Weebit Nano Limited (WBT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So welcome, everyone. Always good to see familiar faces again. Is there an echo here? Or what is it? Okay. While someone from the online. So we have -- I don't know how many people online but we have 150 registered. So welcome also. [Technical Difficulty]

In fact, [indiscernible].

Okay. Apologies, we're not yet under discussion. So -- and AI in my view is probably the biggest transformation that is happening. And like any other transformation, it was enabled by semiconductors. Like in the '80s, it was very much personal computing. And then in the '90s, it was the data centers and [indiscernible]. 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 thing could be happen 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 somewhat different players coming in. And usually, they all 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 is one of the good examples. It was very big in a personal computing. They kind of missed the smartphones and get themselves back into the big Internet and the AI, very good move. So it's a huge demand coming in, there's lots of opportunities. Coby's going to talk about more details. But the first thing that happens in semiconductors and the big data centers as the computation of what we call the AI training, all these analysis that people do to make sure that they understand. Quite similar in a sense to the way we do learning with a lot of energy, read a lot of material, trying to make a lot of sense of everything, try to memorize it, something we write on the paper, something we just remember. And then -- but it's 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 all what we call the inference. But now that the machine is trained, they have a lot of knowledge, now they see something on the street and they're able to do. A good example could be a car. There's a lot of training. They need to differentiate between what's the red light, what's a green light, is that a cat or 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 red light, never seen a human being, we wouldn't be able to make all these decisions, but this is it have to be made on like that. And this is going to be the Edge AI, which is predominantly influence, 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. On the last [ pleasant ] discussion is what's happening in Israel. 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, we've been terror attacks. We've been missiles coming from Iraq by Saddam Hussein in the '90s. Many people think that the first time people work from home was during COVID. I operated the Israel Design Center for Intel from home during the 1991 Gulf War. No notebooks and not phones. It was desktops and terminals and the internet was connected by telephone jacks, whoever remembers what they look like, the old ones. If you love your old, if you don't know anything, I'm talking about your young. But it is what it is. These are the stone ages of technology. And it's kind of -- in many senses, it's getting things to work. There's people in the fighting and the army on that, but we all know that battles are won not just by military power, what we call the civil society power, holding the economy, making commitments and, 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. And he was interviewed by CNBC and they asked him, why do you do that? And he gave a similar answer that I get. In his experience for the more than 40 years that we've been working with the Intel factories and R&D Centers in Israel. He has never been people losing a single commitment, a single day of work no matter what happens. And 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, right? Everybody was arguing, should we work from home, not work from home, should we work at all? What should we do? People just moved on and created new business models giving services from remote other than flying over, became more efficient, et cetera. So to make the long story short, Weebit is a big part of it, commitments and work have been held and sustained as if nothing happened on the outside. What happens, mood is not the wonderful thing that would love to be. But nevertheless, the company executed through the past few months and continue to execute not losing any single commitment, not a single one. So if probably tells it's because of the war, don't trust it, there is some other reasons of not hitting commitments. So this is about it. As I said, not an easy time to be it, but something we know how to deal and cope with, and we are going to take the best interest of investors to make sure that the company continues to deliver and do that's needed to do. Now Coby will tell you what he is committed to do and what he is....

Okay. Thank you, Dadi. And again, thanks, everyone, for being here. Actually, maybe before I start on the retail meetings that we had in Paris and Melbourne, a lot of people had questions about ASX and things like that. And I guess some people might have questions now, but also that article that came out that -- but anyway, I want to thank Blair from the ASX who's joining us now here, and he'll be also learning about Weebit what we do. So thanks for coming. So 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. Erik is there a way to drop this picture?

Yes, I think. I'll do that.

Okay. Okay. Well, I'll keep going but kind of blocks part of the slide and stuff. So you know this slide, you know everything here. The market data is updated now. As we move forward, the projections of the size of this market are constantly growing, no big surprise. And non-volatile memory market, now it's expected to be already $165 billion. The Board and the management team, actually, I'll just focus on the one you 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 end product companies, et cetera, that 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 IT company, set up their sales from 0, built up the sales organization. Today, CEVA is selling already something like USD 140 million per year. So -- and he hit the ground running 2 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 regard 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. And you also know this slide about how ReRAM is applicable to so many of these different market segments. So I'll dive again. And the few people, and Blair you 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 progress that we have is really moving forward through the qualifications. More recently, we are using these wafers and we announced that we achieved now 150 degrees. I think this was a major milestone for us, not qualified yet, but we're demonstrating it. This is a very big thing. You know that we're qualified at 125 degrees, and we told you that's already automotive grade. And actually, I'm guessing something like 80% of the automotive needs are served by 125 degrees, 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 when this was announced, more or less, a VP from one of the top three automotive companies in the world calls us up and he says, did you really achieve that? And I said, yes, 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 that's kind of the type of reaction that we're getting. We also -- we're constantly pushing out the endurance level. This is already endurance of 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 competitive it is. With DB HiTek, we signed that 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 pushing and even doing more than we expected. So we had a great meeting with them 2 weeks ago. There was a technical summit followed by a business summit. And we already set with them to identify kind of the profile of who would be 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 he's now working with those sales managers to identify exactly which customers we want to approach. And so this is really moving much nicer, much better. Of course, DB HiTek, the whole issue that we have with SkyWater about the IP libraries and things like that, that's -- 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 work here. It feels so much better to work with them relative to SkyWater. Not to say that we're stopping the work with SkyWater and maybe a 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 projects that they are doing under the CHIPS Act with the DOB and so on. So the foundry services is kind of the lower priority for them. We're benefiting. We're actually one of the big customers on the R&D side. Now that they know how to manufacture our technology, we transferred -- I kind of say that 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. We have a great relationship with them on the R&D side. Unfortunately, we're struggling with them 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 we're already with SkyWater. We just announced the...

Announced that we made the money rather than someone else.

I'll take the money. So we just announced that we now have a demo showing the global foundries chips 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 the Adesto technologies. And they're actually trying to make that work in parallel to working with us. So right now, we're kind of 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. In beginning of April, in 2, 3 weeks, there's going to be a very big conference in Germany, the Embedded World Conference. That's going to 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 booths. For this -- we're going to have even -- we're going to take more than one demo system because we -- I can already see we're going to be doing some parallel demos over there. It's really exciting for us. They haven't -- GlobalFoundries haven't made a formal decision to work with Weebit. They're still looking at both options of whatever they have from Adesto and us. And I mean, they'll need to decide if they want to use one, the other, both. There is 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 4 smaller companies that are developing ReRAM and I mentioned Adesto, I mentioned CrossBar and Weebit and 4DS. So Adesto was acquired, as you can -- as you know, was acquired by Dialog. It 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 want to 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 kind of shows you how the industry is evolving. And so that's more or less where we're at. And kind of looking at moving forward, and the semiconductor space is going to be more than USD 1 trillion very soon. And 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 analog and sensors, you can see analog itself is #3 already. For me, they're basically the same. It's basically 1 domain of $100-plus billion. The reason why I'm pointing them out is in Dongbu, in DB HiTek, the process that we're using is 130-nanometer BCD. BCD basically indicates that it's tailored for the strong spot is actually analog in sensors. So that the domain that DB HiTek is focused on and what we're working with them on sensors. I guess you can understand what sensors are in the world that is so full of sensors. Again, just a dynamic though, I think I started 3 or 4 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 -- and on the analog side, a key part behind this is what's called PMIC or power management. Today, almost everything is working on batteries charge, you have 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 needs to do a smart charging, sometimes it charges faster, sometimes it charges slower, et cetera, et cetera. In the past, they always did it on a separate chip. They have one chip for power management, another chip for the MCU, for the microcontroller and they would 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 flying, it actually sits right next to the design, it's 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 we know, is back in that line. It actually comes on top of the design. So they don't give them about the ReRAM. 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 are lower voltage and other things that really enable the power management to get a lot of benefit from ReRAM 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 too. You know that we're going down. I mean, we reached now a demo on 22-nanometer. We've already demonstrated to some of the foundries that we can work on what's called FinFET technology, which is actually the teams and continuing to push forward also on this right, looking for on this front and looking at how we can progress there. You guys know this slide and how ReRAM 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, now that there are more and more horror stories, I don't know if I gave you the example of the most recent one that I heard about a company that in their smart watch, 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 ReRAM. 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 yes, this number, I believe, is very correct. Today, more and more people are asking, obviously, now suddenly everyone knows who NVIDIA is, it's so funny. I mean -- but NVIDIA is obviously a very important company, and they've been doing amazing things on the AI -- how did that skip over here. So just the applications of ReRAM on the AI front, there are many of them. We've been talking in the past a lot about neuromorphic computing. I remind you that our ReRAM operates. I mean, our ReRAM 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 ReRAM as the basis for their research and it still has many years of R&D, but there's a good progress there. But I mean you can see here, this transformation is happening now. I talked about it on the [indiscernible] 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 ReRAM and putting it in 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 happening already quite a bit, and this one will happen in the future. But just to give you some of the advantages when we're talking about AI, and Dadi was talking about the Edge AI. All of these different chips in appliances, whatever you want to call them, sensors that are all over the place, they are operating most commonly on some sort of battery or even ambient energy, I mean 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 it wakes up, registers what the humidity is. It needs a memory where it can go quickly, write something, finish. And then later on, it might compile some things, do some computation and send it off, that's actually not AI, but you have many of these devices, which need to do inference, the 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 doesn't make sense. So you want the Edge device to be able to do a lot of the initial computation, the initial digestion and then send only a small packet every once in a while to the cloud. So all of that ReRAM really enables it. And if you think of an autonomous vehicle, someone jumps in front of the car, you want to recognize that as fast as possible, react as fast as possible. And obviously, since the vehicles are driving on batteries, you want to also have it as low power as possible. So you can start imagining how in so many different domains, you have ReRAM advantages moving to the AI revolution. We talked about this already in the past, and I think it's always important to remember, Weebit today is really focused on getting foundries on board. This is really the most important activity, getting DB HiTek on board has been important because 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 ReRAM. So yes, I know a lot of you and a lot of the people that I meet, there's a sense of, I don't know if to call frustration or anticipation or whatever, but it takes a long time to get to the point where these product companies are actually using our ReRAM and getting to mass production, and we have royalties from massive sales, et cetera. But once we sign an agreement, if you remember, we were talking about DB HiTek. 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 our customers want it, and they will be designing it in. So yes, you will -- can I turn this thing off? 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 another roughly half year until 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 onboard, I mean, normally, they just want to come onboard after qualification. But as you can understand, DB HiTek and us, we're working together to pull those customers early. And those customers will need roughly a year to do the design and then 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 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 I'll focus on the important and interesting things. So we 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 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 of happening. I know that from the outside, you look at Weebit and you say, hasn't been used for so long. And this company probably fell asleep or something, right? We're working like crazy and I don't know what to say beyond. It just takes time, and I know it's frustrating to hear it from you all the time, but it is -- we are making very good progress there. So the plans for the future, for this year. We are -- the revenue side, I said it before, I'll say it again. The license fees are not paid upfront with DB HiTek or SkyWater. These are agreements where we need to meet milestones and payments are made based on milestones. And you'll see a trickle of payment coming in this year, nothing big, I don't want to set up any big expectations. The key thing is that this is going to lead to more. We're pushing hard on all of these fronts and qualification and fab partners, customer partners, et cetera. And I think really the key point to always remind everyone and maybe even emphasize now more than ever. In order to do ReRAM, 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 all of the circuitry that controls the writing into the memory, okay? And 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, and we have an amazing team that's actually generating patents on just how you write into the memory in order to achieve the bigger endurance and so on. You don't just want to write into a bit with the maximum voltage upfront and you wear it out so fast. You want to go and methodically try with lower voltages, then see if it's working. You see if the bit already -- you want to write a 1 into the bit and it already has 1. So no sense in writing into it. And these are the simple 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 this module to the rest of the world. If you remember, we talked about the fact that these are systems on a chip. 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, the Wi-Fi interface, HDMI interface, sensors and processor and memory are IT 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 wanted 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, the teams need to work very closely together under a very focused management in order to really make progress. Remember, ReRAM is not a simple technology to develop, and you need that focus. And at Weebit, we have it. At Weebit we have -- now the last count that I made, we have 13 PhDs in chemistry and physics. Most of them, by the way, did their PhD on ReRAM. It's amazing. 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 -- they're very experienced. These guys, by the way, from day 1, the very first memory module which 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 want to have a memory compiler at a certain point. So everything is already set up for that once we have many customers, we'll start working on that memory compiler. 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 ReRAM solutions today. They have amazing device and process teams, of course, that's their expertise, their fabs, right, their foundries. But their focus is manufacturing wafers and selling wafers, right, they make money off of selling wafers. The reason that they have ReRAM is because they want to enable their customers, right? They want to have that IP library so that customers that plan to 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 ReRAM 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 ReRAM, and they have a certain options, but that's it. They won't retailor them for us 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 -- what about your ReRAM? I don't think he even knows they have ReRAM. It's not his big focus. And that's why I think Weebit, has what it takes and Weebit has a great potential now, the market situation and where we are. And so I'm extremely bullish about where we are in the future. Yes, it's frustrating. It's taking us time. But I think everything shows that we're in the right direction. So I think that's it. Long discussion. I talked a lot, I know, but now I can open it up for you guys for some questions.

If any, use the microphone because we really have people online. Any questions from the room?

I just want to go back to the qualification on the 150 degrees. In the past, you talked about that time line being quite defined in terms of how many hours to bake. Is that time line 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 in -- we have now a big lab already set up, so that we do the qualification process ourselves. We haven't actually formally started the 150-degree qualification. First of all, the higher the temperature, the longer the qualification because we need to leave the wafers, the chips in the ovens for a longer period and it's even more testing. So it's even more frustrating how much time you need to wait. But right now, the big focus of Weebit is making DB HiTek, 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, it's a matter of priorities. It's going to happen, but it's just going to take us a little bit more time. Questions here or -- by the way, people that are online, 120 people there. If you have questions, please enter 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. And I will remind you, we've got someone from the ASX here. Just around where the...

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 the first thing I've said it many times, and unlike what was written in that article, 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, Weebit raised, as last year, we raised $60 million. So 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 -- I mean I love meeting you guys. I love the reason to come out here and everything. Right now, we are here. We're happy with ASX. What will happen in the future if, when, whatever, Board will need to discuss it and decide. But at this point, there isn't any immediate intention to do anything like that.

Just...

Yes, go ahead.

The Chairman of the Board. The issue of the listing never came up on the board, and it's not going to be discussed because as Coby mentioned, we see anything happen but it's not on our agenda anytime in the future. I think our job is to make sure that work as well as possible with the ASX and abiding the rules and make [indiscernible].

And again, we had a good meeting yesterday. I'm glad to that. Do you have any other questions there?

Nothing online.

Okay.

Probably the only final thing to presentation is as -- so we know that there's some uncertainty on the time lines for Weebit on the next fabs because you've got a lot of communications going forward. Once you, say, get a second or third fab on, is your expectation that their relationship to build some initial customers straight away that you can go into NRE spread away? Or do you think there'll still be another delay for that to see? Because you've obviously got to qualify for that as well. The customers will come after the qualification, will have maybe some initial agreements quite quickly after those fabs?

So I'll actually give a couple of answers here. 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 -- 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 until we see it qualified. We know, we're guaranteed everything is okay. We are pulling them up and saying, "Hey, guys, it takes you a whole year to do that design. No sense and you're waiting until qualification and only then starting. You can already see we're qualified at Leti which basically led the uses of STMicro wafers. So that's one of the big foundries here. 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 onboard, the more qualifications we'll do, the more confidence customers will have upfront that they can actually engage earlier. How much earlier and whatever, 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 want to help you understand this process. And 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 the bible of start-ups, a book by Geoffrey Moore. It defines the process of a new technology and how it gets out to market. You start off with this crazy idea that everyone thinks you're totally insane and whatever. You managed to get some geeks to start playing with it. And finally, you're going and you have a product in your hand and you're so excited and you rush out site to start selling it. There's this chasm down there and the customers are on the other side and what am I going to do? 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 finding someone -- normally, it's not the leaders. It's someone who's following who wants to become the leader and is willing to take that added risk with a new technology because the potential value that they see now is very big. And so that's -- at DB HiTek, for example, we really wants to jump up to #10 to a higher level and so on. You get that first one. You finally start getting it going. Someone else already sees it and says, "Oh, wow, there's SkyWater, it's DB HiTek." It becomes a little bit easier to actually sign the next one. As you can see, we're still working very hard. But once you sign 1 or 2, and this is what the book defines as the bowling alley, they say you knock down one pin and then it takes another pin fall. And then you start knocking down the second, the third, the fourth as it becomes -- each one makes it easier to get the next one. And once we'll have another 1, 2, 3 foundries signed up, suddenly you get to the point today, everyone calls it FOMO, right? Everyone starts looking around saying, "Oh my God, we're going to 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 -- I can see it's building now. And it's taking time. And I know it's frustrating, but I really see the pin starting to fall, and I can see how we're making the progress with the foundries. And that's basically where we are.

A quick follow-on from that, Coby, is how many fabs and IDMs can Weebit work with in parallel?

That's a very good question. And we've been very cautious in growing the team. One of the things that I don't want to do is hire too many people too early and burn cash too fast. So we've been growing the team in a very controlled manner. Now that we have more activity, we've hired a few more. But 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. And we're now actually. This is the big challenge that the team has. The management team is struggling now on 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 that's -- I love this problem. Finally, we have this very good problem, and we're pushing forward there.

Right. Couple of questions coming through to just around discrete memory, where you're at with that and sort of guess what the outlook is for that part of the business?

So the work is continuing all the time. There is actually, we're looking at even more than one option for different selector. So 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 discussions with the foundries and negotiations and so on. So it's lower priority, but it's definitely happening.

Is there any questions in the room?

Naomi Simson, has she been a good fit for Weebit? And has she done much thus far?

Well, we're very happy. She has a lot of experience as well. Yes. That's actually -- that's Dadi's 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 that you bring people that look like you think like you and knows exactly what you know. I think it's dangerous that we have been bringing people that -- with different background and different knowledge. The start is always complex because more sides have to learn. But so far, we are quite happy with the contribution. The ability to ask tough questions coming from a different angle is always useful and good for growth. But we'll see, she just started a few months ago, too early to give any grades, but I think we are doing very good.

Coby, another question online. How much of the MRAM market do you think Weebit can erode?

I think I don't want to make a speculation. There's definitely that atmosphere that people are telling us they want to move away from MRAM. Now MRAM will always be around. MRAM has some advantages, especially -- I mean, the key advantage is it has higher endurance than what ReRAM has. And some applications need that. Some applications don't end up in magnetic areas and actually that 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. As we sometimes remind people. There's still a lot of usage of even magnetic tapes and rotating disks out there. It's not just all flash even. So flash will stick around for a long time. And in some places, it will take many years until 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 will 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 mentoring is the new usages in your possibility is. That's something that we want. And I think that's the focus. So if we just end up replacing MRAM in the next 2 years, then we are going to be happy, not we as an investor, not we as people that manage the company. There might be some occasions that is going to be replaced, some not. They are much more flash, embedded flash that I think we have better chances to replace. And I bet there is going to be new opportunities that we feel -- the thing that I love about technology that I built something and I think that's going to be the usage model. It's 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 with customers in the market, we'll start seeing that. It will come in this part of the world that we do. And I think we have a very good team to be able to go and enable that in a month.

Just a couple of questions about the GlobalFoundries update. Number one, is there any contractual arrangement with GlobalFoundries? And when do you expect the qualification to start on the 22-nanometer 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 are -- 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 that's ongoing work.

Going online. Just with the 150-degree qualification, will DB HiTek have to do their own modification 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 have -- we set up a very advanced lab, actually we have 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." So it was pretty nice to see how impressed they were with Weebit and -- so yes.

There seems to be some confusion. So let me explain what it is. You qualify a specific factory. We have to be done. Each factory enable. By the way, I think that you move from 1 factory A to factory B. You have to go through qualification because, by the way, in a car industry, you move from one manufacturer line to another one, you'll have to test it. You develop a new car, even at the same factory, it has 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 at DB HiTek, we'll have to go through this one, run the wafers in DB HiTek and will then in our lab, on their lab, it doesn't matter, it's a tactical decision. We are going to move to another company and the customer would want to have 150. We'll have to go do this 150. It's -- I believe I wish it wasn't this way. But eventually, at the end of the day, the reason you go through this via [indiscernible] 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 qualification is so important to make sure that you assure the quality and reliability. But again, every new process technology have to go there. You move to 130 to 45. We have to do it. It's a process. Now Coby is right. The moment to do it all couple times, you gain the experience, you know how to do. You know how to get it ready for that is going to get faster. But since we -- 9 women cannot make a child in 1 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. This has to be done. The fact that we have this capability in-house is a huge achievement in a world of progress because you are now not dependent on someone else, to go to the world, you could define your priorities based on new goals and what you want to do. If they want the wafers, you can take them to our lab and do there a 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 the fab is the fab, not the Weebit. So it's a complex process. We are going through this one. It's always harder and longer the first time we 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 this is 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. And the fact that we know how to do that is a huge benefit to our ability to grow, expand. In other talks, we said that we are now setting the foundations for the ramp of Weebit and it takes time. I don't think we want to promise anything. But if you put the foundation right, and I believe we have the right team to put the foundation right. then the ramp later on is going to be way smoother and things will work and you want to deal with all the problems, all the issues now other than in 2 years when people start ramping and what kind of problems can [indiscernible].

Thanks, Dadi. Too much of the time. We'll get one last question in, which has come through. 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 -- 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 -- yes, that's right. My traditional selfie. So just a second, yes, 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 a few. 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. Yes, there's some good stuff back there. So you're welcome to enjoy it.