Good evening, and welcome to the Aehr Test Systems' Fiscal 2023 Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jim Byers of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to Aehr Test Systems' second quarter fiscal 2023 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, Ken Spink. Before I turn the call over to Gayn and Ken, I'd like to cover a few quick items. This afternoon, right after the market closed, Aehr Test issued a press release announcing its second quarter fiscal 2023 results. That release is available on the company's website at aehr.com. 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 that may cause results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements 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. And now with that, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Gayn Erickson, President and Chief Executive Officer. Gayn?

Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter of fiscal 2023 earnings conference call. Thanks for joining us today. Let's start with a quick summary of the highlights of the quarter and the momentum we're seeing in the semiconductor wafer level test and burn-in market, and then, Ken will go over the financials in detail. After that, we'll open up the lines to take your questions. We had a very solid second quarter reflecting strong sequential and year-over-year growth in our revenue and net income, both ahead of consensus estimates. Revenue for the quarter was $14.8 million, an increase of 39% sequentially and 54% year-over-year, and we generated non-GAAP net income of $4.5 million, slightly over 30% net profit. Our momentum in silicon carbide wafer level test and burn-in continues to grow, and we see this momentum continuing for the next several years as companies are adding significant capacity in silicon carbide semiconductors to address the incredible forecasted demand, particularly for the electric vehicle and electric vehicle charger markets. Forecasts from William Blair estimate that the silicon carbide market for devices and electric vehicles alone, such as traction inverters and onboard chargers, is expected to grow from 119,000 6-inch equivalent silicon carbide wafers for electric vehicles in 2021 to more than 4.1 million 6-inch equivalent wafers in 2030. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 48.4%. This equates to almost 35 times larger in 2030 than in 2021. In addition, 6-inch equivalent silicon carbide wafers for other markets, such as solar, industrial, and other electrification infrastructure, are expected to grow to another 3 million wafers by 2030. This expands our silicon carbide test and burn-in market even more. We are excited to have added two new customers for silicon carbide test and burn-in during the quarter. The first is a major silicon carbide semiconductor supplier that purchased our FOX-NP dual wafer test and burn-in system used for engineering and device qualification during the quarter, and after the quarter closed, has since placed their first orders for two of our FOX-XP multi-wafer systems for volume production test and burn-in of their silicon carbide wafers, including the order we just announced today. This company is one of the world's largest suppliers of silicon carbide devices and serves several significant markets, including the electric vehicle industry, as well as other industrial applications. We now have two of the top four silicon carbide market participants as customers. They have indicated to us that they plan to order a significant number of FOX-XP systems for volume production of their silicon carbide devices at facilities around the world to meet the rapidly expanding forecasted market demand for silicon carbide devices for electric vehicles and other industrial markets. This new customer selected our FOX-XP multi-wafer test and burn-in system configured with our new fully integrated and automated WaferPak Aligner for high-volume hands-free operation. They have told us how important automation is to them across their wafer fabrication, assembly, and testing, and that, in addition to the cost-effectiveness and scalability of our system, our fully integrated FOX-XP with automated WaferPak alignment handling is key to meeting their automation needs that are critical to their scalability, as well as the quality and reliability goals of the customers and markets they serve. The FOX-XP multi-wafer level test and burn-in system can be configured with up to nine or 18 wafers depending on the customers’ specific test requirements. It provides the test electronics and device contactor technology that enables contact to 100% devices on a single wafer and the handling and alignment equipment to provide a total turnkey single vendor solution to meet the needed critical test and stress requirements. Our Automated WaferPak Aligner adds a number of very valuable features to the wafer-level test and burn-in process. This new FOX WaferPak Aligner is available in both standalone and integrated versions. In the standalone version, customers can align their WaferPaks offline from the FOX-XP systems using our new FOX WaferPak cards that can be docked to the Aligner. The Aligner will automatically load the WaferPaks with wafers or exchange tested wafers with untested wafers and can be used to support up to five or more fully-loaded XP systems for an extremely low-cost application with long test and burn-in times. The integrated version of our new Aligner docks directly to a FOX-XP chamber that can test and burn-in up to 18 wafers at a time. This can be preferable for customers for lower test and burn-in times or in the case where the customer wants near hands-free operation. The new Aligner can work with all types of wafer sizes, including the high-volume runners of 150 millimeter and 200 millimeter used for silicon carbide and can also test 100 millimeter silicon carbide or other wafers. It can also test 200 millimeter and 300 millimeter wafers typical of silicon photonics devices, memories, and logic devices. We see automation is more typically desired in 300 millimeter fabs, such as silicon photonics and memory devices where automation is much more typical. The Automated Aligner also allows for unattended change or reversion from one product type to the next and the ability to run multiple different product type wafers in parallel. Adding automation through our new Aligner gives our wafer-level test and burn-in offering even greater value, as well as opens up several large incremental markets to Aehr, such as high-volume processors and chipsets with integrated photonics transceivers, flash, and ultimately DRAM memories, and also higher mix devices requiring extremely high reliability and 100% burn-in, such as automotive microcontrollers and sensors. The new second customer added this quarter is a multi-billion dollar annual revenue global manufacturer of semiconductors that serves multiple markets, including supplying devices to the automotive industry. This new customer has already has experience in power semiconductors and quickly understood the value proposition of being able to test and burn-in 100% of their devices at wafer level. In a fairly short period of time, they selected our FOX-NP dual wafer test and burn-in system for qualifications of their silicon carbide devices for multiple markets, including electric vehicles. We anticipate that this customer will move to high volume production using our FOX-XP systems after their customer qualifications. Adding two new customers now provides more optimism about our ability to gain significant market share of the test and burn-in market for silicon carbide devices. These customers expand our penetration beyond our initial lead silicon carbide wafer level burn-in customer. Regarding that lead customer, they continue to ramp their capacity and use of our FOX-XP multi-wafer test and burn-in systems and WaferPaks, which is being driven by increased demand for silicon carbide, particularly for, but not limited to electric vehicles. We expect significant orders from them for the necessary WaferPak for wafer contactors to match their previously purchased FOX-XP systems, and they continue to forecast orders for significant numbers of new FOX-XP systems and WaferPak contactors over the next several years to meet growing demand. In addition to the customers that have now placed initial orders with Aehr for silicon carbide wafer level test and burn-in systems, our ongoing benchmarks and evaluations with multiple prospects made great progress during the quarter. These include significant market leaders in silicon carbide, as well as several smaller existing and up-and-coming suppliers. We expect several of these companies to place their initial orders with us before the end of this fiscal year ending May 31, 2023. We also continue to see very positive responses from our discussions with a number of new potential customers in silicon carbide this quarter, and have also begun detailed discussions with gallium nitride semiconductor suppliers from around the world. Silicon carbide devices and modules have key advantages for traction inverters in onboard and offboard chargers for electric vehicles, as well as other high power industrial applications, while gallium nitride is generally believed to be superior for lower power applications, particularly under 1000 watts. Both device types are forecasted to grow significantly over the next several years and into the future. Both silicon carbide and gallium nitride semiconductors address the high voltage power semiconductor markets that are significant opportunities for our FOX wafer-level test and burn-in systems and WaferPak for wafer contactors. As we look to further penetrate these markets, we continue to add new capabilities to our wafer-level test and burn-in systems. These include the new bipolar voltage channel module and very high voltage channel module options that enable silicon carbide and gallium nitride semiconductor manufacturers more flexibility to address a wider variety of stress and burn-in conditions for their engineering qualification and production needs. These advanced capabilities enable manufacturers to ship products with higher reliability and parametric stability necessitated by applications such as electric vehicle traction inverters, onboard chargers, and several other industrial and power conversion markets. With these new features, test and burn-in at wafer-level ensures even better control of yield loss and improved product reliability. Many questions have come up on what the addition of these two new silicon carbide customers means. Both have a history in the automotive space, and one is currently a leading supplier of silicon carbide devices to this market. We announced our lead customer about three years ago, right before the pandemic started. Silicon carbide's massive ramp did not really start until the latter half of the pandemic as electric vehicles, chargers, and worldwide electrification of infrastructure really began to take off. Our lead customer did not place an order for their second system until the middle of 2021. If you aggregate the orders we've announced from them and the WaferPak contactors to support their orders, their choice of Aehr has meant roughly $75 million of business for Aehr already. They have publicly said they have plans to expand. So we are enjoying their success. The new customers can be equally significant. For the major supplier silicon carbide customer, we first tested their wafers on our machines at Aehr, and then they purchased a FOX-NP for engineering qualifications three months ago and have since tested their wafers at their facility. Since then, they have already purchased two of our multi-wafer FOX-XPs for production test and burn-in of their devices, including the order announced today, and they have told us they'll need a significant number of additional systems. This happened in a fraction of the time that it took to get to this point with our initial customer. As Aehr has now validated our wafer-level solution with multiple customers and their end customers, our solution is very effective at screening out defects to automotive qualities. We believe this new customer can be as large as our lead customer. So while we only announce purchase orders as they come in, the fact that this customer is depending on Aehr for its production volumes going forward should give investors confidence that Aehr is right in the middle of this electric vehicles tsunami. The second new customer this last quarter is a very large player in discrete and power semiconductors today and is already qualified for automotive. Interestingly, this company has yet to announce their silicon carbide MOSFETs that they're already characterizing on our FOX wafer-level burn-in systems. We believe that most customers of our FOX wafer-level test and burn-in systems have the potential to be a significant revenue source for Aehr, and this customer is no different. We've said in the past that we haven't seen any real competition in terms of cost effectiveness, footprint, and manufacturing capacity compared to our proprietary FOX wafer-level test and burn-in systems and WaferPak for wafer contactors. We continue to engage with both current suppliers of silicon carbide devices, as well as other new entrants into this market. The industry data suggests CAGRs of close to 50% over the rest of this decade as the electric vehicle and charging infrastructure markets develop. Solar and wind will also be part of this growing market. So, naturally you'd expect lots of new entrants; some will succeed wildly, some may make niche inroads. We want all of them to come to Aehr for their test requirements. Our use case is compelling. Since their customers, such as the automotive companies, require zero failures, not one in 10,000 or one in 100,000, but no failures. So test and screening out early defects becomes very, very important to our customers and prospects. And from the level of interest we're seeing, we believe our message is getting through. We set out to be seen as the industry standard for wafer-level test and burn-in, a critical piece of the production process for several semiconductors and their target applications, including silicon carbide and silicon photonics. With the momentum we're seeing, we feel we have a very good chance to be recognized as that industry standard and to gain significant market share worldwide. Now let me move on to silicon photonics. We're also seeing a strong recovery of our silicon photonics wafer level test and burn-in business after the weakness we saw during the pandemic. Halfway through this fiscal year, we've already shipped over $5 million in systems upgrades in WaferPaks to silicon photonics customers, and that's over 300% of last fiscal year's first half revenue for silicon photonics. This jump in revenue is also spread across multiple customers and much of it is for new product designs and qualifications that we feel will lead to production volumes. We have systems installed at over half a dozen customers testing silicon photonics devices used in 5G infrastructure, data and telecommunications transceivers, and a few yet-to-be-introduced applications that we're very excited about. With multiple market leaders announcing plans to integrate photonics transceivers into their microprocessors, graphics processors, and chipsets, we believe silicon photonics will become a significant market for wafer-level test and burn-in over the next several years. Looking ahead, we continue to be very encouraged by discussions with current and prospect customers and the continued momentum opportunities we are seeing. Europe has a large number of potential customers for power semiconductors, including both silicon carbide and gallium nitride, and the U.S. East Coast has several companies that are already in or getting into silicon carbide, as well as companies that are making investments in silicon photonics. We're also seeing companies in Asia getting into the power semiconductor game. The lifting of COVID-related travel restrictions in Taiwan and Japan is really helping with our new customer engagements in those regions. With the significant increase in market demand we're seeing for our products and in our sales activities, we have been investing in building up our sales and support teams across the globe. During the quarter, we expanded our senior sales leadership with the addition of several proven executives that will manage our sales activities in Asia, Europe, and the East Coast of the United States. These are experienced semiconductor capital equipment sales veterans with significant expertise in test and direct relationships with our target customers. We're very happy with these additions and have already seen a positive impact from their efforts. In conclusion, we continue to believe that we will receive production orders from additional silicon carbide companies beyond our current customers and begin shipping systems to meet their production capacity by the end of our current fiscal year that ends May 31, 2023. We expect a strong second half of this fiscal year and are maintaining our guidance for revenues of at least $60 million to $70 million for our current fiscal year that ends May 31, representing growth of at least 18% to 38% year-over-year and also represents revenue growth of between 35% and 75% in the second half of the fiscal year, compared to the first half of this year. Additionally, we continue to expect bookings to grow faster than revenues in fiscal 2023, as the ramp in demand for silicon carbide and electric vehicles increases and we build momentum going into fiscal 2024. With that, let me turn it over to Ken before we open up the lines for questions.

Thank you, Gayn, and good afternoon, everyone. As Gayn noted, we had another solid quarter in Q2 with strong sequential and year-over-year growth in our revenue and net income. We also saw improvement in gross margin and beat analyst estimates in both the top and bottom lines. Looking at our financial results in more detail, net sales in the second quarter were $14.8 million, up 39% sequentially from $10.7 million in the first quarter and up 54% from $9.6 million in the second quarter last year. The sequential increase in net sales from Q1 includes an increase in WaferPak/DiePak revenues of $6.1 million. For the second quarter, these consumable revenues accounted for 45% or $6.6 million of our total revenue, compared to only 5% of revenue in the preceding first quarter. The increase in revenues is primarily due to shipments of WaferPaks for our lead silicon carbide customer in Q2 related to prior quarters' system shipments. As noted previously, customers often buy systems and then WaferPaks later after they have completed their WaferPak designs. Gross profit in the second quarter was $7.9 million or 53% of sales, up from gross profit of $4.5 million or 42% of sales in the preceding first quarter and up from gross profit of $4.5 million or 47% of sales in the second quarter of the previous year. Several factors contributed to the improvement in gross margin. The change in product mix had a favorable impact on gross margin. Consumables revenues, which deliver higher gross margins, accounted for 45% of total revenues compared to only 5% of revenues in the prior quarter, resulting in a 4.7 percentage point improvement in gross margin from Q1. We also saw an improvement in unabsorbed overhead cost to cost of goods sold due to higher revenue levels in the second quarter, accounting for a 3.2 percentage point improvement in gross margin over the prior quarter. With our use of contract manufacturers, we have the ability to keep our costs relatively fixed while revenues grow, which contributes to gross margin. Gross margin also benefited from lower freight, duties, and tariffs and lower warranty costs, providing a 3.5 percentage point improvement in gross margin. We are definitely seeing an improvement from the challenging supply chain environment we saw over the last fiscal year. Freight costs have come down substantially. As noted in prior calls, due to the shortage in ocean freight capacity with shipments into the U.S., we were required to ship by air. This is no longer the case and we are saving over $50,000 per chamber consolidating chambers on ocean shipments. We continue to minimize our use of suppliers in China and use these suppliers only when their total cost, including tariffs, is lower than other suppliers. Warranty costs also improved, which is actually reversing some warranty reserves as both our quality continues to improve, as well as our costs associated with repair have lowered significantly using our repair center in the Philippines. Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter was $4.5 million or $0.16 per diluted share. This compares to non-GAAP net income of $1.3 million or $0.05 per diluted share in the preceding first quarter, and non-GAAP net income of $1.4 million or $0.05 per diluted share in the second quarter of fiscal 2022. Non-GAAP net income excludes the impact of stock-based compensation. Operating expenses in the second quarter were $4.4 million, an increase of $403,000 or 10% from $4 million in the preceding first quarter and up $624,000 or 16% from $3.8 million in the second quarter of the previous year. The increase from the preceding first quarter is primarily due to an increase in SG&A of $350,000 related to cost of growing the business, including increases in headcount and corresponding recruiting fees, increases in company-wide salaries and increases in outside commissions, travel, entertainment, and trade shows related to our significant increase in selling activities. We've invested in human capital with key additions to our sales and marketing staff to expand our customer engagement and marketing reach, customer support, and manufacturing staff to support revenue growth, and engineering staff for our development programs. The increase from the second quarter last year includes increases in SG&A of $386,000 related to the cost of growing the business, and R&D of $238,000 related to increased spending on development programs. During the quarter, we announced two new enhancements for our FOX-P family of wafer-level test and burn-in systems. These include the bipolar voltage channel module and very high voltage channel module options, which enable new advanced test and burn-in capabilities for silicon carbide and gallium nitride power semiconductors on Aehr's FOX-P wafer-level test and burn-in systems. Our R&D program initiatives also include a new automated WaferPak Aligner, which can be configured in either a standalone configuration or integrated with our FOX-XP systems. We have taken orders for both configurations, including the recent announcement of an order from our new silicon carbide customer for a FOX-XP system, which includes the integrated configuration which provides hands-free operation of wafer handling and auto loading. 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. These R&D programs include enhancements in all our key markets, including silicon carbide and gallium nitride power semiconductors, silicon photonics, and other photonics semiconductors, mobile 2D and 3D sensing devices, and memory and data storage semiconductors. Turning to the balance sheet for the second quarter, we finished the quarter with a strong balance sheet. Our cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments were $36.6 million at November 30, up $437,000 from $36.1 million at the end of the preceding first quarter, and up $1.6 million from $35 million at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2022. Working capital at November 30 was $54.8 million. This represents an increase of $5.4 million from Q1 and $15.3 million from Q2 of the prior year. Inventories at the end of the second quarter were $18 million, an increase of $739,000 from the preceding quarter and up $4.9 million from the second quarter last year. We are increasing inventory to support our expected growth in the second half of fiscal 2023, and we continue to purchase inventory to ensure adequate supply to meet current customer and future customer market demand. Our highly differentiated FOX family of systems allows us to purchase material that is leveraged across many customers and markets, which provides us confidence in our ability to meet the significant market opportunity. Bookings in the second quarter were $10.8 million. Backlog as of November 30 was $15.5 million, compared to $19.5 million at the end of the preceding first quarter and $36.1 million at the end of the second quarter last year. Effective backlog, which includes backlog as of November 30 and all orders since the end of the second quarter, including the order we announced today, is $23.5 million. Now turning to our outlook for 2023 fiscal year which ends on May 31, 2023, we are confident in the company's growth trajectory and our unique capabilities and product offerings to meet customer demands. As such, we are reiterating our previously provided guidance for full year total revenue of at least $60 million to $70 million, representing growth of at least 18% to 38% year-over-year with strong profit margins similar to last year. We continue to expect bookings to grow faster than revenues in fiscal 2023 as the ramp in demand for silicon carbide and electric vehicles increases, and we've built momentum going into fiscal 2024.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. The first question comes from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.

Hey, congrats guys on continued strong business and new customer momentum. Gayn, it sounds like you're updating the number of customers that you expect to be shipping to by the end of the fiscal year. Can you just clarify how many customers in total you would anticipate selling to by the end of the fiscal year?

We don't want to be too vague, but being overly specific can also lead to issues. There are a few customers who haven't placed production system orders with us yet, but we believe they may start ordering and requesting deliveries as soon as before the year ends, and we have the capacity to fulfill those requests. We have sufficient inventory and have prebuilt systems based on market forecasts and specific customer needs, enabling us to ship systems before the end of May.

That's great. I know you've highlighted this before, but could you just quickly remind us what your capacity is on a yearly or quarterly type of level whichever way you would like to break it down?

Right now, we're probably shipping somewhere in the 50 blades or wafers of capacity a month. If you think of a FOX-XP with 18 blades in it, that's about what we're currently doing. We have more capacity than that, but that's our build plan. That's equal to or a little bit higher than what our current customer requests and demands are. We have the material and pipeline to be able to ship upwards of maybe five systems or 100 wafers of capacity a month by this summer and could actually ship another perhaps even 2x that or 10 systems a month in a year. That is not what we're currently believing our forecast is, candidly, but it's feasible to be that. And so, it's an interesting scenario. We're actually using our capacity in our short lead times and our supply chain as one of our believed to be competitive advantages.

Okay. It's fabulous. And then on the new wafer handling technology, which really seems to be a game changer for some of your new customers. Does that come with an ASP that's materially different from the prior generation product?

No, it's pretty similar. Our automated handlers are in about the $800,000 range type of thing, whereas the manual liners are significantly cheaper than that. Our plans are to be shipping that here by the end of the fiscal year to multiple customers.

Great. And then my last question and congrats on the product success during the COVID period and the recent uptick in silicon photonics. I know it's relatively modest revenue, but materially better than it has been in the most recent time frame. But as you look at that in a multiyear time frame, could those customers be the same size as your lead silicon carbide customer at $75 million or is it materially greater or modestly less? Could you give us any color there?

Yes. So we've been kind of holding our cards to our chest for several years on this thing. So with the announcements by some major suppliers, I think there are going to be lots of smaller players certainly over the next, say, three years or something along those lines. But any one of those big players could be larger than our biggest silicon carbide customer. So the total available market for the silicon photonics when you start talking about it being embedded in servers and chipsets and processors and GPUs, I think is bigger than the silicon carbide business.

That’s fantastic. No other questions. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Christian.

The next question comes from Jed Dorsheimer with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Yeah. Thanks. First off, congratulations on a spectacular quarter. So nice work.

Thanks, Jed.

I guess my first question on your first new silicon carbide customer, the one that's purchased two XPs with the automated handler. Is the automated handler going to be shipping at the same time as the shipment of these two tools? So will you have both available to ship with that automated handler at the March time frame?

The customers actually requested that we shipped the XP system with the first one, shift the second one integrated with the aligner and then upgrade the first one with the aligner. But it's sort of a risk reduction thing for everybody on doing that.

Got it. And from a rev rec perspective, do you expect that these will fall into this fiscal year's revenue recognition or is it...

Our policy is that if we have a new product going to a new customer until that customer says, I've accepted it, we do not score revenue, even if they pay us for it entirely.

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. And I guess I was wondering if you could just outline if the material quality of silicon carbide milliohm resistance is coming down in the material, it enables multiple shrinks. Every time you would have a shrink or your customer would have a shrink in terms of chip design, that will trigger new consumables from a WaferPak.

That's right. WaferPak full wafer contactors are tailored to the specific wafer designs, which correspond to the device designs. Therefore, as the device dimensions shrink, the overall X by Y area will also decrease.

When considering the capacity needs for silicon carbide from a wafer start perspective, if the industry experiences a shrink scale, there would likely be a 30% recurring revenue stream associated with that, along with the additional machines needed for different diameters.

In a typical purchase upfront for our tool, we've talked about these ASPs in the like $2 million, $2.5 million or so for a tool, and then a set of WaferPaks might be $1.5 million. So if you use the one-third rule and call that 30%, I'm with you.

Got it. That's helpful. Last question for me, I'll jump back in the queue. Did I hear you correctly when you talked about your second new customer? Did they not announce products in silicon carbide?

I'm choosing my words very carefully. They have not introduced silicon carbide MOSFETs, and I checked their website again last night to confirm. They still have not mentioned it. We know they are in discussions with customers.

Okay. Got it. Thank you.

Thanks, Jed.

The next question comes from Dylan Patel with SemiAnalysis. Please go ahead.

Hey, Gayn. I wanted to ask the WaferPaks, the various burn-in equipment on both a silicon carbide side and photonics side, is that going to be in the wafer fab or can it be in the test fab?

You know what, it absolutely can be in either. Most of our equipment today, if not all of it, is in the front end. It naturally fits in the wafer fab right next to the fab. Our systems are rated for clean room specifications. They're intended to go into the clean rooms.

It's burn-in and then stimulation next, right or is there anything else in the middle?

No, there's test after burn-in on your wafer always. Our recommended process is to take a raw wafer; no need to test it. We will test it and tell you which are the good and bad die.

Thank you for the color. I'll have to reread it here. But one quick last question was about China's reopening. I'm curious if you've been scheduling any travel there because there's a ton of companies like TankeBlue, so on and so forth that are all there that are investing a ton.

We've had multiple conversations with several of the China suppliers. We have people in the country. So other than the restrictions on the local travel or intercountry travel, our team has been able to move around with customers throughout this entire period.

Good. Thank you.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Bradford Ferguson with Halter Ferguson Financial. Please go ahead.

Hi, Gayn. I understand that the FOX-XP system can handle 18 wafers during burn-in simultaneously. With the total WaferPaks costing $4.5 million, how does that compare to the nearest competitor? I've heard that their commodity system processes one wafer at a time.

$700,000 to $1 million for the equivalent per wafer cost. So it would be significantly lower than the other folks. In some of the silicon carbide cases, for example, we might be $200,000.

So essentially, you're like at 70% off potentially.

We’re pretty open with our margins with our customers. They know what we're doing. I think we have a good relationship with them that allows us to continue to invest.

And tagging on to Jed Dorsheimer's last question, your second customer with no silicon carbide announced plans that is kicking the tires with Aehr.

Yes. They have not actually announced that they are selling silicon carbide MOSFETs yet. We know they're talking to customers.

Okay. And then I have a moonshot question, which is in medical testing, there's LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics where they would actually run the test for the customers. What does Aehr Test Systems think about running the burn-in for the customer and/or like having an Aehr Test Systems certification where it's a best practice?

We actually do customer wafers inside in one of our secure labs here. We have multiple labs that are secured with cameras and lockouts, et cetera, to ensure that there's no cross-pollination of IP. That has proven 100% successful so far.

And those subcontractors are where the die maker, the wafer makers shipping out the whole wafer to Asia or whatever to get burned in and then it goes on from.

We are working with companies that will use their own sub-cons and they will buy the tool and put it there and it's dedicated for them. We already are working with them to qualify them to be able to do silicon photonics-based or silicon carbide-based burn-in.

Okay. Thank you.

No problem. Thank you.

The next question comes from Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, Gayn and Ken. I have a couple of follow-up questions. Gayn, I understand that you have the capacity to take on a few more clients by the end of the year. However, considering the 15 to 20 or more silicon carbide companies that are currently scaling up, do you have the capacity to serve a majority of them?

I think so, yes, because I don't think not all of them will be anywhere near as big as the first one. We do actually look at the total capacity need.

I know, obviously, this is a very early stages of this market growth. But just curious if there's been any kind of a slowdown from any of the customers just based on China's EV market and some of the broader concerns in the marketplace?

We haven't seen it at all. I'm going to simplify the categories of silicon carbide players.

All right. That sounds good. And final question, I was quite frankly shocked when you said earlier today that the silicon photonics customer could be bigger than your current silicon carbide customer. I was always under the assumption that after the initial set of orders, they're doing 100% burn-in, and then it goes down to like a 5% sampling over time...

Silicon photonics is actually the definition of where they are actually putting a photonics transceiver on a piece of silicon bypassing the normal discrete modulators, demodulators. This has been the holy grail that people have been working on for over 20 years. I believe it is ultimately larger than the silicon carbide market. It is way more devices, and it is 100% burn-in and it is much longer test times.

Well, that’s exciting stuff. Look forward to the second and third phase of growth here. Thanks for your time today.

Thanks, Tom.

There are no further questions in the queue. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody for attending. I wish everyone a happy new year. As always, we'd love to take your calls. We're located here in the Bay Area, just around the corner from Tesla. And if you happen to be in town, feel free to reach out to us or the IR folks will be happy to take a short meeting. We're really proud of what we're doing here. The manufacturing production floor, which is sort of blowing at the seams right now, is pretty exciting to look at too. So I would encourage you, if you'd like to reach out to us. And if not, we'll either see you at the Needham Conference or talk to you at the next quarterly call. Have a nice day. Good afternoon to you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.