PDF Solutions - Q2 2023
August 8, 2023
Transcript
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Thank you for joining us on today's call. If you've not already seen our earnings press release and management report for the first quarter, please go to the investor section of our website, where each has been posted. The second quarter was very similar to our first quarter. Revenue remained strong as we experienced continued adoption of our end-to-end analytics by our customers. Before Adnan discusses the financials in detail, I have some comments about our observations from the second quarter and our perceptions of the market for the remainder of the year. Bookings in the second quarter were similar in magnitude to the first quarter. Significant contracts that closed in the quarter included customers deploying process control and front-end fabs, a cloud customer deploying analytics for an internal chip design team, and a chip company deploying analytics for complex 3D packaging.
With continued strength in Asia, Gainshare improved in Q2 versus Q1 as shipments improved. Bookings for Cimetrix's connectivity runtime license showed modest improvements in Q2 versus Q1, as our customers' equipment shipments, particularly in China, started to increase. Given our strong backlog and business model, where most of our revenue is typically ratably recognized, we continue to deliver strong results in revenue and earnings. Beyond the business that we booked, we have experienced significant customer interest in our analytics, and a number of pilots are underway with customers. We were pleased with the business results in the quarter as it demonstrates the strength of our business model. Subsequent to the second quarter, we announced an acquisition of Lantern Machinery Analytics. Over the past year and a half, we have been evaluating with some battery manufacturers the ability to apply PDF's analytics platform to lithium-ion battery manufacturing.
Today, lithium-ion battery manufacturing is under $100 billion in revenue, and over the next 12 years, is forecasted to be over $400 billion. There's going to be a tremendous increase in capacity. Moreover, controlling variability of manufacturing to improve yields and product quality is becoming of interest. Through our work with manufacturers, we recognize that there is a need to collect and process images. This data, when combined with upstream equipment sensor data, has the potential to be used to improve yields and product quality. Machinery Analytics had developed an ML pipeline for battery image processing. This capability may also have applications for our IC customers as well, particularly in the assembly processes, where many images are collected. Machinery Analytics had some small revenue with early customers, but for the most part, was a pre-revenue company.
We will incorporate their ML pipeline in our products as we develop applications for battery and IC manufacturing. We are excited to have them join the team. Turning to DFI and our eProbe machine, the customer we previously talked about has qualified our new eProbe 350 and now has two machines running at their facility. After a lengthy evaluation in our fab, we anticipate shipping another eProbe 350 by the end of the year for an on-site evaluation with a different customer. We are very excited about the progress we are making with the DFI program. As our customers develop 3D processes like gate-all-around and backside power, we believe electrical inspection will increasingly be important to ramp and control yields. Now let me turn to discuss our view of the environment and our perspective of the H2 of the year.
Midway into 2023, we are more cautious in our short-term view. Our gainshare customers in China are reporting decreased wafer volumes, which will reduce gainshare in the H2 of the year. We anticipate continued increases in Cimetrix runtime licenses, but a lower rate of improvement than we initially anticipated, as equipment suppliers, particularly outside of China, remain conservative on the increase in equipment shipments. Finally, for Exensio, in Q2, we saw customers delay some expected bookings to the H2 of the year. Although some of those bookings already closed in July, we remain cautious about the timing of others. Early this year, we anticipated revenue growth for the year approaching mid-teens. Our expectation now is year-over-year growth will be in the low double-digit %.
The core analytics growth is expected to exceed the overall growth, but it will be offset partially by a year-over-year decline in Integrated Yield Ramp. While the short-term environment is unsettled, the long-term drivers for our customers, which include increased use of AI, ML, cloud, smart devices, and the electrification of the energy economy, remain in place. These drivers are being amplified by the various government investments in semiconductors we are seeing around the world, and the increased diversification of the supply chains that many of our customers are embracing. As a result, our pipeline of business is strong and remain confident on our customers' continued success and growth. We would also like to remind everyone that on October 24th through the 26th, we will have the PDF Users Conference meeting at the Santa Clara Marriott.
As with our pre-COVID event, we will combine one of those days with an analyst day, which will be on October 24th. This gives our customers, strategic partners, analysts, and stockholders a chance to see the latest capabilities from PDF and to learn from each other. The theme this year is applying AI ML to transform manufacturing and technology R&D. The list of speakers is turning out to be the strongest we have ever assembled. Sanjay Natarajan, SVP and co-GM of the Intel Logic Technology Development, will talk about the transformation they have made, which has enabled them to deliver five nodes in four years. Other speakers include executives from SAP, Siemens, Advantest, GlobalFoundries, and Analog Devices. We also expect additional executive engineers will commit to speak at the event.
Our attendees usually include executives and engineers from system companies, fabless, IDMs, OSATs, foundries, and equipment companies, who all share a passion for analytics and ML that drive R&D and manufacturing. We are looking forward to the event this year after a multi-year hiatus after COVID. I want to thank all PDF employees and contractors for their efforts during the H1 of the year. Now I'll turn the call over to Adnan, who will review the financials and provide his perspective on our results. Adnan?
Adnan Raza (EVP and CFO)
Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone, good to speak with you all again today. We are pleased to review the financial results of the second quarter and to bring you up to date on the progress of the business. Our Form 10-Q has also been filed with the SEC today. Please note that all of the financial results we discuss in today's call will be on a non-GAAP basis, a reconciliation to GAAP financials is provided in the materials on our website. Financial results for the second quarter of 2023 continued to be strong, coming after a solid first quarter. Q2 total revenue was $41.6 million, up 20% versus the comparable quarter of last year.
Analytics revenue was up 19% to $37.1 million in Q2 of this year, versus $31.1 million in the second quarter of 2022, and represented 89% of total revenue this quarter. The growth in our analytics revenues came from growth in Exensio and Leading Edge products, offset by decline in Cimetrix runtime licenses. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, our analytics revenue was up $0.8 million. During the second quarter, revenue contribution from Integrated Yield Ramp was $4.5 million, up 26% from last year's comparable quarter, primarily due to increased level of gainshare from higher volumes at some of our Asian customers.
We are very pleased with the various engagements we have currently ongoing, the deal sizes of bookings we are working to close, and the strategic conversations we're involved in with our customers, strategic partners, and major semiconductor governmental initiatives around the world. All of these factors evidence progress towards our goal to be the go-to manufacturing data analytics platform for the global semiconductor and electronics ecosystems. Our ending backlog at the end of Q2 of this year was $244.9 million, which is 33% higher than our prior year Q2 ending backlog. We reported gross margins of 74% for the quarter, up meaningfully versus 69% for Q2 of prior year.
As we have said before, on a quarter-over-quarter basis, we may see some variations on this metric as we modulate the spend for our customer engagements and grow our cloud and people spend to support the growth of recurring revenues. We remain committed to our non-GAAP gross margin target model of greater than 70%. On the operating expense spending side, our R&D spend was down $0.6 million versus the prior quarter, as we continued to take advantage of our leverage and shift our resources to pre-sales and new business initiatives. Our SG&A was up $0.9 million versus the prior quarter, primarily driven by increased spend in pre-sales and marketing efforts.
Overall, within SG&A, we have invested faster into sales and marketing, while ensuring that on the G&A side, we can take advantage of our scale and have brought down G&A as a % of our revenue slightly versus both prior quarter as well as Q2 of prior year. For EPS, we reported a profit of $0.19 for the quarter, similar to last quarter level, but meaningfully higher than $0.11 for the same quarter a year ago. We are pleased about our year-over-year $0.08 positive swing in EPS compared to the same quarter of last year. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $124 million, compared to $117 million at the end of the same quarter a year ago, and $134 million in the prior quarter.
With the change versus the prior quarter, primarily driven by an increase in our accounts receivables at the end of the quarter due to timing of billings. Since the end of the quarter through today, we have already collected the majority of our quarter end build receivables. During the quarter, we also spent approximately $1.9 million of cash to close the acquisition of Machinery Analytics that John mentioned, with an excellent team based out of Canada and Poland, to expand our analytics platform for EV battery manufacturing. We continue to believe that the strength of our balance sheet positions us well to consider strategic investments and acquisitions as they become available. Like John mentioned, as we look forward, we expect to grow our revenue for this year on a year-over-year basis at lower double-digit % level, instead of the approaching mid-teens level we had previously guided.
We are being careful based on three key observations of the rest of the year. First, our gainshare from some Asian customers is expected to slow down for the rest of the year as they face their own economic and demand challenges and volumes decrease. Second, our Cimetrix runtime licenses, while up versus prior quarter, are still facing a mix of increased demand from some regions, coupled with muted demand from other regions. Third, consistent with John's comments, the timing of bookings is less clear given the industry dynamics.... as we become strategically important for our customers and partners, the size of our bookings is growing, with many approaching the high single-digit or double-digit millions of dollars.
Overall, when we look at the longer term, we feel emboldened by two factors: the demand for our products that we can see in our sales pipeline, and the strategic relevance of our analytics platform, which is taking hold with all three constituents, customers, strategic partners, and the various government initiatives. We also believe that in our analytics platform, we have three strong elements that complement each other: the Exensio analytics platform, the unique data collection capabilities of our Leading Edge products, and our Cimetrix connectivity products. We're excited about the future and the growth ahead for PDF. With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator to commence the question and answer session. Operator?
Operator (participant)
Thank you, Mr. Raza. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. If you're using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before asking a question. Please wait one moment for our first question. Our first question will come from the line of Blair Abernethy from Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open.
Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director)
Thanks. Good afternoon, gentlemen.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Afternoon.
Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director)
Just wanted to ask you about the acquisition of Lantern Machinery. Give a sense of what needs to be done to take this package this product and take it to market, and what are you thinking in terms of timelines?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Sure. Thanks for the question, Blair. A lot of the work early on in R&D is done with SEM images, scanning electron microscope images. We wanted to use optical images. The pilot we did with them before acquisition was to test that pipeline on optical images coming from some of the manufacturers we had been working with. We feel very good about that, and we expect about six months of development to package this appropriately and then begin pilots with customers. Probably in early 2024, we expect to start seeing pilots begin with customers and revenue to follow from there.
Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director)
Okay, great. It looks like from your 10-Q, you paid just under $2 million for it. How much do you have any sense of how much money will be required to get it to market? Just so that will we see that in the R&D or CapEx? How are you, how is the investment going to show up?
Adnan Raza (EVP and CFO)
Sure. Good question. There's really two elements to that. One is the people spend, of course. The team is just under 10 people, and like I mentioned in my prepared remarks, it's based in Canada as well as in Poland, so there's a bit of balancing with the cost we're able to do there as well. The second piece of the cost is, of course, what we spend, to your point, on system improvements. We will of course, go through the appropriate accounting treatment as far as P&L versus capitalizing, but given the small nature, it probably will hit our P&L. It's going to be small. We'll keep it manageable. A couple of $100K is kind of what we're thinking on this acquisition when you look at for this year. We'll, we'll continue to keep it manageable. It's kind of our perspective.
I'll give you one other context. The machines themselves, the equipment that's used, it's basically off-the-shelf camera, and then the structure that's used with it. It's a lot of the value is in the AI ML pipeline and the software that we'll be coupling with it. Hopefully, once you get to the point that John is mentioning, you know, the reason for the acquisition is it, it hopefully is very accretive to our margins.
Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director)
Okay, great. Thank you. Just shifting over, can you just highlight a couple of things on the partnership side that stand out in Q2, whether it's with Advantest or some of the other partners you've been working with?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Sure. Yeah. I think I prepared in my previous remarks on Q2, I, I had already talked about anticipating the Advantest user conference. We presented there, had tremendous turnout jointly with customers, announced a number of new product capabilities in partnership with Advantest. At SEMICON, we were in the AWS booth to highlight Exensio Cloud on AWS. I, you know, I think that generated quite a few leads as I saw the statistics. You know, I think somewhere between 50-100 leads generated off of that activity. Then, also with the SAP, we continued a number of selling activity in early demonstrations with customers beyond the first customer on the PDF SAP pilot.
Nothing to describe from a booking standpoint there, but again, I think we find that they're a very effective way at reaching out at a lot of the customer base. It's the same company that we already knew at a different entry point in the company, typically through the finance organization or C-suite. I would say the customer, the partnership activity with those partners was quite heavy throughout the quarter. We do anticipate, you might have noticed at SEMICON, that we did... We were quoted in a Teradyne press release of support of their Edge Box with Exensio applications, and we have, you know, had a long-standing relationship with Teradyne and supported their testers for, you know, close to a decade now.
This enhances our ability to provide the same machine learning capability on their Edge Box that we can provide on others. That also kicked off a whole set of customer dialogues, as well as there's many customers on the Teradyne platform. We do believe that's an important incremental relationship.
Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director)
That's great. That's great. Thanks, yeah.
Operator (participant)
One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Christian Schwab from Craig-Hallum Capital. Your line is open.
Christian Schwab (Managing Partner and Senior Research Analyst)
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Given the substantial backlog and kind of a lot of long-term, you know, positive growth drivers, despite, you know, bringing guidance down for the back half of the year, what, what should we be paying most close attention to, you know, as we think about what your revenue prospects for 2024 and beyond are? You know, what, what, what would have to happen to return to, you know, the 20% plus growth rate, and what would have to occur to kind of remain, you know, here in the low double digits?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah. I think that's a great question, Christian. you know, continued weakness on equipment will create a headwind for us. I mean, if you, if you take out, as I said in my prepared remarks, if you take out the equipment weakness and the IYR weakness, you know, the core analytics business, actually, the remaining pieces that are in control, continues to grow pretty reasonably. you know, we'd like to end that headwind. Ending that headwind would get us back up pretty close to the 20% range. I think it comes down to bookings momentum on core analytics. I think that would get you back over. You know, we've been growing more than 30 plus range for a while. That would get us back into that range.
I think, you know, we have as Adnan said in his prepared remarks, we have an awful lot of pilots going on. I think a large number of things that are in the double-digit millions in terms of bookings value. In the past, it's been a small number that drove, you know, a lot of the growth. I'd say that the breadth of them has increased quite substantially. I think with those bookings, you start seeing, obviously, return to more robust growth. Of course, that's on top of a larger base than it was in the past, right? Obviously, 30% on a small number is harder, it's much harder to do 30% on a larger number.
We do see that, we do see that activity out there, that book, that, that, customer interest activity out there. I kind of went on a ramble. Let me see if I can summarize that for you well, Christian. Let's get rid of the headwinds, stop declining on those things. Growth on the, on the equipment shipments again, would really help in terms of not creating a headwind, the bookings activity on the larger, you know, 8-figure deals, both on the Leading Edge and on Exensio.
Christian Schwab (Managing Partner and Senior Research Analyst)
Just a quick follow-up on that. Thank you for that color. Let's just say that, you know, wafer front-end equipment is, you know, sees a, you know, a muted recovery next year. Do we have enough double-digit million pilot businesses to take us, you know, to 15%-20% growth in a, in a flat WFE market?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah.
Christian Schwab (Managing Partner and Senior Research Analyst)
Excellent. Great! No other questions. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
One moment for our next question. Our next question come from the line of Tom Diffely from D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.
Linda Weiser (Senior Research Analyst)
Hello, thank you for ask, for letting us ask questions. This is Linda on behalf of Tom Diffely. First of all, congratulations on a good quarter. I guess my first question is, I would love to better understand, the trends you're seeing across different customer types. Maybe you could walk us through, what you're observing in customer behavior across memory, automotive, data center, and markets.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, sure, Linda, thanks for the question. I would say, you know, we continue to see, if you look at kind of the double-click, where we saw the bookings happen in the quarter, the two strong areas, silicon carbide and a high voltage-related area, that was some of the process control bookings that we saw, some of the analytics bookings that we saw, and actually just usage statistics coming off our cloud sites for customers. Within our customers, we, we track within our customers, what parts of the organizations are driving the most, and that definitely continues to be a strong part of the market. The cloud site for the Exensio analytics deployment for our cloud customer, obviously, that's data center-related.
The analytics for an IC company that does complex system and package, again, high-performance computing and data center-related. So the second area that we, we've seen quite a bit of strength and has been in the data center area, that's definitely where you see the second strength. We started seeing bookings for customers, I didn't talk about it in my prepared remarks, that were on the test floor for, you know, our F-related customers, that we were encouraged about that because that tends to be driven by mobile and cellular. Yeah, we did see positive results for in that area. So I think those customers are starting to feel a little bit more confident. They had been, I think, weaker in the past.
Lastly, on the memory side, you know, when we look at our pre-sales activity, we do see a fair amount of activity on the memory piece that was a little bit larger than we have in the past. I feel like they, they are also starting to see the end of the tunnel for them. When you look geographically, as I said in my prepared remarks, we saw a pretty steep falloff in the third quarter on wafer volumes. Because we measure, you know, the amount of wafers we test for our IYR customers. We did see that drop off from the royalties, and that's why we became cautious on the gainshare royalties out of China. We saw that drop off in July, relatively meaningfully compared to the previous months.
When you look at our runtime licenses, though, we see factory activity, new equipment shipments for companies shipping into China, Chinese equipment companies, as well as companies that's, are primarily in Europe, but ship into China, also being very strong. When you look at what category of technologies, they tend to be more mature nodes with an emphasis on high voltage, again, silicon carbide and IGBT, and things like that. You know, overall, what we see, I think, is very consistent with what you see reported in the market when we look at the segments that we track, you know, equipment shipments, wafer volumes, and buying characteristics from our customers.
Linda Weiser (Senior Research Analyst)
Thank you, that's very helpful. Then with respect to the forward pipeline, to what degree has it been influenced, by far, by the announcement of your seven-figure SMH booking last quarter? Can you see yet any tangible effect, on the developing interest of other, from other customers?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, there's a number, you know, the partners continue to be a meaningful part of our, our presales activity with customers. It's very hard, you know, Linda, to say, okay, you know, will they come in faster than the others? We have found that their selling cycles are different than ours. Some are, are, are, are able to give us, pretty strong predictability. We do anticipate them impacting our H2 of the year, but the bulk of the selling in the H2 of the year will come off pilots that are run, directly in a two-way relationship between an end customer and PDF. With most of the bookings being driven by Exensio and Leading Edge, substantial contracts for Exensio and Leading Edge.
Linda Weiser (Senior Research Analyst)
I see. A follow-up on that, have you noticed any uptick, maybe in conversations with other partners like SAP, where you can pair Exensio with other platforms and drive, more of those top floor to shop floor linkages?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah. Thank you for that question, too. I've mentioned the new, the new relationship with Teradyne. That was one that, we announced during SEMICON. They announced it during SEMICON. We are also working on other things. Some are engineering related, and some are more shop floor related, engineering software related. We're not in a position to announce them yet, Linda, but I think, you know, as obviously we have a user conference coming up, so you can anticipate us being in a position to make more announcements, at our user conference around things that we are working on.
Linda Weiser (Senior Research Analyst)
We'll be looking forward to that. A last question, on the model, Adnan. On a year-over-year basis, gross margins have improved, and they continue to progress, nicely. Aside from volume leverage on revenue growth, what other drivers are contributing to that improvement from this level?
Adnan Raza (EVP and CFO)
Yeah, sure. I think a bunch of things. I think we're just, as the business scales, we've been able to focus a little bit more into all of the different dimensions, right? Whether it was on the Cimetrix side, taking a look at our prices and where they are positioned on the cloud side. Okay, how do we charge versus markup on the AWS? What do we pay actually ourselves with our scale getting bigger? A combination of all of those things. Then on Leading Edge, we've talked about the enterprise-level deals that we have done. A combination of those factors is what has allowed us, frankly, to be above the long-term margin of 70%.
We hope to maintain that even in face of some of these, revenue comments that we've discussed on the call today, for the next few quarters and the rest of the year.
Linda Weiser (Senior Research Analyst)
I appreciate that. Thank you for your time today.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Thank you, Linda.
Adnan Raza (EVP and CFO)
Sure. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
One moment for our next question. Our next question, come line of Gus Richard from Northland Capital. Your line, your line is open.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Yes, thanks for taking the question. Good afternoon, John and Adnan. On DFI, I think you said you shipped, a system in the quarter and expect to ship another one in the fourth quarter. How many would you have in the field at this point?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, yeah, what I, what I said in my prepared remarks, we actually said in our last call that we had, we were shipping-- we had shipped in the second quarter, a machine, that was qualified, actually, in this third quarter, recently, at, at an existing customer. We would ship, we anticipate being able to ship again in the fourth quarter. That would put 3 in the field to date, Gus.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Okay. Then, the, the new systems that are going into the field, are, you know, they gonna be used in lab, or, you know, are people sort of thinking about trying them out for, for fab?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, that's a great, a great question. You know, if you look at how an e-beam tool has been used conventionally, e-beam inspection tool, most of the customers tell us, once you're kind of done with R&D, the number of defects you can see in a 2-hour recipe isn't enough to continue to run the machine, so they typically are not used in manufacturing. I think the customer base overall came into evaluating the eProbe, assuming it was a similar situation. What they're finding, now with the eProbe 350, given the machine's ability to scan, you know, a few billion features per hour, so in a 2-hour recipe, measuring pretty close to 10 billion features, it's actually finding defects even as the node is maturing.
So now I think people are just starting to scratch their head saying: Well, gee, maybe this can actually be used in manufacturing. That would be a first. As you know, for things like 3D defects, like via void and, you know, shorts and gate-all-around structures, there's really no inspection technique other than an electrical test that can see them. Usually, eventually, people give up on inspection and just try to control things with metrology. We believe the eProbe has the potential of giving them a way of controlling it with an inspection technique. The roadmap will continue to improve the throughput of the machine over the next year. So we believe we can keep up with improving defect densities at our customers. I, I think, the customers are encouraged by that.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. The revenue model here is equipment as a service?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
As of today, yes.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Yeah, okay. Got it. Switching over to the acquisition, I just wanna make sure I understand what you're doing here. It sounds like you've got looking at batteries, and if you're looking at the battery, you're looking at welds, and if you're gonna move it into the back end, maybe it's wire bonding, and you're gonna collect massive amounts of images and just use ML, AL, AI rather, against those images to, you know, suss out, you know, field failures.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
The assembly on the back end, you said wire bonding, I think you mean for the IP production.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Yeah.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
There's a number of places where images are captured, in the back end, not just bonds, but, you know, chip finishing and other things like that. There's many places to apply a pattern, an image recognition pipeline and assembly. For the battery area, the information is really about the grain information on the cathode and anode as the different materials are applied. The customers want to take very high-speed images, because these things are on a roller that move at, you know, many meters per second. They want to capture images of those grains that predicts the spaces in the grains, and different things give you a prediction about, you know, what's this battery's life like, gonna be like? How stable is this battery?
Is it gonna perform to spec? You know, we have a partnership with Voltaiq. They have end-of-line extraction of electrical behavior. This gives you an inline measurement, and then our process control products give you the ability to collect data on, you know, the equipment that's rolling the material, the rollers, the pressure being pressed when you're applying the paste, the alignment of the film as it's running over rollers, et cetera. That data set, you know, we already collect. It's really tying those three pieces together to create an end-to-end like situation for battery, as we've done for IC manufacturing. You can think of the image as kind of like your inline inspection data collection point.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Got it.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
What we're-
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
All right. That... Sorry, go ahead.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
What we're focusing on there is the ML pipeline software.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Right. No, I, I, absolutely makes sense. Just back to DFI for a second. How, you know, are you, you know, have you kept one in-house for demos and, you know, are you building a couple more? You know, what's that pipeline of assembly look like?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah. We, we look to have a few machines in-house even after this to be able to do demos and incremental software and hardware development. We have placed some purchase orders for long lead items on further machines, and we've been doing that over this H1 of the year as we've increased our confidence. You probably saw that in our capital spending in the H1 of the year. You know, we do feel like the industry has wanted a way to see voids and buried shorts for as long as I've been in the industry, and it's only exacerbated by the fact that you have 3D structures now. We feel like it's a very useful capability if we can prove you can do this in very high feature count.
You can be measuring 20 billion at an inspection time, you can see very small deviations in yield.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. All right. Super helpful. Thank you so much.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Thank you, Gus.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. As a reminder, that's star one one for questions, star one one. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Andrew Wiener from Samjo Capital. Your line is open.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Hi, good afternoon, John.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Hey, Andrew.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Hey, I just wanted to follow up on DFI, and just, you did say the third tool that you're hoping to ship by year end is a new DFI customer, correct?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Correct.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Is that for an advanced logic application as well?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Correct.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Okay. Maybe you could, if we look out into 2024, you know, how you're thinking about, you know, could you just express some, you know, increased optimism around DFI? We've obviously been waiting for a while for this to become a, you know, a real commercial opportunity. You now have two with your lead customer, you know, you're adding a second customer. Sounds like, you know, as you said to Gus, you know, you're ordering some more advanced parts. How do you look at the growth opportunity as you get out into next year? What, you know, what has to happen, and is it around penetrating these two lead customers, you know, deeper?
Are there other, you know, if you wanna call them pilots, where you're running wafers in-house, where you think there's an opportunity to, you know, ship new tools to new additional customers in 2024?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah. I think it's a great, let me see if I-- great way to frame the question, Andrew. Let me see if I can give you a as well-organized answer. First, you know, as you know, you know, because I've said this many times, to me, the single most important thing was to get a second tool into the lead customers- lead customer first. Because, every, every company on the leading edge will always try something to see if it does something. When you can get two, that means you've filled up the capacity of one, and now they need to have a second. This was a really super big milestone for us that I think is the first important thing that emboldened us.
Along the way, we started doing some pilots, as you referred to them, with customers sending us wafers on-site. We did that only with one other customer at the time, again, because we, we felt like 80% of our effort should be, you know, establishing that the lead customer would need two, right? There's no point in going and spreading yourself thinly across many companies just to keep on doing the same thing. We've got to prove that we have a winning solution. We, we feel much more emboldened after the lead customer, you know, digesting a second. Now, we're in a position that we feel like, okay, we can ship a third machine to that, that new customer.
What that lets us also demonstrate is, you know, the uptimes and utilizations have, have been really remarkable for an e-beam tool on the first machines. I think people were quite surprised by how strong they were. We want to be able to demonstrate that that really does work broadly across a couple of customers, while also increasing the aperture of taking on pilots from other customers and potentially other parts of the chip market. We haven't really done much with memory yet. We will go back and look at that. There are additional opportunities that we see. In 2024, we would like to start seeing more success with the first customer. That's the most important thing.
Secondly, start to drive revenue at that second customer and getting more growth there, and then increasing the aperture on on-site pilots, you know, on our site, I'm sorry, you know, in our lab pilots for additional customers. Some of that will expand the aperture outside of leading-edge logic.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Maybe then switching gears for a second. You called out silicon carbide as an area of strength. You know, I, I think historically, you've talked about it as, you know, a significant opportunity longer term, but given the volumes relative to, you know, other parts of the semiconductor industry, you know, despite the excitement around it, you know, it was not material. Are you starting to see that become material? You know, we've seen obviously some very large, you know, commitments, you know, made to sort of traditional Exensio PDF customers, who are in the provide silicon carbide solutions. You know, would you expect that, you know, to grow materially as you look out into 2024 and 2025? You know, how would you think about that trajectory relative to sort of the trajectory of silicon carbide industry as a whole?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, thanks for that. Yes, a couple of data points there for you, Andrew. When I was meeting with some of our early cloud site customers and reviewing with them cloud statistics, you know, I do occasionally as a like, drop in on some of our customer meetings. The customers have been telling me not that they are-- a lot of the driving, driver for the existing cloud sites has been their silicon carbide business. We are seeing that. We started seeing customers on the process control side start to deploy for these new silicon carbide and other IGBT-like technologies for our capability in this H1 of the year, Q2 in particular.
We do anticipate silicon carbide being a driver for our business as we look out into 2024 and 25. Part of that is because a number of the companies that are in the silicon carbide business happen to be historic PDF customers. They're already natural-- it's natural for them to extend their Exensio deployment into these new facilities as they stand them up and start tooling them up. We do anticipate that. We do also anticipate this gives us an opportunity to go to companies that have not historically been a PDF customer, who are making a big investment in silicon carbide. Because in comparison to IGBTs and other high voltage transistors, the manufacturing challenges are very substantial, as have been reported in the press.
You know, using an analytics platform and all the way down to the equipment control and equipment connectivity, is more important for these customers than it has been for the conventional high voltage transistor production. It is a much, much more complex production, as it's now becoming realized. We expect there to be four meaningful, you know, processing elements to this, to these, to these working flows, as opposed to really just wafer flow, package, and test. You have to grow the ingot. You need to use something like the Soitec Smart Cut technology. You have the front-end processing, and then you have packaging and system packaging. It's quite a, you know, end-to-end analytics, we believe, will be important for that customer base.
Yeah, we do anticipate that being a growing part of our business in 2024 and 2025.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
John, and, I mean, I don't wanna sort of trump maybe something you're gonna present at the analyst day, but if I think about, like, $1 of investment in the ground or $1 invested in, you know, capacity expansion across, let's say, like, advanced logic, silicon carbide, and then maybe either like mixed signal or mature nodes, how do you think about what the revenue opportunity for PDF is across those, you know, the different buckets? And, you know, and, you know, if one, that's even quantifiable, and two, sort of maybe even on a relative basis.
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, that's a super great question, Andrew. We've been trying to understand that a little bit ourselves. It's hard because some of our customers are multi end-marketed customers. For example, you know, we have IDM customers. They make silicon carbide transistors. They also do, you know, embedded controllers. They do mixed signal analog parts. You know, they do a lot of different things. For some of the enterprise class customers, sometimes it's hard to peel that out unless we know what sites they're logging in from specific sites and which sites those are, or data is getting loaded from certain sites, so we can kind of get some understanding of kind of how they're using the system and what parts of their business are driving growth. We don't have a really easy way to quantify it just yet.
What I can tell you is, you know, for Exensio, we've always found, you know, there's as much business on the trailing edge and high voltage and, you know, silicon carbide as there is on the leading edge. In other words, you know, a company like an onsemi or an ADI or, you know, an ST, they drive as much analytics as our high, our leading-edge customers drive. That's in part because the number of products tend to be a lot more. While, you know, a leading-edge company may have 100 or 200 different products, or maybe up to 1,000, our customers on the trailing edge may have 70,000 products they need to keep track of in Exensio. The characteristics are different.
We haven't figured out a way to kind of model it the way you're describing. I find it intriguing, the way you've broken it out, but it's not what we've done so far. We've looked at kind of just wallet share in customers and say, "Okay, how much are they spending on manufacturing? What should, you know, the analytics spend be on that?" Frankly, it's still in the, you know, tens of %, you know, is how we've modeled it. That may be a little conservative.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Then maybe last, I just wanted to follow up on Christian's question and put it like a little bit more of a fine point on it. You know, you made comments about, you know, the ability to grow the analytics business, and, you know, putting IYR aside, I think you talked about even the potential to return to sort of the 30, you know,-ish% growth rates that you had experienced over, you know, a number of years.
If one, you know, if wafer equipment sales were to return to, you know, flat to, you know, modestly growing, were you saying that the pipeline is robust enough that if, you know, you guys can execute against closing, you know, closing deals, you know, that you'd see a path to returning to that sort of 30-ish% growth in analytics, you know, over sort of a, you know, a couple of year period?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, I think you, you're maybe stealing the thunder for what we'll talk about on the PDF Users Conference. We're still, I think, working that through. I mean, in general, what we feel is the following, Andrew: We, we do believe there is a very significant universe for our customer base, you know, that, that is a big opportunity for Exensio and our overall platform for analytics. As I said to, with Christian, if we can get a return of equipment sales, growing a little bit, at least not decreasing like it had, and starting to grow a little bit more meaningfully, getting back to the levels they were before, having the IYR return to the volumes they were at before, we do believe we can achieve over the 20% growth.
To get back to the 30% growth, we're gonna go back and do, you know, sharpen our pencils and say: What has to, you know, what needs to return in the overall environment? Because as I said in my prepared remarks, we did see a couple of things slide out from Q2, you know, one of which already a couple, which already closed in the early part of Q3. We wanna see that, that robustness and, and, and bookings return on the overall analytics business. I think, you know, there's, as I said, there's an awful lot of activity out there, so we do believe that demand is there. We'll just see how customer confidence happens in the H2 of the year.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
My last question, apologize. You know, both you and Adnan called out as one of the sort of constituents where you're seeing strong interest, or activity is obviously around government either subsidized or sponsored investment in new semiconductor capacity and sort of enhanced supply chains. Are you seeing direct opportunities there, or is that all gonna be indirect? Has that shown up in pipeline yet, or is that more still on the come?
John Kibarian (President and CEO)
Yeah, that's starting to show up in the pipeline, Andrew. It's mostly through the companies the governments are funding, some of which are existing companies, some of which are new companies. You can also imagine, given PDF's pretty unique perspective in the industry, our footprint across the world, and our experience with everybody else that's tried to get into this industry over the last decade or so, the, the governments themselves, from time to time, do reach out to us, and we do have dialogues with them, to understand, you know, what they should be thoughtful about. We have not really put in our pipeline business directly with them, and we really don't focus on it, but it does help us understand what their intention and motivations are.
Since in effect, in many of these cases, they are the owners, right? They are the ones writing the checks. It's good to understand what ownership wants. So we, we do see those as an opportunity for us to be educated on their vision and their drive, and then for them to understand our perspective on, you know, what it's taken in the past to be effective at introducing, creating a new entrant in semiconductors. It's not an easy activity at all.
Andrew Wiener (Founder and Chief Investment Officer)
Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Once again, as a reminder, that's star one one for questions, star one one. One moment while we compile the Q&A roster. At this time, there are no more questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the program. Thank you for joining on today's call. Everyone, have a great day.