'At a meeting of semiconductor CEOs in Munich,' Ed confides to his diary, ' I meet a very switched on guy who told me he had a new kind of memory technology with ten year data retention and 100,000 write/erase cycles, and licenses were going very inexpensively because they needed a final tranche of development money.'
'This could be good for three reasons', writes Ed, 'we have some military customers who need this kind of endurance, the designers are always complaining about the characteristics of the embedded memory they use at the moment, and being associated with a new technology will raise our profile for the IPO.'
'My
'When it's over, the board sits in silence'.
'"Any questions?" I ask'
What's it called - this technology?" asked our research director.
'Phase-change", I tell him.
'"Look Ed," says the R&D guy, " the press have taken to calling this technology a Techno-Ponzi scheme. It's not new, the industry's been working on it for 40 years, it's still not dense enough to be useful in most applications, and taking a license for a flaky technology is more likely to put investors off than attract them."'
'Oh dear', writes Ed, 'still its only another 249 days till we IPO and I'll be wallowing in wonga.'
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