, is very correct. And, you know, today, more and more people are asking. Obviously, now suddenly everyone knows who NVIDIA is. It's so funny, you know? I mean, but, NVIDIA is obviously a very important company. And they've been doing amazing things on the AI front.
How did that skip over here? So, you know, just the applications of, of RRAM on the AI front, you know, there are many of them. We've been talking in the past a lot about, neuromorphic computing. I remind you that, our RRAM operates I mean, a RRAM cell basically operates like a synapse in your brain. And we are continuing that R&D activity. There are many multiple, let's say, R&D centers that are researching neuromorphic, that are using our RRAM as the basis for their research. And, you know, it still has many years of, of R&D, but, there's a good process progress there. But I mean, you can see here this transformation is happening now. I talked about it on the PMIC front, but it's happening across the board now. People used to have flash as an external memory.
They would have to load it into the SRAM and then basically work reading from the SRAM. SRAM is a volatile memory. Today, more and more are actually taking the RRAM and putting it instead of the SRAM. They don't need an external non-volatile. They already have it built in, and they can use it inside their chips. So this transformation is, is happening already quite a bit. And this one will happen in the future. But, you know, just to give you some of the advantages when we're talking about AI and Dadi was talking about the edge AI, you know, all of these different, chips in, in appliances, whatever you wanna call them, sensors that are all over the place, you know, they are operating most commonly on some sort of battery or even ambient, energy ambient.
They really, it's amazing how they just get energy out of thin air. And basically, they do something small, and they go right back to sleep. I mean, they don't have enough energy to do anything big. And they need a memory which is very fast and low power. And they wake up. Dadi today gave someone the example of a sensor that's sitting in the middle of a field and sensing the humidity of the ground. And, you know, it wakes up, you know, registers what the humidity is. It needs a memory where it can go quickly, write something, finish. And then later on, it might compile something, do some computation, and send it off. That's actually not AI.
But, you know, you have many of these devices which need to do inference, you know, maybe cameras that are recognizing faces of people, doing some computation. You don't want to send everything to the cloud all the time, to the big data centers because that's a lot of power. That's, that doesn't make sense. So you want the edge device to be able to do a lot of the, you know, the initial computation, kind of do the initial digestion, and then, you know, send only a small packet, every once in a while, to the cloud. So all of that, you know, RRAM really enables it. And, you know, if you think of, of an autonomous vehicle, someone jumps in front of the car, you want to recognize it as fast as possible, react as fast as possible.
And obviously, you know, since the vehicle is driving on battery, you wanna also have it as low power as possible. So you can start imagining how in so many different domains, you have RRAM advantages moving to the AI revolution. We talked about this already in the past. And I think it's always important to remember. You know, Weebit today is really focused on getting foundries on board. This is really the most important activity. You know, getting DB HiTek on board has been important because, you know, behind each one of these companies, behind each one of these foundries, you have hundreds of customers. And each one of them has multiple products. And once you have a foundry on board, all of these companies can go and manufacture there and embed our RRAM.
So yes, I know a lot of you and a lot of the people that I meet, you know, there's a sense of, I don't know if to call it frustration or anticipation or whatever. But it takes a long time to get to the point where these product companies are actually using our RRAM and getting to mass production. And we have, you know, royalties from massive sales, etc. But once we sign an agreement if you remember, we were talking about DB HiTek. You know, once we sign an agreement with DB HiTek, you know these guys don't do it if they're not planning to invest in it. And they invest in it because they know that their customer base wants it. And we're working with them now. And you know that their customer base will be exposed to it.
And their customers want it. And they will be designing it in. So yes, excuse me. Did I turn this thing off? Oh, it's okay. So you need to go through transferring the technology to DB HiTek, what we're doing now. And once that's done, we'll need to tape out. And it takes about half a year until we'll get the silicon back that we can actually go and test and get to the point where we're qualifying and, you know, another roughly half year until we finally qualify it and so on. And then so I mean, it's a long process. And obviously, with our customers, once the customers decide to come on board I mean, normally, they just wanna come on board after qualification.
But as you can understand, DB HiTek and us, we're working together to pull those customers early. And, you know, those customers will need roughly a year to do the design and then another, another half year to manufacture the prototypes and test them and so on. It does take time. It is frustrating that it takes so long. I go crazy with it. I'm in the wrong industry because I'm an impatient person. But, you know, this is semiconductors. But you know, I mean, with a high level of confidence that as soon as a company like DB HiTek signs with us, we will end up seeing those royalties later on. I won't even go through the business model since we've gone through it so many times in different versions. And, you know, I'll focus on the important and interesting things.
So you have here a list of the top 10 foundries and the top 10 IDMs. I remind you, IDMs are companies that have their own fabs. A few companies in the world that actually have their own fabs and manufacture for themselves. You know, you know that we have an agreement with DB HiTek. You know that we're working with GlobalFoundries. And I said in the past, and I'll actually say it even stronger now, we are now making very good progress with the majority of the companies on the foundry list and the IDM list. So, someone in Melbourne actually ended up asking me, "So are you feeling better even now than you did before?" You also said before that you're working with the majority.
Yes, we have a lot more happening now than even half a year ago, more evaluations ongoing, making progress there in negotiations already with some of these guys. There's a lot happening. I know that from the outside, you look at, at Weebit, and you say, "Hasn't been used for so long. And, and, you know, this company probably fell asleep or something, right? We're working like crazy." I, and I don't know what to say beyond it just takes time. And, and I know it's frustrating to hear it from me all the time. But it is, we are making very good progress there. So, you know, the, the plans for, for, for the future, for this year, we are the revenue side, I said it before. I'll say it again.
You know, the, the licensing, the license fees are not paid upfront with DB HiTek or SkyWater. You know, these are agreements where we need to meet milestones. And payments are made based on milestones. And you'll see a trickle of payments coming in this year. Nothing big, nothing. I don't wanna set up any big expectations. The key thing is, you know, that this is gonna lead to more. We're pushing hard on all of these fronts and qualification and fab partners, customer partners, etc. And I think really the key point to always remind everyone and maybe even emphasize now more than ever, you know, in order to do RRAM, you really need to have very strong teams in multiple domains. There's the device side, which is the physics part of things.
There's the process, which is basically chemistry, how you manufacture this, analog, which means, you know, all of the circuitry that controls the writing into the memory, okay? It's actually much, much smarter than anyone thinks because, in order to achieve higher endurance, in order to really get the maximum out of the memory, you need to know how to do these things in the smartest way. We have an amazing team that's actually generating patents on, on just how you write into the memory in order to achieve, you know, the, the law the bigger endurance and, and so on. You know, you, you don't just want to write into a bit with the maximum voltage upfront, and you wear it out so fast. You wanna go and, and methodically try with, you know, lower voltages, then see if it's, it's working.
You know, you see that the bit already, you wanna write a one into the bit. And it already has a one. So no sense in writing into it. And these are the simplest things. I won't go into the very elaborate things that we do in order to really minimize power, minimize the, basically maximize the endurance and so on, but really a lot of activity here. And then the digital design, which is basically interfacing the small unit to the rest of the world. If you remember, we talk about the fact that these are systems on a chip. You know, you have a whole system on a single chip. There's the core that the customer designs themselves. That's the heart of the system.
And then all of the periphery, you know, the Wi-Fi interface, HDMI interface, sensors, and processor and memory are IP modules that come around it. And they need to make everything fit in that puzzle. So customers will come to us and say, "Hey, on the digital side, we want the interface to be a little different. We want it to look like that. We want to have this level of voltage or that level of leakage or all kinds of things like that." So there's a lot of work here. You need to have really very strong teams on all of these fronts. And basically, you know, the teams need to work very closely together, under a very focused management in order to really make progress. Remember, RRAM is not a simple technology to develop. And you need that focus.
At Weebit, we have it. At Weebit, we have, you know, now the last count that I made, we have 13 PhDs in chemistry and physics. You know, most of them, by the way, did their PhD on RRAM. It's amazing. You know, these guys are really focused there. And it's a great team. We have an amazing analog design team, which is, as I said, generating patents on just how you can write more efficiently to the memory. We have the digital design team, which, you know, they're very experienced. These guys, by the way, from day one, the very first memory modules that we did, they made sure that it's written in a very configurable, parameterized way and so on, anticipating that we will have a lot of customers. And we will want to automate things.
And we will wanna have a memory compiler at a certain point. So we're everything is already set up for that. Once we have many customers, we'll start working on that memory compiler. And, and this whole system, I can tell you that I honestly cannot see any other company in the world today that has anything near what we have here. I mean, we really got what it takes. And I don't believe that there is any other team in the world that has this kind of team, this kind of infrastructure. I mean, TSMC and UMC that have RRAM solutions today, they have amazing device and, and process teams. Of course, you know, that's their expertise. They're fabs, right? They're foundries. But their focus is manufacturing wafers and selling wafers, right? They make money off of selling wafers.
The reason that they have RRAM is because they want to enable their customers, right? They want to have that IP library, so the customers that wanna manufacture will have it. They don't have a focus on this side, on analog and digital. They don't have big advanced design teams, definitely not focused on the RRAM side. And that's why and I think I told you already, we've had customers come to us and say, "We wanted to use the TSMC RRAM." And, you know, they have a certain options, but that's it. They won't really tailor them for us like, you know, like we can do for them. And as I said, I think that you'd go to the TSMC CEO, and you'd ask him, "Do you, you know, what about your RRAM?" I don't think he even knows they have RRAM.
You know, it's not his big focus. And that's why I think Weebit has what it takes. And Weebit has great potential now, the market situation and where we are. And, so I'm, I'm extremely bullish about where we are in the future. Yes, it's frustrating. It's taking us time. But, you know, I think everything shows that we're in the right direction. So, I think that's it. Long, long discussion. I, I talk a lot, I know. But now I can open it up for you guys for some questions.
We just need to use the microphone because we've got some people online. Any questions from the room?
Hi, Coby. Thanks for that. I just wanna go back to the qualification on the 150 degrees. In the past, you've talked about that timeline being quite defined in terms of how many hours to bake. Is that timeline in process now? And is that happening at SkyWater, or is that something that's happening at, Leti?
No. It's actually happening in our offices. We have now a big lab already set up, so that we do the qualification process ourselves. We haven't actually, you know, formally started the 150-degree qualification. First of all, the higher the temperature, the longer the qualification because you need to leave the wafers, the chips in the oven for a longer period. And it's even more testing.
So, you know, it's even more frustrating how much time you need to wait. But right now, the big focus of Weebit is making DB HiTek, you know, moving forward as fast as we can on that side, finishing as much testing as we can on GlobalFoundries, and really showing because there are so many other companies and other foundries that are actually waiting to see the results of GlobalFoundries, in order to make the next step. So it's really important for us to show good results there. So the 150, you know, it's a matter of priorities. It's gonna happen, but it's just going to take us a little bit more time.
So questions here or by the way, people that are on online, I know you 120 people there. If you have questions, please answer them in the chat box, not in the Q&A. I think you said right, in the chat box. So, so.
There is one question there. I will remind you, we've got someone from the ASX here, just around, whether.
Well, I think it's good for him to hear the questions, right? I mean, Blair, that's one of the reasons he's here, right?
It was just whether there's any intentions to list on the NASDAQ at some stage soon and what that means for Weebit shareholders.
Okay. So I think first thing, I've said it many times. And unlike what was written in that article, you know, I think at the end of the day, we've had our issues with ASX. And yesterday, we discussed it with Blair. But the bottom line is ASX has been good to us. I mean, Australia, let's say, being listed on ASX has been good to us. When we needed money, we did raise this. Last year, we raised AUD 60 million.
So, you know, the bottom line is it's okay. It's good. The natural home for Weebit is NASDAQ. I mean, normally, you'd expect companies like Weebit to be listed on NASDAQ. At this point, I think Australia and I mean, I love meeting you guys. So I, I love the, the reason to come out here and everything. Right now, we're here. We're happy with, with ASX. What will happen in the future, if, when, whatever, you know, the board will need to discuss it and decide. But at this point, there isn't an immediate intention to do anything like that.
Just.
Yeah. Go ahead.
The Chairman of the Board. The issue of delisting never came up on the board. It's not going to be a topic we will discuss anytime soon. As Coby mentioned, we'll see what should happen. That's not on our agenda at any time in the foreseeable future. I think our job is to make sure that it works as well as possible with the ASX and ASIC and abiding the rules and making it.
Yeah. Again, we had a good meeting yesterday. I'm glad for that. Yeah. Any other questions there?
There aren't any online.
Okay.
I'll be good. Thank you.
Yep.
Hey, guys. How you doing? Probably the only final thing for clarification is, as we know that there's some uncertainty on the timelines when you bring on the next fabs because you've got all the communications going back and forth. Once you say get a second or third fab on, is your expectation that their relationship will build some initial customers straight away, that you'll go into NREs straight away? Or do you think there'll still be another delay for that to see? Because you've obviously gotta qualify for that fab as well.
Mm-hmm.
The customers will come after the qualification, or do you think you'll have maybe some initial agreements quite quickly after those fabs?
So I'll actually give a couple of answers here, to this. The simple answer, first of all, is every new fab actually, every new process, even in the same fab, when we move to another process and we start working, we need to do that technology transfer. We need to do, you know, manufacturing, the prototype, and qualification and all. And in general, as a general statement, customers normally or the product companies, to be exact, they normally, like anyone, try to be risk-averse and say, "Let's wait till we see it qualified. We know we're guaranteed. Everything's okay." We are pulling them, you know, up and saying, "Hey, guys. It takes you a whole year to do that design. No sense in you waiting until qualification and only then starting. You can already see we're qualified at Leti, which basically Leti uses ST Micro wafers.
So that's one of the big foundries here. You know, we're already qualified on those wafers. We're already qualified at SkyWater. We're now working with DB HiTek. The more foundries we have on board, the more qualifications we'll do, the more confidence customers will have upfront that, you know, they can actually engage earlier. You know, how much earlier and whatever. You know, we'll be pushing, obviously, to do that more and more. By the way, one of the reasons to work with an IDM is the fact that, by definition, they are their own customers. So as soon as you sign with an IDM, you have a customer signed up. And that way, the IDM will actually start doing the design in parallel to the technology transfer. And that's why we really like the idea of working with IDMs, and we're trying to push them.
At a higher level, I think I wanna help you understand this process. I guess probably none of you read the book that's called Crossing the Chasm. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to work with new tech companies. It's from. It's the Bible of startups, a book by Geoffrey Moore. It defines the process of a new technology and how it gets out to market. You know, you start off with this crazy idea that everyone thinks you're totally insane and whatever. You manage to get some geeks to start playing with it. And you know, finally, you know, you're going, and you have a product in your hand, and you're so excited, and you rush outside to start selling it. Oops. You know, there's this chasm down there, and the customers are on the other side.
And what am I gonna do? You know, and, and you go through this very, very frustrating period of just trying to get those customers to understand that you have something really valuable. And you end up finally finding someone. Normally, it's not the leaders. It's, it's someone who's following it, who wants to become the leader, and is willing to take that added risk with a new technology because the, the potential value that they see now is very big. And so that DB HiTek, for example, really wants to jump up from number 10 to, to a higher level and, and so on. You get that first one. You finally start getting it going. Someone else already sees it and says, "Oh, wow. You know, it's there's SkyWater. There's DB HiTek." It becomes a little bit easier to, to actually sign the next one.
As you can see, we're still working very hard. But once you sign one or two and this is what the book defines as the bowling alley they say, you knock down one pin, and then, you know, it makes another pin fall. And then, you know, you start knocking down the second, the third, the fourth. As you know, it becomes each one makes it easier to get the next one. And you know, once we'll have another one, two, three foundries signed up, you know, suddenly, you get to the point today, everyone calls it FOMO, right? Everyone starts looking around saying, "Oh, my God. We're gonna be left behind." And all of a sudden, everyone starts jumping on this. And the book defines it as getting inside the tornado.
And I can tell you guys, I've been in the tornado already in the past at least a couple of times. It's an amazing sensation. It's something crazy. And at Weebit, I can finally see the tornado out there. I can already see it. It's there. And it's coming. And we're working hard. I can't guarantee anything. I can't promise anything. But it's, you know, I can see it building now. And it's taking time. And I know it's frustrating. But I really see, you know, the pins starting to fall. And I can see how we're making the progress with the foundries. And, you know, that's basically where we are, so.
Follow on from there, Coby, is how many fabs and IDMs can Weebit work with in parallel?
That's a very good question. We've been very cautious in growing the team. You know, one of the things that I don't want to do is hire too many people too early and burn cash too fast. We've been growing the team in a very controlled manner. Now that we have more activity, we've hired a few more. The team knows how to work hard and really work in an optimal way that we can have multiple foundries or IDMs working with us.
We're now actually. This is the big challenge that the team has. The management team is struggling now, you know, how do we deal with so many additional evaluations that we have with foundries that have kicked off in the last few months and that we need to deal with. But, you know, that's. I love this problem. Finally, you know, we have this very good problem, and we're pushing forward there.
Right. A couple of questions coming through just around discrete memory, where you're at with that and sort of, I guess, what the outlook is for that part of the business.
So, you know, the work is continuing all the time. There is actually, we're looking at even more than one option for a different selector. So there's, there's constantly this research going on, even more than research. It is, as you can imagine, it is lower priority right now. We have to focus on getting these agreements with foundries done. We have to focus on all of these evaluations and, and discussions with the foundries and negotiations and so on. So it's lower priority, but it's definitely happening.
All the questions in the room.
Coby, I'd say.
Yeah.
Let's ask about [audio distortion]
Naomi Simson.
Yeah.
Has she been a good fit for Weebit, and has she done much thus far? Well, we're very happy. You know, she has a lot of experience.
Let's get this one.
Yeah. Here. That's actually that is job. That's.
I think she is. And she will definitely become more. It's a training exercise. The big risk on any company, definitely for board of directors, is that you bring people that look like you, think like you, and know exactly what you know. I think it's dangerous to do that. Bringing people that in with different background and different knowledge is, the start is always complex because both sides have to learn. But so far, we are quite happy with the contribution, with the ability to ask tough questions. Coming from a different angle is always useful and good for growth. But we'll see. I mean, she just started a few months ago, too early to give any grades. But I think we are off to a very good start.
Thank you.
Coby, another question online. How much of the MRAM market do you think Weebit can erode?
You know, I think I don't wanna make a speculation. You know, there's definitely, you know, that atmosphere that people are telling us they wanna move away from MRAM. Now, MRAM will always be around. You know, well, MRAM has some advantages, especially I mean, the key advantage is it has higher endurance than what RRAM has. And some applications need that. Some applications don't end up in, in magnetic, areas. And, and actually, t hat magnetic field issue isn't an issue for them. So I do expect MRAM to be around. There's room for a lot of different types of non-volatile memory technologies.
You know, as we sometimes remind people, there's still a lot of usage of even magnetic tapes and, and rotating disks out there. It's not just all flash even. So, you know, flash will stick around for a long time. In some places, it'll take many years until, you know, slowly, we'll take over MRAM. You can see the projections. I mean, MRAM today is practically all of the wafers of emerging memories. And now, we already see the projections. So it'll happen.
One comment, as I've done these things for many times. The real good question is not how we will replace MRAM because MRAM doesn't have a huge business as well. I think the job is that we have a unique technology, and the main thing is the new usages, the new possibilities. That's something that we work. And I think that's the focus. So if we just end up replacing MRAM in the next few years, I don't think we that we are going to be happy, not you as an investor, not we as people that manage the company. There might be some occasions that it's going to be replaced, some not. There are much more eFlash, embedded flash companies that I think we have better chances to replace.
I bet there's going to be new opportunities that people, you know, the thing that I love about technology, that I build something, and I think that's going to be the usage model, is always the smart person that comes in and say, "Oh, I could use it in a completely different manner. That may be even more successful than the thing you started." And I've seen it times and again. And I think the more we learn and we establish the technology, we get customers in the market, and people start seeing that, it will come. And that's part of the work that we do. And I think we have a very good team to be able to go and enable that in the market.
Just a couple of questions about the GlobalFoundries update. Number one, is there any contractual arrangement with GlobalFoundries? And when do you expect qualification to start on the 22nm chip with GlobalFoundries?
So, right now, we have a basic agreement for manufacturing with GlobalFoundries. They are not, we don't have a licensing agreement with them. I think it's important to make sure that the facts are straight. We are working together. We have a lot of discussions. We will take these wafers now, these chips, the demo chips, and we will start qualification. So in any case, we are going to be moving to the next step. And we are pushing GlobalFoundries to actually engage formally and sign a license agreement. And, you know, that's ongoing work.
Just with the 150-degree qualification, will DB HiTek have to do their own qualification for the 150 degrees?
So the 150 degrees obviously have not been done on DB HiTek wafers because those don't exist yet. We've been doing them on other wafers. In general, qualification, in most of the cases, I believe, will be done in our lab. We set up a very advanced lab. Actually, we had people from some of the big foundries visit us. And they were there like, "Oh, my God. You have even better stuff than we have." You know, so it was pretty nice to see how impressed they were with Weebit. So yeah.
There seems to be some confusion. So let me explain what it is. You qualify in a specific factory. It has to be done. Each factory enabled. By the way, it's Intel. You move from one factory A to factory B, you have to go through qualification because, by the way, in a car industry, you move from one manufacturing line to another one, people have to test it. You develop a new car. Even at the same factory, you have to be qualified. That's the way business run in any manufacturing, semiconductors anyway, simple. So the fact that we do the qualification in our lab on the 150, we'll have to do it for DB HiTek if you want people who want to have 150 degrees DB HiTek.
We'll have to go through this one, run the wafers in DB HiTek, and do them in our lab, on their lab. It doesn't matter. It's tactical decision. We are going to move to another company. The customer will want to have a 150. We'll have to go through this 150. It's ugly. I wish it wasn't that way. Eventually, at the end of the day, the reason you go through this Via Dolorosa is very simple. When you buy a product, it doesn't matter what it is. You don't want your kind of components over here start failing a year later because it doesn't meet the requirements. So this huge qualifications is so important to make sure that you assure the quality and reliability. Again, every new process technology, you have to go there. You move to 130 to 45, you have to do it.
It's a process. Now, Coby is right. The moment you do it multiple times, you get the experience. You know what to do. You know how to get it ready for that. It's going to get faster. But since nine women cannot make a child in one month, you have to go through the full process. And that's what it is. And that's the nature. I think it's very important that people understand that this is the way of life. And this has to be done. The fact that we have this capability in-house is a huge achievement and a world of progress because you are now not dependent on someone else to go do the work. You could define your priorities based on your goals and what you wanna do.
If they run the wafers, we could take them off to our lab and do whatever job. The fact that they come and visit our labs, they have to qualify our labs because they want to make sure that whatever we do meets their standards because the person that owns the quality and reliability of the product coming out of the fab is the fab, not, not, Weebit. So it's a complex process. We are going through this one. It's always harder and longer the first time you do that. But the moment a big foundry comes in and say, "I qualify your lab," it's going to be easier for the next foundry to come in and qualify the lab. And it's a process. They want to measure that to see that the same results appear on our lab and the other lab. It's an important one.
It's very critical. Not everybody knows how to do that. The fact that we know how to do that is a huge benefit to our ability to go expand. In other talks, we said that we are now setting the foundations for the ramp of Weebit. It takes time. I don't think we want to promise everything. If you put the foundation right, and I believe you have the right thing to put the foundation right, then the ramp later on is going to be way smoother. Things will work. You'd want to deal with all the problems, all the issues now, other than in two years when people start ramping and all kind of problems come back.
Thanks, Dadi. Out of time. We'll get one last question in, which has come through. First, there was a thank you to Coby and Dadi for their dedication and efforts. But just a question around the current situation in Israel and whether that's led to any hesitancy with engagement on the part of potential customers or partners.
Not at all. I mean, you know, I think the customers realize we're meeting schedules. We're moving forward. I actually haven't had beyond people, of course, expressing empathy and so on, we haven't had any discussions about that with any customer. Okay. I guess, yeah. That's right. It's my traditional selfie. So, just a second. Yeah. That's, let's see. Put it like that. And let's get as many of you in there. And, actually, I need to move over here. And then I can get more of you. So there we go. Okay. Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate you coming as always. It's always great to see you. And thanks to all the people that are online. And thanks, Blair. Okay. And yeah. There's some good stuff back there. So, you're welcome to enjoy it.
Thank you, Coby.