Atomera falls 34% after reporting STMicroelectronics project won’t proceed

Shares of Atomera (ATOM) are lower in Wednesday trading after the company announced in post to its corporate blog last night that a project with STMicroelectronics (STM) won’t proceed. In the update on the MST project with STMicroelectronics, Atomera stated: “During our 200mm wafer development with ST Micro we were trying to deal with a very difficult performance trade-off. Using MST on ST’s platform, we were able to demonstrate significant performance improvements which was the goal of the program. Unfortunately, that higher performance led to a corresponding reduction in reliability, or lifetime of the device which exceeded ST’s specification limits. We worked together on several solutions to get around this trade-off. At about the same time that ST notified us of their decision to focus production on 300mm, we provided them with a new implementation, validated through our simulations, which brought even higher levels of performance improvement without impacting reliability. In other words, we found a way around the trade-off which is only enabled with MST. For ST though, this solution required a device architecture change which would require multiple cycles of learning to validate. ST determined that it could not be completed in time to meet their aggressive 300mm BCD110 production timeframe. For this reason, a few days ago ST informed us that they are not currently planning to complete the validation of our new implementation. In short, ST has decided to take BCD110 to market without the MST improvement and currently doesn’t have a plan for a further product variant with MST leaving us without a line of sight to royalty. ST has reinforced that they will continue to work with us on the other technology areas in which we are engaged.” In Wednesday afternoon trading, shares of Atomera have fallen $1.46, or 34%, to $2.79.