Onto Innovation - Earnings Call - Q4 2020

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Today, and welcome to the Onto Innovation fourth quarter earnings release. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Michael Sheaffer with investor relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Michael Sheaffer (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone. Onto Innovation issued its 2024 quarter and full year financial results this afternoon, shortly after the market closed. If you have not received a copy of the release, please refer to the company's website at www.OntoInnovation.com, where a copy of the release is posted. Joining us on the call today are Michael Plisinski, Chief Executive Officer, and Steven Ross, Chief Financial Officer. As is always the case, I need to remind you of the Safe Harbor regulations. Any matters today that are not historical facts, especially comments regarding the company's future plans, products, objectives, forecasted, and expected performance, consist of forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These estimates, whether expressed or implied, are being made based on currently available information and the company's best judgment at this time.

Within these is a wide range of assumptions that the company believes to be reasonable. However, it must be recognized that these statements are subject to a range of certainties that can cause the actual results to vary materially. Thus, the company cautions that these statements are no guarantee of future performance. Risk factors that may impact Onto Innovation's results are currently described in Onto Innovation's Form 10-K report for the year end of December 2019, as well as other quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Onto Innovation does not update forward-looking statements and expressly disclaims any obligation to do so. Today's discussion of our financial results will be presented on a non-GAAP financial basis unless otherwise specified. As a reminder, a detailed reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results can be found in today's earnings release.

I will now go ahead and turn the call over to Michael Plisinski. Michael.

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and a happy, healthy new year to each of you and your families. With 2020 successfully behind us, the Onto Innovation team is looking forward to a new year fueled by strong markets and our strengthening customer partnerships. We're proud to already have five of our six new products announced in 2020, accepted by top-tier semiconductor manufacturers, clearing the way for further adoption in 2021. In addition, we added new markets such as high-end image sensors, planar film metrology, and heterogeneous packaging. In total, we estimate that by the end of 2020, we expanded our available markets by over $500 million. Our successful integration of Rudolph and Nanometrics creates a strong financial foundation, already achieving the gross and operating margins outlined in our long-term operating model.

This foundation enables growth from both organic and inorganic investments, such as our recent acquisition of Inspectrology, a leader in overlay metrology for the expanding compound semiconductor market. Now, let's start with some highlights from the fourth quarter. Our growth in the fourth quarter exceeded the high end of guidance, increasing 23% over the prior quarter, while our operating income grew 58% over the same period. Revenue from customer expansions and advanced nodes doubled over the third quarter. The strongest growth came from NAND customers, but we also saw double-digit growth from both DRAM and logic customers. In total, we delivered standalone systems to 10 customers to support these expansions.

Building on the broad appeal of the current Atlas platform, we shipped our newest Atlas V systems to multiple logic customers for evaluations at 5 and 3 nanometer design rules, as well as evaluations for leading DRAM devices for the 1Z and 1 Alpha nodes. Complementing our Atlas platform, Impulse integrated metrology revenue increased significantly in the quarter, but more importantly, we added a new DRAM customer. After an extensive evaluation, the customer selected Impulse for the most critical process steps in their next-generation memory product expected to ramp in 2021. We estimate these critical steps will represent over half of this customer's integrated metrology volume. We also recognized revenue on our industry-first Aspect IRCD technology, providing high aspect ratio channel hole measurements critical for 3D NAND with over 170 device layers.

We have successfully demonstrated the capability to other NAND customers and expect to deliver several evaluation units in the first half of the year. Demand for Element compositional metrology is expanding, driven by the impact of slight material variations on transistor performance at the most advanced nodes. In the quarter, a second memory supplier selected the Element System for inline composition metrology of incoming wafers. In addition, a leading supplier of material deposition equipment took shipment of an Element System for the characterization and development of next-generation dielectrics for advanced 3D NAND and logic devices. While we don't expect large volumes from this customer, we do anticipate additional orders. Now, let's review our packaging and specialty device market, which resulted in our largest source of revenue for the second quarter in a row. Growth in the fourth quarter was up another 3%, following a 44% jump in the third quarter.

Revenue from our customers supporting 5G represented the strongest growth in the quarter. Estimates for MediaTek and Qualcomm of another 500 million 5G-enabled phones in 2021, an increase of over 250% over 2020, suggests continued strong growth in the new year. To support rapidly shrinking interconnect geometries, customers are demanding more precise and repeatable measurements. This trend has contributed to revenue from our flagship Dragonfly platform doubling in 2020 over 2019. In collaboration with our leading customers, we recently released the third-generation Dragonfly system. This new system increases 2D sensitivity by 40% and throughput by 30%. Our 3D metrology throughput has increased by a very impressive 50%. We've shipped multiple third-generation Dragonfly systems to both OSATs and top five semiconductor manufacturers. In addition, the Dragonfly G3 was selected by another top three manufacturer of image sensors for mobile devices.

The Dragonfly platform was the only tool capable of detecting a critical yield defect at full production speed. We expect follow-on orders from this customer in the first half of 2021. To conclude the fourth quarter highlights, our new products are well-positioned to support the transistor and packaging architectures that are enabling new devices for AI and data center applications and the transition to 5G. The timing of these inflections is setting the stage for a strong 2021, which I'll discuss after Steve covers the fourth quarter financial highlights. Steve?

Steven Roth (CFO)

Thanks, Mike. And good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin my remarks, Mike mentioned that we recently closed the Inspectrology acquisition. That occurred at the end of December, however, after our close of our fiscal year. Therefore, that acquisition had no effect on the results that we'll be discussing today. Let's begin. Our fourth quarter revenue was $155.1 million, slightly above the high end of our previous guidance, up 23% from the third quarter of $126.5 million. As we discussed on our last conference call, we expected to see strong recovery in our advanced node business, which increased over 100% in the quarter, driven by memory and logic.

Our fourth quarter revenue would have been approximately $4 million higher, however, a few tools that we had to ship to a Chinese customer were halted because the customer was placed on the entities list by the U.S. government in late December. We've applied for a license to ship those tools, and the high end of our Q1 guidance assumes that the licenses will be approved in time for shipping in the quarter. Breaking down revenue by market, 42% of sales were in our advanced packaging specialty device market, with the strength related to the 5G RF market. Advanced nodes was 37% of revenue in the quarter, and software and services represented the remaining 21%. Turning to gross margin, our gross margin continued to stay strong at 54%, consistent with the third quarter.

Fourth quarter margin was impacted by product mix, including the sale of the lithography system, which typically has a lower margin profile. We expect to see continued improving margins as our new products provide enhanced value to our customers, and our supply chain synergies continue to impact our product cost. As we look forward to Q1, we expect increasing revenues in our key markets and currently anticipate margins to be in the range of 54-55%. Moving to operating expenses, fourth quarter operating expenses were $46.3 million, an increase from $45.1 million in the third quarter of 2020. The change was primarily due to an increase in project expenses, as a contracted R&D project that provides an R&D credit in the third that provided an R&D credit in the third quarter was lower in Q4.

In addition, less employees taking paid time off in the fourth quarter also contributed to the increase. For the 2021 first quarter, we are seeing an increase in operating expenses as a result of the Inspectrology acquisition. As such, we expect Q1 operating expenses to be in the range of $47.5 million-$48.5 million, with the majority of the increase over the fourth quarter being from the acquisition. We've identified cost synergies totaling about 20% of the historical operating expenses of Inspectrology; however, we do not expect to see the realization of those synergies to start until the second half of 2021. On our last call, I noted that at the midpoint of the revenue guidance we provided, we would be operating at quarterly revenue levels that would put us entering our long-term operating model, which we established for the Rudolph Nanometrics merger.

As you can see from today's results, our gross margin was north of 54%, and our operating margin north of 24%, both in line with that model. We expect those results to continue to strengthen as we drive to the upper end of our long-term model, with operating margins of 32-33% and greater than $5 per share earnings power. Our effective tax rate for the fourth quarter was 5% and 12% for the full year of 2020, which was below our normal rate of approximately 17%. The lower rate was due to the conclusion of an IRS audit and a net operating loss carried back claim we filed in the fourth quarter to tax years with higher statutory rates. For 2021, we expect the tax rate to return to a normal level of between 16 and 17%.

Net income increased in the fourth quarter and was $35.6 million or $0.72 per share, and above the high end of our guidance. In the 2023 quarter, we reported a net income of $19.6 million or $0.40 per share. Higher revenues and the lower tax rate that I just discussed contributed to the stronger performance. Moving to the balance sheet, which is on a GAAP basis, we ended the quarter with a cash position of $374 million, up $33 million from Q3, and our cash from operations was $105 million for the full year. Accounts receivable increased in the quarter on high revenues and ended at $149 million, and inventory increased in the quarter to $191 million on anticipated higher Q1 sales. Finally, turning to first quarter guidance, we expect revenues to be in the range of $155 million-$169 million.

In this range, we expect earnings to be between $0.62 and $0.76 per share. With that, I'll turn it back to Mike for additional insight into Q1 and 2021. Mike.

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

Thank you, Steve. We see several secular trends contributing to another year of strength for the semiconductor equipment industry. The continued proliferation of billions of connected devices and the massive amounts of data they send every second to the cloud is driving demand for the most advanced memory and logic devices to support new applications in artificial intelligence and high-performance compute. The transition to 5G, which is only just beginning, will drive an estimated 250% growth in 5G-enabled handsets in 2021, further increasing demand for advanced logic memory and the numerous specialty devices that go into those handsets. Advanced packaging is playing a more pivotal role in the roadmaps of many device manufacturers as they drive smaller geometries and heterogeneous packaging to deliver products with higher performance and lower power consumption.

We expect to play a prominent role in the transition to heterogeneous packaging by leveraging our JetStep Lithography, Firefly Inspection, and Discover software suite to overcome challenges from shrinking geometries across larger packages. We expect to start shipping these new solutions to customers beginning in the second quarter. Another important secular trend is the transition to electric vehicles driven by consumers and supported by various government initiatives. The EU has announced a plan to ban new fossil fuel car sales by 2030. California, Japan, and others have announced their plans to ban the sale of new combustion engine vehicles by 2035. This transition to electric vehicles is accelerating demand for power controls, smart vehicle sensors, and other systems to optimize drive trains, battery life, and charging. Many of these critical devices are produced using compound semiconductor processes such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide.

Inspectrology is a leading supplier of overlay metrology specific to these unique processes. By augmenting their overlay metrology with our Discover run-to-run software, defect inspection, and process analysis software, we'll provide a unique integrated solution to help customers meet aggressive ramp and yield targets. In addition to growth in the secular markets we serve, we are strengthening our customer relationships. For example, we recently completed two record-level volume purchase agreements, each representing over $100 million in target revenue for 2021. These agreements cover the breadth of our product lines across both front and back-end applications. Though not a guarantee of revenue, the agreements are a good indication of business health and our growing importance to these customers. Specific to the first quarter, the midpoint of the revenue guidance that Steve mentioned is up 4.4%.

We project revenue from advanced nodes increasing by double digits, led by logic customers investing in both 5-nanometer and 3-nanometer process technology. We also see modest growth in DRAM and a slight contraction in NAND after an incredibly strong fourth quarter. Packaging and specialty will remain essentially flat with the fourth quarter, with strong investments in packaging technology by leading IDMs offsetting the decline we typically see due to effects of seasonality. Considering the strength of our current backlog and the growing visibility we have into the second quarter, we expect the first half of 2021 will be over 20% stronger than the first half of 2020. It's an exciting time for Onto Innovation, and we appreciate the continued support from our customers as we look at the many opportunities in front of us. I also want to acknowledge and thank our dedicated team at Onto Innovation.

Thanks to their incredible teamwork and tireless commitment to our customers' success, we're positioned to have a more critical role in driving the future of our industry. With that, we'll open the call for your questions. Sarah?

Operator (participant)

If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing Star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, that is Star 1 to ask a question. We will go ahead and take our first question now from Craig Ellis with BofA.

The question, and Mike and Steve, congratulations on the product and sound expansion successes and entering into the target financial model range. Mike, I wanted to start just by following up on a couple of the points you made. The first one is regarding the two $100 million volume purchase agreements. I do not remember you commenting on such an item before, so can you put some context around that? You mentioned that those may or may not be for revenues in the current year. Any further color on their ability to either fall into this year or maybe spread over a multi-year period would be helpful.

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

Sure. As we have grown, as we merged and brought together the two companies, both companies were serving these large IDMs, and we had back-end, a lot of strength from the Rudolph side, from the back-end, from the Nanometrics side, some front-end. When our customers are looking at the total spend together, they are looking at putting together a more comprehensive plan, giving us more visibility, letting us understand where their expansion plans are coming across both the front-end and back-end, and making sure that we have the visibility to ramp along with them. The volume purchase agreements are meant to give that indication. In some cases, they are more formal than others. All of it is meant to define a year. This is not over multiple years. I think that was part of your question. It is all for this year.

It's an indication of what they see, what they expect to spend this year.

That sounds very constructive. Would you expect to enter into more of these types of agreements with other IDMs, or is this really something that is unique to these two customers, and we would not expect this to occur with others?

No, I think we would see this as we continue to grow our position and integrate more deeply into customers' roadmaps. I think this would be a more common occurrence as we rise.

Got it. Got it. The second question was related to the color on the first half of 2021. Congratulations on the 20% year-on-year growth that you see. The question is this: can you just comment on the visibility that you have as you look out across the full year, Mike? To what extent does that exist? Where might it be greater in some parts of the business than others? We have had some companies indicate that they would expect industry spending to be a little bit more front-half-weighted than steady or back-end-weighted linearity. Any sense from your end in terms of what that full-year contour might look like for Onto?

I think some of our customers in the front-end will be more front-end, first-half-weighted. Although when I look through the list, there was a mix, and a number of them are balanced. I think there'll be maybe a slight bias to the first half. Remember, half our business is volume-driven business, which really sees the pickup in the Q2 and Q3 timeframe. In addition to that, we see the new products that we've announced and gotten acceptance on. We would expect more of impact from that revenue in the second half. All things considered, I would say that we would expect first half, second half to be relatively, on the conservative basis, relatively the same for us.

Even if there's a slight bias towards the first half spending from some of our customers, I think with the new products and the traction we're gaining in some other areas that we would offset that.

Yep. Very helpful. Thank you. Finally, Steve, 54% gross margin second consecutive quarter, and first quarter guidance builds on that. Congratulations. Can you comment on the extent to which we have any lingering COVID costs or other costs that are in gross margins that you're working on? Maybe related to COGS, just express your comfort with supply sufficiency for the type of demand environment Mike's talked about and whether we should expect there would be any incremental costs down the road for expedites or other things that would be more common in a tight environment like we seem to be seeing out there.

Steven Roth (CFO)

Yeah. I think we've talked about in the past. The COVID side, while there's some incremental costs for cleaning and stuff like that in the factory, I mean, they're minimal comparatively. I mean, we're saving probably on the travel side, obviously, and we're turning some about on this kind of the cleaning and our protocols that we're putting in, so I kind of see them as somewhat of an offset. I wouldn't—I don't think there's anything you have to worry about from the COVID side impact. Supply chain, I think always the risk is how does COVID affect some of our other Asian suppliers and things like that if someone gets—one of those factories gets hit or something like that. So far, we've been able to manage through that.

We have had some impact at a supplier that I think we've talked about in the past, but we've been able to work through that. It is something that's clearly on our radar screen, something that we're obviously all concerned about because that's where a COVID effect could really hurt, not just us, but several of us in the industry, depending on which vendor that is. Right now, we're able to manage through it.

Thank you very much, Steve. Guys, congratulations on the strong start to calendar 2021.

Thanks, Craig.

Operator (participant)

We'll take our next question from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company.

Hey, guys. I'll also offer my congratulations on the nice finish to 2020 and the strong 2021 outlook. I guess maybe just starting with that 2021 outlook, Mike, it looks like many in the industry are calling for WFE to be up about 15% this year. When I take your commentary about the first half of 2021 for Onto growing 20% year-on-year, you'd get to about a $330 million first half. And your comments about a balanced first half, second half could imply you're going to do about $660 million this year. And that says you're up maybe 19% year-on-year, so outperforming WFE pretty nicely. Is that mostly through share gains and some of the new products you talked about gaining customer adoption? Is that kind of a good way to be thinking about how you can outgrow WFE this year?

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

Yeah. It is around the expansion within the markets we were serving, but also expanding our served markets. We talked about heterogeneous packaging and the transition towards panel packaging that that is going to drive. Of course, we would expect to be shipping steppers to support that in the second half. That is an upside. There is a series of things. As you may have picked up, we have released a lot of new products. Those products are gaining traction, and some are gaining traction through share gains in the existing markets, others through opening up new applications and new markets.

This is sort of a related question. You mentioned the Impulse win at a top-three DRAM manufacturer for their next-generation node. Is there any way you can sort of quantify how big that opportunity is? I mean, there's only three DRAM guys. They're all pretty large. Just trying to sort of think about what that could mean for Onto with that win.

The way we quantified it was it's over half the share. It also depends on how big the customer's ramp is. That is why I'm hesitating because they're still working on that ramp plan. From an integrated perspective, it's very significant. Let's put it that way. If that's an overall $100 million-$125 million-$150 million market, it's a meaningful move in share gain for us.

Great. Thank you. And just for Steve, given the outlook for panel lithography systems to start shipping in the second half of the calendar year, I know those systems carry lower gross margins. How much of a headwind would that be to gross margin in the second half? Or do you think some of the other IRIS, the Aspect tools can offset some of the higher shipments of the lithography in the second half?

Steven Roth (CFO)

Yeah. I think that's a good way to look at it. I mean, the lithography systems, obviously high ASP and lower volume. It's not like we're seeing a ramp of lots of units. We are, obviously, we've talked about the backlog we have in lithography for this year already or for this year. Yeah, again, I think having one or two lithography tools go in a quarter can easily be offset by some of the newer products we've got. I've talked about the value added of some of these new metrology products that we've added. I don't think you're going to see a real big headwind. You won't see that headwind, I don't think, in the numbers.

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

We'll take our next question from Patrick Ho with Stifel.

Thank you very much. And Belayda, happy New Year and congrats on the really nice finish to the year. Mike, maybe first off, a little more color on the DRAM metrology win you talked about in the prepared remarks. One, can you give us what type of applications those wins were for? And secondly, we've seen the process control intensity increase for both NAND and logic over the last several years. Are you seeing that now more in OCD metrology for the DRAM side as well?

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

On your first question, it's for integrated metrology applications, which are primarily CMP. We're working with several customers to expand based on the stability and the speed at which we're making these measurements. They're looking at other process steps where integrated hasn't been traditionally used, but they see potential benefit based on the quality of the measurements that we're able to provide. For this win, it was CMP. To your second question—what was the second question? Sorry, I missed your second question.

Oh, process control intensity in DRAM. Do you see that emerging in OCD metrology and the impact for you?

Yeah. We definitely see process control intensity increasing first in logic. We mentioned that before, and we're seeing that consistently growing as the nodes are shrinking. In DRAM, I'd say it's a little bit less, certainly less ramping, meaning less accelerating intensity increasing. We do see, as the customers are migrating down, that they are increasing the number of tools they need, but not at the same rate as the logic.

Great. Maybe as a follow-up question for Steve, in terms of working capital management, given that you're seeing more and more systems ship out, especially in the near term, you've worked the working capital front pretty well. One, what have you improved upon, particularly since the merger, given that there are diverse products in that combination? Secondly, from the inventory front, how are you managing that right now, given some of the supply constraints in the whole ecosystem, as well as your ability to meet increasing customer demand?

Steven Roth (CFO)

Yeah. I think you've probably hit on both areas. The two areas that we obviously focused on a lot since the merger have been the AR and the inventory. I think putting the companies together in integration and kind of coming with a common process for accelerating acceptances. Everyone obviously ships, and we get 80%-90% upon shipment type of scenario. There's always cleaning up those acceptances. I think the team's done a very good job of doing that this year. I think our DSOs have been trailing down pretty much quarter over quarter the last couple of quarters. That's been an improving area from the working capital perspective. On the inventory side, it's two stories, right? We've got obviously the litho inventory we're purchasing for some of the products we're putting in and coming out with.

At the same time, you're right. As I mentioned to Craig a minute ago, we're obviously constantly looking at the supply chain, the impact of COVID that can have on the plant. We're obviously doing our forecasting of where we think the—based on the comments that Mike made about the first half of the year. Right now, we're obviously looking at it. We're making sure that we're ahead of the curve as best we can. We haven't seen anything that really has impacted us yet.

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

We'll take our next question from Tom Difley with DA Davidson.

Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I guess I'll start with Steve. I guess first, on the margin side, when you look at the new $100 million volume purchase agreements, do those include volume discounts that might impact the margin structure?

Steven Roth (CFO)

Yeah. You could imagine if we're doing that, they're obviously a big-to-package deal. Because of the portfolio of products Mike talked about, it's not just a one product, $100 million, how do we do it? It's a mix of all of our products in a lot of these cases, both front end and back end. Overall, the margins are actually pretty strong. Yeah, like I mentioned, I don't anticipate you seeing any major impact on our margins this year. As revenue grows, I think we're going to continue, as I mentioned in my comments. As we continue to drive revenues, I think you're going to see continued improving gross margin. Obviously, they flow pretty strong down the operating model for us.

Okay. When you look at your long-term model and you're going from the $600-$800 million range, you have about a 500 basis point improvement in the operating margin. Is most of that just driven by increased revenue, or are there any programs or projects you have to do to achieve those new operating margins?

I would say it's twofold. I don't think there needs to be much to hit that model. I think as we drive the revenues, we'll get there. I also don't want to say I'm complacent with the model we have because, as we've talked, from the synergy standpoint, putting the company together, there are some longer-term engineering programs that are two, three years in the making, like getting to common platforms, things like that. Those will work their way into that model or into our results as we proceed up that model revenue growth.

Okay. And then finally, for Mike, when you look at the potentially $70 billion of WFE spending this year, and you look at the business you have in the second half on the lithography side, are you going to need another slug of tools in 2022 to handle the big WFE equipment spending this year, or is that kind of building up in correlation to or in conjunction with the spending this year?

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

Specific to the lithography, you're asking?

Yeah. Just kind of the front end versus back end and the timing of the two segments.

Yeah. No, we would expect several years of growth on the lithography side to keep up with the demand. Based on the multi-year range and multi-year discussions that we're having with our customers, this is a transition that's going to be happening for, like I said, for several years. It is at least what they're sharing with us. The expectations are for fairly decent growth over those next several years.

Okay. That is great news. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Operator (participant)

We'll take our next question from David Julie with Steelhead Securities.

Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. I have a couple. Could you just highlight, I think in your prepared remarks there, Mike, you're talking about the increase in TAM or SAM from your new tools. Could you just basically elaborate on that? Give us the total again and how it breaks out amongst the four or five new tools.

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

There is a slide in our investor deck that also will break this out. It will be a little more clear there. Just for a quick summary, the biggest piece is the opening of the optical, the planar film metrology, which is roughly half the optical metrology market, a $800 million-$900 million market. Roughly half of that is this planar films, and the IRIS platform opens that up. The Aspect or the Impulse that was stick in the optical metrology market, the Impulse is really around share gains within the existing integrated metrology market, where we have not really participated. We have not had a new product in six years. That is about a $150 million market, and we like the traction that we are seeing. As I mentioned, pretty strong growth in the fourth quarter, driven by 3D NAND customers, and then adding another DRAM customer.

That's nice growth there. Continuing the SAM expansion is the heterogeneous die or the panel-level packaging, which, including the inspection software and lithography, we estimate can be over $100 million annually. The Aspect and the Element System there on the compositional and 3D NAND side are more expansions within our existing OCD space. We did not count those into the expansion opportunity. I think that covered most of it from the new products perspective. Of course, Inspectrology, we see that opening up with the electrification of vehicles. We see that opening up an area for compound semiconductor, where we play with just the inspection tools and some of the software today.

By pulling that all together through the overlay metrology, which is quite unique and challenging for those compound semi devices, that's an estimated, I think we said, $80 million expansion for the SAM there as well.

Great. It sounds like your front-end business will grow a little bit quicker than the overall Wafer Fab equipment business. I'm curious about the back-end business. It's always a little bit harder to gauge. As far as your inspection business goes, if we have, let's say, 7-8% unit volume growth this year in non-memory units, what would you expect the inspection business growth rate to be?

Oh, we're still expecting inspection to be double-digit growth this year. Another SAM expansion I forgot to mention, which is an important one that we're excited about, not just for this year, but following years, is CMOS image sensors. We estimated that to be about an $80 million market, which we do not currently play in. Over the last two quarters, we've added two of the top three manufacturers of CMOS image sensors for their high-end front-end applications. We expect to expand to some of their simpler but higher volume applications as well.

Steve, did you guys know what the backlog was?

Steven Roth (CFO)

We didn't disclose the backlog, but it's, again, it's the first year out of the companies combined. But it's over $100 million.

Okay. Just a little bit more elaboration on the thin film tool, that's obviously being the biggest new TAM expansion. I think you've already won some business, and that might be wrapped up in a volume purchase agreement. If you could elaborate on what you kind of would expect, let's say, in what I guess this year is wrapping up, next year is a big volume year, what would you target as a successful kind of run rate for that business, let's say, in 2022?

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

I would say $80 million. My team has probably fallen off their chairs. That is only 20% of the market. If we are successful in some of the penetrations that we are planning this year, some of the repeat business that we are delivering against already, I do not think that is an unreasonable expectation for 2022. I also see the roadmaps and some of the additional work we are doing on the platform that will make it even more valuable to our customers. Another unique capability we are providing the customers is the upgradeability. These systems are part of a platform strategy that gives the customers the best price performance for the optical metrology needs. That means these systems will be upgradable to full OCD as their needs expand and their needs change. The capital usage of these tools is more flexible than competitive solutions.

I think that's going to have additional value as well and help drive it.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, that's Star One. If you would like to ask a question, that is Star One. We will take our next question from Mark Miller with Benchmark Company.

Again, congratulations on your quarter. Happy New Year. Just was wondering, you had a large tax benefit last quarter. In 2021, you're going to be going to a tax expense. Is that correct for all the quarters?

Steven Roth (CFO)

Yeah. I mean, we had, I think I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we closed out an IRS audit that's been going on for a number of years, as well as we did some carrybacks that drove down the principal driver of the rate down. Historically, kind of the rates would have been somewhere in that 17% range. Yeah, I think for 2020, again, non-GAAP, we'll be back into those that, well, GAAP and non-GAAP will be in that 16-17% range.

Can you kind of give us an estimate in terms of % of business per chips, say, DRAM, NAND, logic, which are dominant, or are they similar, or is one more dominant than the other in terms of the chip revenue related?

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

They're pretty balanced. If you look at memory and logic, they're pretty balanced between the two broad categories. Breaking down DRAM and NAND, then it varies quarter to quarter. In general, I would say the NAND is a little stronger than DRAM for us.

It is going to be somewhat softer this quarter. Is that correct?

Yes. Somewhat softer this quarter. Yep.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Still stronger than the first quarter of 2020, though, I'll note.

Thank you.

Steven Roth (CFO)

You're welcome, Mark.

Operator (participant)

There appears to be no further questions at this time.

Michael Plisinski (CEO)

All right. Mike, you're on mute.

Thank you. We'd like to thank everyone for participating in the call today and for your interest in Onto Innovation. Everybody stay healthy and safe. That concludes our remarks for the call. Sarah, please wrap it up.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.