Aehr Test Systems - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 FY2024 revenue was $16.6M; GAAP diluted EPS was $0.81, driven by a $20.8M tax benefit from releasing the full income tax valuation allowance; GAAP gross margin was 50.9%.
• Mix skewed to consumables: WaferPak revenues were $12.4M and accounted for 75% of total revenue; bookings were $4.0M; backlog was $7.3M with “effective backlog” of $20.8M including early Q1 FY2025 orders.
• FY2025 guidance: total revenue of at least $70M and net profit before taxes of at least 10% of revenue; company changed fiscal calendar to a 4-4-5 year ending the Friday closest to May 31 and expects to incur income tax expense beginning Q1 FY2025.
• Strategic catalysts: $12.7M WaferPak orders from a SiC customer for EV devices, acquisition of Incal Technology to address ultra-high-power AI processor burn-in, and an AI accelerator wafer-level burn-in evaluation targeted for production this fiscal year.
• Wall Street consensus (S&P Global) was unavailable via tool; management stated results “surpassed analyst consensus,” but we cannot verify magnitudes today.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• WaferPak consumables strength: WaferPak revenues rose to $12.4M in Q4, 75% of total, highlighting recurring revenue from design activity and installed base.
• Strategic expansion: Announced $12.7M WaferPak orders for EV SiC production; closed/announced Incal acquisition to expand into packaged-part ultra-high-power burn-in for AI/GPU/network processors; and initiated AI accelerator wafer-level burn-in evaluation using high-power FOX-XP.
• Management tone and outlook: “Our full-year revenue and net income results exceeded our previously provided guidance and surpassed analyst consensus” and “we believe we have significant opportunities for growth in fiscal 2025 and beyond”.

What Went Wrong

• YoY decline and soft bookings: Q4 revenue fell 25% YoY to $16.6M amid EV demand slowdown and customer pushouts; bookings were only $4.0M in the quarter.
• Margin pressure vs prior year: GAAP gross margin was 50.9%, down from 51.5% in Q4 last year, reflecting lower revenue and overhead absorption; operating income fell vs prior year.
• Visibility and mix: Full-year bookings dropped to $49M vs $78.3M prior year; mix shifted away from systems to consumables due to delayed capacity ramps, and FY2025 includes higher OpEx and commissions that can weigh on near-term margins.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings! Welcome to the Aehr Test Systems Fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jim Byers at MKR Investor Relations. You may begin.

Jim Byers (SVP)

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to Aehr Test Systems' Fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results Conference Call. With me on today's call are Aehr Test Systems' President and Chief Executive Officer, Gayn Erickson, and Chief Financial Officer, Chris Siu. Before I turn the call over to Gayn and Chris, I'd like to cover a few items. This afternoon, right after market close, Aehr Test issued a press release announcing its fiscal 2024 fourth quarter and full-year results. That release is available on the company's website at aehr.com. There were two other announcements issued today, and those are also posted to the company's website. This call is being broadcast live over the internet for all interested parties, and the webcast will be archived on the investor relations page of the company's website.

I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements that are based on current information and estimates, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors are discussed in the company's most recent periodic and current reports filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements, including guidance provided during today's call, are only valid as of this date, and Aehr Test Systems undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements. Now, with that said, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Gayn Erickson, President and CEO. Gain?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call. Thanks for joining us today. I'll start with a quick summary of the highlights of the fiscal fourth quarter and full year we just completed in May, and spend some time giving an update on the key markets Aehr is addressing for semiconductor wafer level test and burn-in, including some new emerging opportunities. I also want to go over the exciting news we announced today with the acquisition of Incal Technology, which has some incredible products addressing the ultra-high power semiconductor market, including a significant number of AI processor makers. Then Chris will go over the financials in more detail and provide our guidance for the new fiscal year. After that, we'll open up the lines to take your questions.

Starting with our financial results, as we reported in our preliminary announcement last week, our full year revenue and net income results exceeded our previously provided guidance and surpassed analyst consensus. Although we saw customer pushouts to silicon carbide devices due to slower electric vehicle demand in the second half of our fiscal year, we still achieved another record for annual revenue for Aehr of $66.2 million. On the bottom line, GAAP net income was $33.2 million or $1.12 per share, which includes a tax benefit resulting from the release of the company's full income tax valuation allowance of approximately $20.8 million, recognized in the fourth quarter. Chris will talk more about that.

This past year, wafer level test and burn-in of silicon carbide power semiconductors used in electric vehicles or EVs, were a key driver of our business, and we anticipate that market will continue to be a key contributor to revenue in the current fiscal year. We're also seeing traction with several emerging opportunities for our test and burn-in solutions in new target markets, and expect bookings and revenue across a much broader range of customers and markets this fiscal year.

These new target markets include quality, reliability, and production test and burn-in of artificial intelligence processors, wafer level burn-in of flash memory devices used in solid-state disk drives, burn-in of semiconductors used in hard disk drive magnetic read/write heads, wafer level burn-in of gallium nitride power semiconductors used in data centers and solar power conversion, and stabilization and burn-in of silicon photonics integrated circuits used for optical I/O communication between chipsets and processors. I'll cover at least a little on each of these key markets, beginning with wafer level test and burn-in of silicon carbide devices. We continue to have a high level of confidence in this market, which remains an enormous opportunity for Aehr.

While most forecasters are saying that the inflection point for silicon carbide and electric vehicles is now the second half of 2025 into 2026, from our many meetings with semi-suppliers, Tier 1s, and electric car companies themselves, it's even more clear now that silicon carbide is the plan of record for electric vehicles and preferred over IGBT. Virtually every car manufacturer is designing new electric vehicles with silicon carbide modules, which absolutely need reliability test and burn-in to screen out failures that otherwise will show up in the life of the vehicle. Burn-in of the die at the wafer level before the modules, before they're put into modules, is significantly more cost-effective, with much higher yield than doing this at the module level.

We believe we're in a strong position to win more than our fair share of this business, as we believe we have the industry-leading wafer level burn-in solution. This past year, we engaged with a significant number of new Silicon Carbide device and module suppliers related to their anticipated capacity needs, and we remain engaged with these and all major players in the market, including many in China. We continue to make great progress with our previously announced benchmarks and engagements, and believe these potential customers are committed to wafer level burn-in to meet their requirements for Known Good Die, for die sales, and for their power modules.

The silicon carbide market continues to be an enormous opportunity for us, and we're seeing more and more auto suppliers that are committed to silicon carbide in their EVs, as well as roadmaps that are based on modules for their electric motor power inverters. We're also seeing growing demand for silicon carbide devices beyond EV market, such as solar, data center, and other industrial applications for power conversion. We remain very enthusiastic and believe we're well-positioned to continue to grow our business in silicon carbide, and expect to receive first orders from a significant number of additional silicon carbide customers by the end of this fiscal year.

Today, we announced that we received over $12 million or $12.7 million in orders from one of our silicon carbide customers for WaferPak full wafer contactors to be used for production needs, for wafer level burn-in, and screening of the silicon carbide devices for the EV market. We're excited about our continued partnership with this customer, and to receive these orders to help them meet their needs for new device designs. As these orders illustrate, when our customers win new designs from their customers, or they change device designs, wafer patterns, or sizes, these customers need to order new WaferPak contactors from Aehr to fulfill these design changes.

This consumable type of revenue grew in fiscal 2024 for us, representing 57% of total revenue as systems orders growth slowed, but new designs and variety of devices increased, causing incremental WaferPak sales on the installed base. As we look ahead, we believe that silicon carbide remains a very large market opportunity for Aehr, as more and more EV manufacturers adopt silicon carbide, and we believe we're well-positioned to continue to capture market share. We expect to add a significant number of silicon carbide customers, both this fiscal year and the next fiscal year, as silicon carbide ramps into the second half of 2025 and into 2026. Now, let me talk about the AI processor market.

Last month, we announced we're working with an AI accelerator company to move their AI processor test and burn-in to wafer level, and have secured a commitment from them to evaluate our FOX solution for production-level test and burn-in of their high-power processors. This company recognizes the potential of the significant benefits of production test and burn-in of their accelerators while still in wafer form, before they're integrated into the end application product, which would prove to be more cost-effective and significantly more scalable than doing the screening later in their manufacturing process. We think this is an amazing opportunity to displace the current package and system-level test for AI processors for Large Language Model development, and we believe we can meet this enormous challenge with the current capabilities of our new high-power FOX-XP system, with up to 3,500 watts per wafer testing.

We're working on this benchmark as I speak here in the lab right now, and expect to complete the evaluation in the next couple of months. Upon successful demonstration of wafer level test results and throughput, we expect they will utilize our new high-power FOX-XP systems for production of their next-generation AI processors, starting this fiscal year. The rapidly growing AI market is still in the early stages, and we see a significant opportunity in this market for our FOX wafer level production systems, as I just discussed. However, in addition, given the unique challenges of testing very high-power devices related to AI processors, there's a very real need for a significant amount of engineering qualification and process development, as well as a significant new opportunity for production reliability screening at the package part level.

AI semiconductors are among the highest power consumption devices in the entire semiconductor industry, with power levels of recent devices up to 1,000 watts or more, well beyond typical processors. These power levels open a new market that requires new, unique test solutions. I'm personally very excited and proud to announce today our acquisition plans for Incal Technology, a manufacturer of a highly acclaimed reliability test and burn-in solutions of a wide range of semiconductor devices and markets. They have a particularly strong new product family of ultra-high-powered test solutions for AI accelerators, graphics and network processors, and high-performance computing processors.

Their ultra-high-power package part test capabilities, combined with Aehr's industry-leading lineup of wafer level test and reliability solutions, uniquely position us to fully capitalize on the rapidly growing opportunity within the AI semiconductor market as a turnkey provider of reliability and test that spans from engineering to high-volume production. Incal is in a unique position with intimate knowledge and working relationships with a significant number of AI industry leaders, providing a front-row seat to the technology needs of those customers. They're shipping systems today for use by a broad range of companies, with many of these companies projecting needs to move to high-volume production level burn-in of these devices. Both Aehr and Incal believe there's a tremendous opportunity to grow this business substantially. Incal has world-class system hardware and software architectures, and customers that have a high degree of customer loyalty for their products.

Aehr brings worldwide sales and support infrastructure, as well as high-volume manufacturing capacity and capabilities, that together we feel will quickly address customer demand, a very high global growth rate of AI and other high-power semiconductors. We also bring R&D resources, technology and processes, and the financial resources to be able to enhance and accelerate new needs that customers may ask for. This unique combination strongly positions us to capitalize on the significant opportunity within the AI market. Interestingly, we share several co-subcontract manufacturers and have similar supply chains, as well as our strategy for in-house assembly and final test of our systems.

I have known the founders and management team for a very long time, including their CEO, Alberto Salamone, who has been in the test and burn-in business for many years, and who will be joining Aehr as an executive vice president to lead our package part burn-in business. Incal is located less than four miles away from Aehr's headquarters here in Fremont, California, with all employees located at that facility. This makes combining the two companies simpler and straightforward. We believe that between wafer level and package part, the reliability test and burn-in market for AI processors exceeds $100 million annually, and with this combined product portfolio, we have the opportunity to capture a meaningful share of this market within this fiscal year. So moving on to the NAND flash memory market.

We've been in discussions for several years with multiple flash memory companies related to our FOX wafer level test and burn-in systems. These companies have provided us feedback on the definition and capabilities required for a next generation wafer level test and burn-in system for their high-volume production roadmap. This included feedback on our systems, wafer packs, and particularly on our automation, using our new fully automated wafer pack aligner. We see the NAND flash market as a key market opportunity for our systems and wafer packs, with long-term potential to also move into DRAM wafer level test and burn-in. This last quarter, we secured an engagement from one of the major flash memory suppliers to evaluate the FOX-XP system with our proprietary wafer-pack full wafer contactors for full wafer level test and burn-in of their flash memory devices.

This application is for 100% test and burn-in of devices to be used in high-reliability applications such as enterprise storage. This is a benchmark that's going to take us throughout the fiscal year to complete and includes the development of a new high-density WaferPak for production wafer level burn-in of 300 millimeter NAND wafers. We see this as a multi-year opportunity and expect to have preliminary results and feedback during this fiscal year. Our goal is to come to an agreement for customer-specific development of a test cell with the potential for revenue contribution in our fiscal 2026, that begins next June. We're very excited to have accomplished this critical goal this past year, and believe this is the front end of an exciting and potentially enormous opportunity for our solutions. Another interesting market opportunity is hard disk drive market.

One of the new market opportunities for wafer level burn-in is semiconductors used in hard disk drives for data storage. Some of you may recall that in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 epidemic, we announced an order and shipment of our FOX-CP, which is our single wafer test and reliability solution for logic, memory, and photonics devices. This was a key win with a major customer, who purchased a system for wafer level test and burn-in and devices in a very high volume application for enterprise and data center market. They had forecasted to ramp into production over several years, but the pandemic impacted their plans.

After a multi-year product development and qualification process and impact due to COVID-19, this customer, who we've now disclosed, is in the hard disk drive space, has introduced their product and is now forecasting the production ramp to begin in our current fiscal year, most likely in the second half. We believe this will drive orders for multiple CP production systems and WaferPaks, and could even be a 10% customer for us this year. All right, turning to the Silicon Photonics burn-in market. Within the Silicon Photonics market, we shipped the first order from a major Silicon Photonics customer for new high-power configuration of the XP system late in our third fiscal quarter.

This new configuration expands our market opportunity by enabling cost-effective volume production test of wafers of next-generation photonic ICs that are targeted for use in the new optical I/O or co-package optics market. NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel are examples of companies that have all discussed the potential for adding optical chip-to-chip communication for performance improvement and power savings for AI processors and high-performance computing chips. Optical I/O has the potential to be a game changer for semiconductors, as it breaks the bottleneck of data transmission bandwidth limitations of electrical I/O. These next-generation silicon photonics-based integrated circuits can require up to 2-4 times as much power for full wafer test, burn-in, and stabilization.

Aehr's new high-power system configuration can be used to test and burn-in up to nine of these new optical I/O device wafers at a time, up to 3,500 watts of power per wafer. This is absolutely unique in the market, as we're not aware of any other solution that can test even one of these wafers in a single touchdown, much less nine of them at a time like we can. While the timing of these devices and volume ramps are not clear, we're watching this market very closely to ensure that we have the products and solutions available to meet the needs of our customers for this potentially significant market application. Now, let me lastly talk about the GaN market opportunity. This past year, we announced our first order for a FOX wafer level test and burn-in system for gallium nitride, or GaN devices.

While silicon carbide will be the semiconductor material choice for EV traction inverters, GaN is expected to gain significant penetration in the onboard charging market, as well as other automotive, solar, and data center power conversion applications. We're working with several of the GaN market leaders and received a significant number of WaferPak orders throughout the year for gallium nitride reliability test and qualification of our systems. We have now received our first forecast for wafer-level production burn-in systems to be delivered during this fiscal year. We continue to be encouraged by this market and believe it'll be a significant end market size for semiconductors, and has the potential to be a solid market opportunity for Aehr Test Systems. Looking ahead, we expect fiscal 2025 to be an exciting year for Aehr.

Silicon Carbide is poised to be a key contributor to revenue again this year, but we also expect bookings and revenue from across a much broader range of customers and markets, as I discussed. We have a lot of opportunities in front of us, and we look forward to reporting on our progress throughout the fiscal year. With that, let me turn the call over to Chris before we open up the line for questions.

Chris Siu (CFO)

Thank you, Gayn. Good afternoon, everyone. On today's call, I will summarize our results for fiscal year 2024, as well as the fourth quarter, and then I'll provide our guidance for fiscal year 2025. Starting with the full year results, we reported record revenue of $66.2 million, up 2% year-over-year. Our full year GAAP gross margin was 49.1%, compared to 50.4% in the prior year. Our full year non-GAAP net income increased to a record $35.8 million, or $1.21 per diluted share, which includes the impact of a tax benefit resulting from the release of the company's full income tax valuation allowance of approximately $20.8 million, compared to non-GAAP net income of $17.3 million, or $0.59 per diluted share in fiscal 2023.

In fiscal 2024, we generated $1.8 million in operating cash flows. Our annual bookings in fiscal 2024 were $49 million, compared to $78.3 million in the prior fiscal year. The decrease was mainly due to customer pushouts of forecasted orders related to silicon carbide devices, due to slower electric vehicle demand in the second half of our fiscal year. Our backlog as of year-end was $7.3 million, with $13.5 million in bookings received in the first six weeks of the first quarter of fiscal 2025. We now have an effective backlog of $20.8 million. Looking at our financial results for the fourth quarter, total revenue was $16.6 million, down 25% from $22.3 million in Q4 last year.

WaferPak revenues were $12.4 million and accounted for 75% of total revenue in the fourth quarter, which is significantly higher than the 38% of total revenue in the prior year, Q4. WaferPak revenues continue to represent a significant revenue stream for our business, due to the strong demand for new WaferPak designs from our existing and new customers, as they win new end customer designs and look to meet their market requirements. GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter came in at 50.9%, down from 51.5% in Q4 last year. The decrease in gross margin is primarily due to lower revenue, resulting in a higher overhead absorption rate and lower manufacturing efficiencies. Operating expenses in the fourth quarter were $5.9 million, consistent with $5.8 million in Q4 last year.

The slight year-over-year increase is primarily driven by increased headcount-related expenses to support our R&D programs and G&A requirements, which were partially offset by lower professional fees. We continue to invest in R&D to enhance our existing market-leading products, and to introduce new products to maintain our competitive advantages and expand our applications and addressable markets. During fiscal 2024, we have invested significant resources to augment the features and performance of our automated WaferPak aligner and developed a new high-power configuration of our Fox-XP system for volume production, wafer-level burn-in, and stabilization of next-generation silicon photonics integrated circuits. At the end of the fourth quarter, we released a full income tax valuation allowance and recorded deferred tax assets and a tax benefit of $20.8 million.

We released this valuation allowance, as we believe it is more likely than not, that the company will realize the deferred tax assets. Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter, which includes the impact of the tax benefit mentioned earlier, but excludes the impact of stock-based compensation and acquisition-related costs, was $24.7 million, or $0.84 per diluted share for the fourth quarter, compared to non-GAAP net income of $6.9 million, or $0.23 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. Moving to the balance sheet. We finished the year with a strong cash position. Our cash and cash equivalents were $49.2 million at year-end, up slightly from our cash and short-term investments of $47.9 million at the end of Q4 last year.

With a solid balance sheet, we'll fund the acquisition of Incal Technology using our cash on hand and common stock. We'll continue to invest in scaling our business and entering new markets and supporting new opportunities. We generated $1.2 million in operating cash flows during the quarter. We have zero debt and continue to invest our excess cash in money market funds. Interest income earned during this higher interest rate environment was $592,000 in the fourth quarter, compared to $487,000 in the same quarter last year. As of the end of Q4, the remaining amount available under the previously announced $25 million ATM offering was $17.7 million. We did not sell any shares during fiscal 2024.

It remains our plan to only sell share against this ATM offering at times and prices that are most advantageous to our shareholders and to the company. Today, we announced that we have changed the company's fiscal year-end from May 31 to a 4-4-5 fiscal calendar, ending on a Friday closest to May 31. The first fiscal year under the new financial calendar began on June 1, 2024, and will end on May 30, 2025. Our first quarter in fiscal 2025 will end on August 30, 2024. This change is expected to improve the comparability of the company's financial results between periods. Now, turning to our outlook for the current fiscal 2025. For the fiscal year ending on May 30, 2025, we expect total revenue of at least $70 million, which includes the acquisition of Incal Technology.

As we mentioned earlier, we released a full income tax valuation allowance and recorded deferred tax assets in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024. Beginning in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, we expect to incur income tax expenses. For fiscal 2025, we expect a net profit before taxes of at least 10% of revenue. Lastly, looking at the investor relations calendar, Aehr Test Systems will be meeting with investors virtually at the Needham Fifth Annual Semiconductor and Semicap Conference on Wednesday, August 21st. And then the following week, we'll be meeting with investors in person on Tuesday, August 27th, at the Jefferies Technology Summit, taking place in Chicago. We hope to meet some of you at these conferences. This concludes our prepared remarks. We're now ready to take your questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. First question comes from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, congratulations, guys, on the acquisition. Gayn, as you look at the Incal acquisition, I assume that the company is a growth company. Can you give us an idea of approximately how much revenue of the $70 million is Incal?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Probably the easiest question that I'll try and answer as best I can. So one of the challenges is we need to close it first, and they did about $12 million over the last 12 months. And so, you know, plus or minus a month or two, even at that same run rate, plus or minus $1 million or two, or something like that. Candidly, we're taking a pretty cautious stance, but if you use those kind of numbers, like $1 million per month from the time we close it, it's probably a good number. But we've, it gets into a lot of the strategy what's going on.

There's been a number of customers that they've been engaged with that have, or we have reason to believe, either directly or indirectly, our engagement is going to help them with respect to their manufacturing plans. And so, we've taken a pretty conservative forecast based upon kind of their current run rates in that $70 million. And, you know, we would expect it to grow from there. So, again, just trying to take a pretty conservative stance right now, and we'll know a lot more after we do all the customer visits here over the next several weeks.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

No, that's fair. Thank you. As you mentioned on the Silicon Carbide side, that you would expect to, you know, qualify this fiscal year with a number of companies in China, given their increased presence in the Silicon Carbide market and ability to maybe lower prices faster than others and gain further share. You know, how many customers, you know, by the end of the fiscal year, would you hope to be engaged with?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah. Okay. Well, I hope to be engaged with fewer customers, 'cause I can't I, I feel like we-- our cup runneth over with the number of engagements, 'cause as soon as they become customers, then we stop talking about the engagement. I'm trying to be serious there, actually. I think what you probably meant is, how many are we now adding as customers? And if I may put that in your words. I can put a specific number on them, I mean, we've got some internal targets that we're going for, but I would say, you know, several, plus, if you look at our current forecast and funnel. There's-- I mean, there's in terms of, you know, well-qualified, perfectly capable, have fabs, it's well over a dozen, just pure silicon carbide players.

These are guys that aren't customers from us yet. I think it might be close to 24 total if you look at everybody. And we, as we discussed about it last year, there are probably more questions on China. We are engaged with multiple Chinese suppliers as well and would hope to add, you know, 1 or more of those as customers also over the next year and a half or so. The reason I'm hedging a little bit on the year and a half is we know that there are people that are talking about bringing on capacity in second half of 2025.

We're just trying to figure out when the first tools would be installed, i.e., I can still win them and maybe install the darn thing in the fall, and that would still be a win for us. But the timing relative, the over under our June first fiscal year is a bit of a pain right now, so.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, that's fair. Thank you for that clarity, Gayn. And then, and then my last question on the AI accelerator large language model, you know-

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Mm-hmm.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Can you give us an idea if you're successful there on the new customer? You know, how big could that be?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah, we're trying to get our arms around that as well. You know, it's a little weird to talk about who it is or, or who it isn't, but I've actually just-- this might get me in trouble someday, but, you know, it's not NVIDIA. We're just-- I've been trying to be pretty clear with people because it's just not fair. I guess, at some point, you know, if NVIDIA ever goes with us, now what am I gonna say? But, they are a revenue-generating company today. They have customers. They're doing very well. It's pretty exciting. I can't, you know, there's some discussion about being able to go public with them, once we have successfully demonstrated it.

They really would have a huge benefit by moving their system level test burn-in to wafer level. I can't decide if who's more excited about this, if it's us or them, with them cheering us on to please, hopefully, make this work for them. This is an interesting one because we are doing some pretty unique things that I'll just share a little bit about, but I'm also holding things to my chest because of competitive reasons. I just don't wanna give away any of our secrets. But, you know, the idea to actually be putting... You know, I mentioned, you know, 2,000 watts-3,000 watts on a wafer, 3,500 watts on a wafer.

If you're actually close to this technically, you would know that all AI processors at these geometries are, you know, and lithographies, are all one volt or thereabouts. What that means, if you're gonna do 3,000 watts, you're putting 3,000 amps onto a wafer, okay? People's heads spin with this, the idea of putting, you know, 1,000 amps, much less two or more thousand amps on a wafer. And so what we're doing is quite novel, and we're using the FOX-XP system that we shipped first to optical AI. At the last quarter, we mentioned that, that we were working on something else on the side, stay tuned, but that's what we were alluding to.

The development of that system in terms of the power, being able to put that much power out and remove that much power, 'cause you have to remove it all through, through the wafer itself, is totally novel. How we deliver that power for optical I/O is actually, interestingly, a little higher voltage and lower current, whereas in, in the AI, it's higher current and lower voltage, but the thermal challenge is the same. So we have a lot of confidence through that, and we're working through that with this right now, and we're-- I walked in back just now, I was talking to the ops guys. They're working on this, on multiple wafers right now with multiple wafer packs. So it looks encouraging, and, stay tuned.

I've got my fingers crossed that we can work through all this stuff, and we think, we're pretty confident that we can make this work, and the customer is hoping and cheering us on to make it work.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks, Gayn. I'll get back in the queue and let some other people ask questions. Thank you.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please press star one. The next question comes from Jed Dorsheimer with William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Jed Dorsheimer (Group Head–Energy and Power Technologies)

Hi, yeah, thanks for taking my question, and Gayn, congrats on the acquisition. I guess just from a framing perspective, is it fair to say that next year is largely going to be driven off of silicon carbide, maybe a little bit in gallium nitride, and as you invest in some of these other very interesting and high-volume markets?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

The way we've actually got the forecast right now is we've taken a pretty conservative stab at the silicon carbide things. And so, I think we're, you know, we could, we could do well over 30%, you know, and new customers and new markets, in that $70 million number. So you know, if you look at the hard disk drive application, I already mentioned it could be like a 10% customer. The production forecast for the AI is a 10-percenter, certainly of the $70 million. The flash memory will not be. We don't, you know, I think that's not gonna be for revenue. We don't have any in there for this, but we hope to secure an order for maybe the next year revenue.

And then the GaN could, with the production capacity that we've been shown, that could maybe be a 10% customer or more as well. So you got, you got 10, you know, three different 10 percenters, and none of those are silicon carbide. And then, I feel like I'm missing one. There's too many of them. But then within the customer base, we are seeing some of the customers, candidly, we thought were going to close this year, that had moved out in time, but then the fabs are coming. So I think being able to secure that first wave, but, you know, you know, several of those guys, at least getting a, a single production, if not multiple production systems, could happen by, by May as well. So I, I guess, yes, silicon carbide is still gonna be really strong.

We think that even within silicon carbide, we'll be more diverse than sort of, you know, the six customers they have, but only two of them really were 10% type customers. We'll actually see more customers that could be, you know, material to us, but they are the leading edge to the fabs that'll be coming online in 2025, late in 2026.

Jed Dorsheimer (Group Head–Energy and Power Technologies)

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. And then could you just help me connect the dots? If I use, you know, you said $12 million, with 2 months of $1 million, so, you know, $10 million, for Intel, it would suggest that the core business is kind of your guidance for a conservative or down year at the low end of $60 million. But on the operating income, if it's immediately accretive, which I think was stated in there, are you making a significant investment in the OpEx to cause the EBIT to come down by 6 or so percentage points? Or is that something going on in gross margin?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah, you know what? I'd say it's mostly the prior rather than the gross margin of it. We've actually made incremental expense investments, some of which, candidly, was in anticipation of much higher revenue this year. But it was things like the additional infrastructure we put in place in sales, support infrastructure for all the selling that's going on. And eventually, those need to turn into orders as we are now very diversified in terms of the number of engagements at high level, but they obviously need to come to fruition. Otherwise, you put all these dollars in place, and they're not helping. So there's explicit direct sales direct costs associated with that.

We also have in our forecast, it's a little different than last year, the mix of our customers changing with some new customers, includes customers that today we're engaged in, both directly and with local reps in those countries, and they have a commission structure in them that is higher upfront than later. So we have, you know, a pretty material. I think it's $700,000-$800,000 or so in external commissions on what would seem to be the same dollars, but it's actually dollars that are bought by new customers in new markets or new countries that has kind of messed us up a little bit. But, I mean, good money spent, for sure, but that's another one.

And then, you know, we've got some of the legal things, legal costs that we've talked about with respect to, I'm just gonna use the code name, with the acquisition, right? That are going on. And, there's a few other things with respect to some profit sharing and some other things that are slightly different year-on-year. We definitely are making investments in R&D this year, both, incremental to the, I'll call it, the wafer-level burn-in product line, we have to get used to thinking about that, but also we'll be making some incremental investments in the package part. We'll talk more about that roadmap as we close that deal, but some things that we're already, you know, contemplating and working on. It's interesting, we just did our strategic planning last week, and we're looking at the R&D programs.

While things like Sierra, the automated aligner and some enhancements, the silicon carbide roadmaps are pretty much in play. I mean, we're meeting the customer needs with all the different capabilities that we need. So the bulk of the R&D resources this year are all in the other markets that we've talked about, in pure execution against some things, against the GaN guys, the hard disk drive, the flash memory side of things, and the AI. All kind of incremental to our platform, so nothing like, you know, boil the ocean, but it's kind of fun to watch us being able to start, you know, putting more energy behind these other markets.

Jed Dorsheimer (Group Head–Energy and Power Technologies)

Got it. And then, well, that begs the, I guess, my final question. So given these changes, you know, as you start to grow in these other areas, how do you see—has there been a shift in... I would assume that once you cover those, incremental investments, you'll have a contribution margin that drops. How does that leverage look? Is it, you know, at $80 million, or $100 million? How do you—how are you thinking about getting back to, that 20%, operating margin or, or above?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

You know, I mean, you and you guys have created your models on there. If you were to think that our OpEx is approximately the same going forward this year, does that make sense? Like, it went up, but our revenues didn't go up. I think we've put the infrastructure in place majorly to be able to to continue to grow, get back to our $100 million-plus run rate that we were on, without incremental expenses. So I mean, I would be careful ratcheting it down, but if you were to look at similar gross margins and then just incremental revenue, you could draw a line and connect the dots as to when we get back to 20, you know, 25% plus net profits, pre-tax.

Jed Dorsheimer (Group Head–Energy and Power Technologies)

Got it.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Okay.

Jed Dorsheimer (Group Head–Energy and Power Technologies)

I'll jump back in the queue.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Okay.

Jed Dorsheimer (Group Head–Energy and Power Technologies)

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Okay, the next question comes from Jon Gruber with Gruber & McBaine. Please proceed.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Jon, that's you. He just misspelled your name, mispronounced your name a little bit.

Jon Gruber (Partner)

Yeah, um-

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Oh.

Jon Gruber (Partner)

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, a good presentation, a lot of prospects, but what I don't understand is, with the acquisition, all these prospects, you know, you get flash memory 30% in new things, the disk drives. Why is there no revenue growth excluding the acquisition?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah, I think you're getting it right. I mean, I think and Jed kind of put some numbers together, and that's probably not a bad model to think about. It's really about the, you know, the push-outs that we saw with respect to the silicon carbide ramps, that, you know, things we were expecting people to be coming in pretty strong. And let me make it right a little nicer than that. And we're just looking at soft forecasts right now. We have multiple customers in our forecast that, you know, are gonna buy one or two systems and not a lot of big ones.

Jon Gruber (Partner)

Mm-hmm.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

So our key customers themselves, for example, and again, we've got, if you just look at the big silicon carbide guys, so let's just back up, so I'm not talking about my customers in general, but or who they are. But I think if you look at the top four silicon carbide customers, they all guided down this year. And so, you know, there have been people that are, you know, were wondering how bad it was gonna be for us, and can we even continue to maintain our growth while they're having a soft year, followed by a strong year? So I think, I think we're, it's the right thing to do right now, is to communicate this. If we see strength in the second half come in harder than we are currently conservatively forecasting, then we'll guide up at that time.

Jon Gruber (Partner)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Okay. Thanks, Jon.

Okay, the next question comes from Matt Winthrop with Equitable. Please proceed.

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

Equitable, I don't know. Hey, guys. How you doing, Gayn?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

I'm good, thanks, Matt.

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

Sort of on a global basis, I have never seen a company turn, or you turn as excited 180 degrees from how dour you were the last two calls. Is there anything you can put your finger on? Are cycles shorter? Were you guys super lucky, had a lot of things in the fire that all started to turn? What do you, so what do you attribute that sort of much more upbeat and such a rapid sort of positive, at least potentially positive outlook going forward?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Geez, Matt, I feel like I'm always a pretty optimistic and upbeat guy, so you know-

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

Listen to the last two calls.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Well, I mean, that's kind of weird, and you know, I know you mean that professionally, not on a personal level.

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

Yeah.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

But I'll just say, on a personal level, I feel like, you know, in January and February, you know, we had customers... When we forecasted last year, we weren't, you know, our forecast was bigger than what we told you guys, okay? Not that anyone thought $100 million was conservative, but I did. We had these customers that were anticipating those fabs going in, and then by the time we got to November and December, you started to see some of the, you know, wheels getting wobbly, and people got kind of scared, and they just held. We absolutely were, you know, completed benchmarks or finished with people that we thought would've been buying, you know, two, three, four months ago, and they just pushed out.

It just sort of seemed, as a lot of these things are, you know, if you look at the kind of technology adoption cycle, I can draw it, but if I can draw it in everyone's mind, you know, you're going up this hill, it actually accelerates a little bit, then it turns over and goes down, turns around again, and then goes up strong. That sort of technology adoption cycle has existed in a lot of different things. And when you turn down that first time, it's pretty scary. And people are like, "Oh, gosh, that's it." You know, we went from...

You know, a year and a half ago, our entire business model was built around the crazy idea, one of the things that was driving the silicon carbide, and it wasn't always about silicon carbide, but that 30% of EVs, or 30% of automobiles in 2030 would be EVs, or 30 million. At that time, people were like: Come on, is that even possible or not? By around fall, people were saying: Oh, it's gonna be way higher than that, and way sooner than that, which we never repeated. And it was as if everybody and their brother was gonna be driving an EV, but we didn't buy into that because we're looking at the fabs. I'm looking at the ground, and there's dirt, and they're not putting that fab in yet.

But people were talking about it with such, you know, such enthusiasm, and even our customers were starting to get as excited. And then they went to the opposite, like, oh, gloom is doom, you know, doom, you know, everyone's all gloomy. The reality is, they're not. You go and you talk to, and we have the opportunity, which is the first time in my whole career, I'm talking to my customer's customer, or if you call OEMs, the tier one's customer, if you're in the automotive book. We're actually the customer's customer's customer. Sitting with them face to face, talking about burn-in times and quality and reliability, and scary, talking about multiple companies' burn-in times and test times and things. Not because I'm sharing anything, I can guarantee that.

They're, but they're really trying to drive for higher quality and higher burn-in and, you know, through the market. And some of those players are going to start building their own silicon, or silicon carbide in this case, to drive for their own quality requirements. Very interesting. You see these people, and you see their roadmap, and they're putting in place massive factories. And by the way, way more so outside the U.S. than the U.S. U.S. is really kind of its own thing, and the market penetration is gonna end up being less than you'll see in Korea and Europe and certainly China, but even in Japan. But you start talking to the big chap, Japan OEMs, as we have, the Korean OEMs as we have, the China OEMs as we have.

And the European OEMs as we have, you can see through their eyes, this is serious. It's not going to be 30% tomorrow, but it—EVs are certainly coming. And that gives me reason to believe that we'll be okay, and that our business is gonna be strong, and more and more data to support why you need long wafer level burn-in test times. I continue to get reminded of that, including news even in the last few days again, okay? On top of that, our whole story, if you will, is about semiconductors growing from $600 billion to over $1 trillion by the end of the decade. More and more semiconductors need reliability tests, because in reality, they have—they're not getting more reliable. Compound semiconductors.

Nobody was using compound semiconductors, like they're talking about with silicon carbide, gallium nitride, the elements putting into optical. They all need burn-in. More and more memory, stacked memory, HBM memory, flash memory going to SSDs, processors, AI processors, they all need to be burnt in. Because they're going into applications where the reliability is not good enough for them to last long term. And as people go to heterogeneous integration or multi-chip modules or whatever you wanna call it, it was driving for wafer level burn-in, and now we even see it's beyond that, even with the package challenges that's going on with the AI. So yeah, if you're reading into it, I'm enthusiastic. We're in a really good spot that's not temporary. This is an upward draft where we saw a softness, we're gonna be fine.

We have highly differentiated, sought-after products, and we certainly have the manufacturing capacity inventory to be able to meet those needs. And so, yeah, you know, we're gonna do well.

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

That, my friend, is a fantastic-

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Sorry about that.

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

That, my friend, is a fantastic answer. Keep, keep on plugging, and we'll, we'll keep watching. I appreciate everything you do again.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Thanks, Matt. Thank you.

Matt Winthrop (Financial Advisor)

Yeah.

Operator (participant)

Okay, the next question comes from Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Yes, good afternoon, and thanks for the question. Gayn, curious, you know, when you look at the book of business you had a year ago, when there was $100 million you thought you'd get for the year, versus where you are today, I assume most of that was silicon carbide, and a lot of that's been pushed out. So I guess the first part of the question is: How far have some of these programs been delayed or pushed out? Obviously, some of them look like they're about a year behind schedule. And then the second part of the question is: Have they all been pushed out, or have some of them been canceled?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah, so okay, so it feels like mostly pushed out. You know, so if I, that's actually, I like the way you phrased it, 'cause it helps me remember. I'm good at remembering what I thought at the time. If I were looking at my forecast and my funnel last year, I had, like, three big guys that were all planning to be buying in the spring. Two new ones, and more from one of our, the big league guys. I'm sorry, four big guys, okay? One of them struggled to build some products. Another one ended up doing well with their package part because of the way the customer mix. The other one had some slowdowns. Another one, and two others. Actually, that's right, there's five of them.

Two others were in the midst of evaluations, and they didn't end up pulling the trigger 'cause they pushed out their fabs. So, I mean, that's, and I was, you know, $10 million here, $20 million there, $15 million there, and you kind of do this, and so a lot of it just sort of shifted out in time. Every single one of those is still absolutely committed to wafer level burn-in and modules, and their fab capacities have pushed. What they told the street and themselves one year ago is definitely pushed out from that now, but every one of those fabs is... Well, that's not true. Most of those fabs have all been continuing to be reiterated and reannounced. I think there's some people that might have pushed this fab out a little bit further.

So if you look at the OEMs, in some cases, some of the big guys, like, like, you know, if you look at Korea, Japan and Europe, their ramps were always 2025, 2026. It feels like these early EVs were like foot soldiers, like, you know, forward, whatever they call it, you know, scouts, to test the water, but their big programs are yet to come. And some of those haven't even changed their mind. This is still the exact same, same schedule they were on, but now it's just getting closer. So, you know, it feels like to me, that it's about, you know, a one to one and a half year push out of most of those guys, and, and I believe it'll come back.

The difference is, I don't think anybody believes, you know, no one's saying, "Oh, it's gonna be 60% penetration by the end of the decade." They're back more to the 30% kind of number, which is a lot of systems for us.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Yeah. Okay, and then, and the second question would be, you know, think back to a year ago again, and when you think about the car makers themselves, are they all still on the silicon carbide path, or have some of them decided to stick with Silicon a little bit longer?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah. So I think it's they’re more towards silicon carbide than they were a year ago. And I can. Yeah, I have specific examples of it. I'd be careful of it, but some of the examples were, you know, people were like, well, so a lot of cars, as you know, have more than one engine in it, okay? And if you look at two years ago, it was very common, people understood that, Tesla put the IGBT in the front and silicon carbide was the first one in the back always. So if you had a single engine, it was silicon carbide. If you had two, a silicon carbide in back and IGBT in front. IGBT is silicon for everybody else that's not knowing, okay? So, they had different properties, et cetera.

My car that I'm driving, I have a Model S, has two silicon carbide engines in it. Engines, the inverters. So we've heard that more and more from the OEMs, they actually prefer to just use silicon carbide, and candidly, 'cause costs have come down and availability is up, they can afford to do that. Trying to think. There's other things I have that's more under NDAs and stuff I can't share, but I believe more and more. One things that shocked me when I was in China, is how the China OEM guys really talked to silicon carbide with preference. Now, there's still models that they're gonna have a second engine in IGBT, but it's more and more silicon carbide in all modules, as a preference. So I'd say more conviction to silicon carbide and more to modules than a year ago.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Great. All right. I appreciate the perspective, and thanks for the time.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Thanks, Tom.

Operator (participant)

Okay, we have a follow-up coming from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks. I just have a quick follow-up, Gayn. We did hit China and Silicon Photonics. Whether you expect those to be revenues in fiscal 2025 or 2026?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Okay. Yeah, so, I think we have forecasts for China. Well, yeah, I guess I just said it. We have forecasts for China this year. And silicon photonics, I think we have some as well. Pretty conservative assumptions right now. Yeah, like, I don't think we have it assumed to be 10% this year. Could it be? Sure. But, you know, the problem with the silicon photonics, at least the optical I/O, is... And again, obviously, there's more than I can share, so I – job is pretty clean. But, you know, those companies that would drive that roadmap, hold those cards close to their chest, right? They're not out – there's no market.

You tell me what NVIDIA, AMD, Intel is gonna do and the other AI processors, and I'll tell you what the optical I/O market will look like. And they're not talking publicly about it. So we know a little bit more than we can share. We'll just watch, and we'll have to be careful being the canary to let everybody know what's going on. But, you know, if people start announcing optical I/O chip-to-chip, you can just think to yourself, "That's good for us." And, China right now is all silicon carbide customers. They have GaN, too, by the way. Their current engagements are all silicon carbide today. Yeah, for China. By the way-

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Perfect.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

A couple more things on China, a little bit more color for people, okay? To us, China is not all one market, and I know people are listening to this, okay? There are companies that are gonna build extensions and do things in China that are, say, not Chinese companies, right? And they're very protective of their IP, and they wanna be very careful with it. And so if you sell to them outside of China and they want you to build in China, we love those guys, right? That's not the same, even though it would be in China, okay? Second is that we have companies that are OEMs today, that are using our products. Well, they use silicon carbide that's built on our product, and they know it. They drive the test times. They know what's going on, et cetera.

They have a high preference for our equipment, and they've talked about potentially dual sourcing in China, okay? Well, in that case, they've said, "Hey, we wanna use your system because we like the same capabilities and all." Well, we like those guys a lot as well. There's other companies that are actually building products themselves, think of trains and planes or cars, and they wanna build silicon carbide. What I can tell you is those companies are so paranoid and so acutely aware of the relationship between burn-in times and quality, that they are like, "I will dictate a specific burn-in process at a specific quality. It's really important to me, and I like what your system does, and it matters." I like those guys, okay? There's other guys that are saying: I wanna buy a bunch of systems from you. I've tried some stuff locally.

I'm not sure how well it works, blah, blah, blah. I'm like: Well, how many systems are you talking about? If you wanna buy a bunch from me, I like that a lot. It just makes me a little nervous about, you know, the overall IP concerns there. And then we have companies that say, "I'd like to buy an engineering system." Yeah, we're not interested. I mean, there's a spread. If you're committed to us and you can show us some preference and show us that you're willing to help us protect our IP, even though we have patents all over the place, you get preferential treatment, if you will. So enough on China. I hope that helps give you a little more clarity, though.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

That does. Then my last question was just a means of potential clarity. You talked about OpEx being flat in aggregate year-over-year because you overspent this year. Does that include Incal, or is that a comment on your business when Incal-

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

No, no, my OpEx this year-

I'm sorry, my OpEx this year is higher than last year, is what I've said. So if you look at, if you look at the numbers, you know, and I think if you just sort of look linear across, you'll find there's maybe $3 million-$3.5 million missing. Like, wait, wait, what happened here? We're actually. That's, that's a result of several areas of expenditures. I forgot to throw Chris under the bus a little bit, too, because we're also spending more, more money on, on, finance and other things that we did for SOX compliance and stuff.

But we have incremental expenses in R&D, we have incremental expenses in legal, we have incremental expenses in commissions, we added more people in sales, and we have a little bit more finance side of things, and then a sprinkling of some bonuses tied around the company, kind of to represent those dollars.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. I guess just for clarity, Cal, again, for Incal, how much should we assume is their quarterly OpEx?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

We haven't done that yet. That's a good-

Chris Siu (CFO)

Well, right now, the forecast outlook, we have already include them-

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Right

Chris Siu (CFO)

in the calculation, in the forecast.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

That's right.

Chris Siu (CFO)

Yeah, in the model right now.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah. It's a relatively small company.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

I got it.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

We will. I mean, I think we've shared about this before, but you know, as our headcount goes up, they have about 24 employees. They have a lease for next couple of years that's right down the street from us. We haven't talked about synergies. Synergies aren't gonna come through people, no way. You know, we need to... But you know, over time, we don't need that second building, potentially, you know, those kind of things. But we're not, you know, we don't—we're not needing to scrounge to try and do any expense reductions or things like that. No way. We're gonna spend more money with those guys.

Christian Schwab (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, got it. I got it. Thanks, Gayn. Thanks for the added clarity.

Chris Siu (CFO)

Thank you.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Thank you. One last round for folks, please. Anyone else with a raised hand?

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Shahar Cohen with Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Shahar?

Shahar Cohen (Founder and Managing Partner)

Hi, guys, congrats for the amazing turnaround and the specifications into other than SiC. A question about Incal. So first, how much of their current revenue is from their legacy Advantest, you know, sub-manufacturing, if you can disclose? And B, to what their Sonoma family, which as I read in the website, is that the one that's supposed to do the high watt testing? Is that already used in testing of AI application, and is that already used by NVIDIA, and did they incur major revenue growth in the last year or so, as one should expect, or do you expect them to grow significantly in 2025 versus 2024 calendar year?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Okay. All right, Shahar, you've done your homework, so you're gonna make me back up and let people know, try and catch up with you a little bit. All right, so Incal is made up of two, kind of, two sources of revenue. They have a test and burn-in business, which is made up of really three families of burn-in systems: low power, medium power, and high power. Their Alpine line of systems is the low power, Tahoe is their mid power, Sonoma is high power. They're all fully compatible from a software perspective.

They all have a similar hardware and software architecture, but a very unique platform concept that I think, from a tester guide, the Alpine system uses panel test electronics and power supplies that are shared over multiple burn-in boards and multiple devices on each burn-in board, making it one of the lowest cost, most cost-effective burn-in systems on the market. We struggled to ever compete with that product line before. Their Tahoe system is a mid-power system, candidly similar in many of the features to our old ABTS system or our current ABTS system, but it has power supplies and panel electronics that power each burn-in board for more capability and more power, with individual temperature control and amazing software.

Sonoma uses, again, similar panel electronics and power supplies, but per device, allowing them to actually locally generate extremely high currents within millimeters of the device, very similar to how the application works, which is one of its key differentiators. And that allows them to be able to be used for these really high-powered, like AI devices. The Sonoma is, in fact, what has really been growing for them. They have multiple customers on each of their platforms, and there is revenue in all three of those segments, even within our fiscal year going forward, and we're currently committed to meeting the needs of those customers. We have no plans to abandon any of those roadmaps. Okay?

But Sonoma is where a lot of the real growth is, and customers want to pull it into production, where we can help them with. You mentioned something that we haven't talked about publicly, but I'll go ahead and go mention it. They actually also do some repair business for, kind of as a third-party repair authorization, and, we haven't talked about that yet. That's, something ahead of us. We've pulled that out of the revenue from last year, so we didn't talk about how much revenue they did in that business, okay? So, the kind of million-dollar run rate is without that business.

Shahar Cohen (Founder and Managing Partner)

Got you. So, thank you very much for the color. Really helpful. Any more color you can provide on the Sonoma growth rate, maybe that was or may be expected?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

... Yeah, we'll stay pat on this for right now. I mean, and I'm not trying to be super elusive. We wanna go see all of the customers and be able to build that up. But you know, we'll probably get you more information. In general, also, we don't normally forecast too much going forward on all the different product lines, just for competitive reasons, too. But that's the area that I think that we're both companies are most excited about to try and help. Although there's a bunch of Tahoe customers, too, that are asking for production volume. So there's the mid-power and high-power systems are pretty interesting, and they've been growing and, you know, we would hope that we can help accelerate that growth.

Shahar Cohen (Founder and Managing Partner)

All right. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

Okay, the next question comes from Larry Chlebina with Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Hey, Larry.

Larry Chlebina (President)

Hey, Gayn, your AI processor job, once you complete that, could that evolve into possibly getting into heterogeneous PC chips? You know, high-volume PC chips are all going heterogeneous.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Perhaps, yes. I mean, it's very interesting, the dynamics in the test space that have gone on with the advent of system-level test, which is, you know, highly adapted, designed for test methodologies, as well as application-specific test methodologies that have really changed the way people look at, semiconductor test. And then with the heterogeneous integration or the idea you take these chiplets, and you take all these devices, and you put them all together onto even a silicon substrate. Sometimes the silicon substrate has DRAM in it. It actually has active things inside of it. And you have this, you know, multi-chip module, unlike you've ever seen before, made up of, you know, a couple of compute processors, you know, four or six stacks of high-bandwidth memory, a couple of optical I/O interfaces on it, et cetera.

You think each one of those devices I mentioned today has 100% burn-in. Where are you gonna do it? You wanna do it at the package level, when all those pieces are there? The answer is, not if you can help it. You wanna move all that stuff to die level, and wafer is the best way to handle the die. So, you know, all of this whole topic just gets me excited as a nerdy test guy because that's all good for us. And you know, bringing on, I always keep using their code name, but Intel, to be able to help us 'cause they're doing, you know, the burning of those heterogeneous packages, right? I've seen them.

You know, it's pretty cool, and you're watching what they're doing, and I can't help but think, "Well, boy, maybe we can also help some of this stuff go to wafer level, and if not, we got the package." I would, you know, the beauty is I'll have both.

Larry Chlebina (President)

That, that's where I was going next.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Yeah.

Larry Chlebina (President)

Does that open up the possibility to go wafer level on some of those projects?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Perhaps, and if not, we got them covered. I mean, I... You know, it's just way better to be able to say, you know, whatever you want, but I just think there's opportunities, and you start seeing it all blurring together. You're like: Wait a minute, you got this optical I/O wafer level. You got heterogeneous. You know, you've got, you know, stacks and stacks of high-bandwidth memory. How can we get that to wafer level? Now, you got a processor that you can put into test modes and do a, you know, a long cycle burn-in in a much more scalable, also lower power mode than at the system level. That might not only be an enabler for scale, but might even, you might even be able to even get enough electricity to do it.

You four, you're like: Wow, there's just—it's a target-rich environment. Being able to go and actually sit down with these companies that are building them for their own use or building them for sale or building them for rent or building, you know, it's exciting.

Larry Chlebina (President)

Okay, one last question. On the flash memory opportunity, I tried getting you on this at the CEO Summit, as is the opportunity in a new fab, or is it possibly in an existing fab, since it requires higher power than maybe existing systems can handle these?

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

This was probably one of the many questions you asked me that I said I can't answer till I answer for everybody, huh?

Larry Chlebina (President)

You said you were gonna answer it on the conference call, so here we go.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

All right. So, I think I can see both. Generally speaking, people think about making big changes when it's time to do a new fab, right?

Larry Chlebina (President)

Yep.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

So it's an easier cut to think about the new fabs that are coming online between DRAM and flash over the next, you know, four, five, six, seven years. However, having spent, you know, 20 years of my life building memory testers, I—you know, every five years, I was replacing the memory tester I sold them five years ago, which sounds crazy, but you get to a point where, through parallelism or power or capability, you can't even use the old tool. And this is true with a lot of ATE systems today. Like, you know, I was part of, you know, HP, Agilent, Verigy, we were acquired by Advantest. Advantest has the 93K platform now that we designed in HP back in the late 1990s. And today, those 93Ks are fully compatible.

People will have may have hundreds and hundreds of these on their floor, but they'll buy a new board that goes into that machine each year to meet new capabilities. So in some ways, we built our platform similar, like the FOX system. The FOX, the very first FOX system we built was for flash memory, right? And people that know our history know that at the time, it was like we were too small and a little too risky. And along came a couple of companies that said, "You know what?

We're willing to look the other way on your risk, because what you have is novel and unique, and I need it." One of them happened to be one of the, or the biggest iPhone manufacturer in the world for facial recognition, and another one was what now is the biggest silicon photonics company in the world for their platform. That parlayed into multiple different customers, multiple different applications, silicon carbide, now GaN, and these other applications where people are interested in using it. But memory is still a core target for us, and we think that we can get into that. Our install base, those customers have critical technical needs going forward in their roadmap, that it's gonna require them to make changes. The equipment they have will not work.

At that point, we could displace, you know, seemingly perfectly good systems in their fabs with new ones that are better. So I think it can be-

Larry Chlebina (President)

Be great if it'd be both.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Me too. I'll take one right now, Larry. I'll take, you know, we're excited. This is a big deal to us, that this commitment. People don't make this commitment lightly. And, oh, by the way, there's another one. We're talking about expenses. I'm gonna spend some money on this flash development this year. You know, it's, it's expensive, what we're gonna be doing, and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna build up some WaferPaks, we're gonna be doing some technology, we're gonna do some prototyping, we're gonna put a bunch of manpower on it. We may not make a dime this year, and it will be all that OpEx money worth spent. Because this. I think this market needs it, I think flash first, then DRAM, and I think we're in a great position architecturally to be able to address that.

Any one of those deals is enormous.

Larry Chlebina (President)

Yep. Well, it's worthwhile doing, that's for sure. All right, thanks, Gayn. Have a good night.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

Thanks, Larry.

Larry Chlebina (President)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

There are no further questions in queue.

Gayn Erickson (President and CEO)

All right. Folks, thank you very much. I know that we ran a little longer than normal. We really appreciate everyone's time. We'll figure out how to make these as concise as possible, as our story is no longer focused on a narrow, you know, market or two and, you know, a couple of few customers. So, we'll find our way to be able to summarize and make it easier to digest. But we're really excited about this, excited to head into the new year, and we welcome our new friends from Incal. We're throwing a lunch for them in a couple of days, so we're excited to host them to come over and meet the crew. And we'll keep you guys updated on a quarterly basis. Have a good one, and take care.