Ilika plc (LON:IKA) Chief Financial Officer Steve Boydell caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their new development project with Seagate Technologies
Q1: Today you announced a new development project with Seagate for Hard Drive technology, Steve is this application for laptops?
A1: The HDD technology (Hard Disk Drive) we’re developing in this project will be used in the data storage market generally so it’s addressing both the cloud storage sector of the hard drive market as well as computer devices such as laptops, mobile phones and tablets and by 2020, it’s expected that more than 60% of all the storage shipped will be to the cloud.
Q2: You announced a project with Seagate back In February 2016, is this project a follow-on from that work?
A2: Both projects are focussed on developing materials for read/write heads in hard drives to meet the demand for increased memory density. The hard drive industry is looking at heat-assisted magnetic recording, known as HAMR, in which a small laser is used to heat the part of the disc that’s being written to, this allows writing on a much smaller scale than before, greatly increasing the amount of data that can be held on a standard disk platter.
The project that we announced last year is focussed on the development of new 2D materials for use in the read/write drive, these types of materials have never been used in HAMR applications before and we’re about half way through that 2-year program. The project that we announced today is developing existing photonic materials and processes to enable improved performance and reliability.
So, whilst the projects are addressing the same challenge, they are different approaches and we’ll be running them in parallel.
Q3: What else can we expect to hear from Ilika in 2017?
A3: Well, 2017 promises to be a very busy year for us, in our half-year report last month we signposted that the company has been successful in attracting 4 new funded programs. We’ve already announced details of the battery integration program together with Sharp and McLaren, and now today the details of this collaboration with Seagate, we therefore have got 2 more significant programs to announce which we hope to be in a position to do over the next couple of weeks. This means we’ll have 7 programs running throughout 2017 across battery materials, electronic materials and aerospace alloys and alongside that we can continue to progress our discussions with potential solid-state battery licensees, particularly for applications in the medical sector.
