One of the best performers on the Australian share market on Wednesday has been the 4DS Memory Ltd (ASX: 4DS) share price.
In afternoon trade the Silicon Valley-based semiconductor development company's shares are up a massive 48% to 8.6 cents.
Why is the 4DS share price rocketing higher?
This morning 4DS provided the market with an update on its collaboration with imec, a world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies.
The two parties have been working together to develop a transferrable production-compatible process flow for its Interface Switching ReRAM technology and to demonstrate this process on imec's megabit test chip.
In late January the company reported that imec had successfully manufactured functional 300mm wafers. According to today's release, these wafers have since been relocated to 4DS's facilities in Silicon Valley where they have undergone extensive analysis.
This analysis has now been completed successfully and wafer "D17" has demonstrated the best characteristics with respect to endurance and retention – two core characteristics for Storage Class Memory on which the testing and analysis has been focussed.
The release explains that endurance analysis has shown that the company can cycle its Interface Switching ReRAM memory cells into the millions of cycles, which is a first for the company. And retention analysis has shown the best retention results the company has been able to produce outside of its own facilities.
According to the release, this is a "significant achievement for the Company as it represents the first time it has been able to replicate and improve certain characteristics on the same multi-million dollar state-of-the-art production equipment used by high volume/high density manufacturers of memory."
In addition to this, during this most recent manufacturing process the two parties obtained invaluable data which they believe "will now lead to faster refinement and manufacturing iterations. The next iteration is expected to produce wafers that will be available for analysis during Q2 2019, barring any unforeseen equipment issues."
Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Dr Guido Arnout, said: "This is a major step forward and we are very pleased with the initial endurance and retention measurements. Manufacturing wafers over a range of conditions is instrumental for the continuous improvement of processes required to meet or exceed the endurance and retention goals for our target market – Storage Class Memory."
Should you invest?
Whilst this is a promising development, there's still a long way to go before the company will be in a position to potentially generate meaningful revenue.
As such, I think it's a little too soon to get excited and would suggest investors hold off an investment at this stage and consider fellow tech shares Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) and Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) instead.
