Dylan Patel: Thank you for the color. I’ll have to reread it here. But one quick last question was about the 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 and — yeah.
Gayn Erickson: So we’ve had multiple conversations with several of the China suppliers. We have people in country, okay? 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, and that includes both sales and support people. Most of the Chinese suppliers are behind relative to other folks. And in many cases, what we’re doing today is, we’re working with companies outside of China who are building silicon carbide devices to ship to those China automotive suppliers. So right now, that’s where we see the primary opportunity from us. Over time, the Chinese industry may also pose a real opportunity for us. I’d say that the bulk of our energy has been in the U.S., Europe and Asia outside of China to-date.
Dylan Patel: Good. Thank you.
Gayn Erickson: Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Bradford Ferguson with Halter (ph) Ferguson Financial. Please go ahead.
Bradford Ferguson: Hi, Gayn. The way I understand is the FOX-XP system allows for 18 wafers to be burned out — burn-in at the same time. In this system with all the WaferPaks costs of $4.5 million, what’s the next closest competition look like? I’ve heard the commodity system is one way at a time 90,000?
Gayn Erickson: Yeah. So $700 million to $1 million for the equivalent per wafer cost. So it would be — there’s an equivalent — please go ahead.
Bradford Ferguson: So essentially, you’re like at 70% off potentially.
Gayn Erickson: We are significantly lower than the other folks. There are people that have $1 million per wafer cost, and we might be $200,000 in kind of one of the — in some of the silicon carbide cases, for example. And people usually go, well, why are you giving them away? Well, we don’t feel we’re giving them away. 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 at the same time, our goal was not to just be cheaper than the other guy. In fact, to some extent, we were ignoring them. What we’re trying to do is be as cheap as back-end production burn-in, which we have also been a supplier for 30 plus years, almost 40 years.
And if you look at our cost to test, the cost of test of us at wafer level is the same as at package level, which people in our industry are shocked to see. And if you go up to 2,000 die per wafer like you would with an onboard charger, it’s half the cost. And so they not only get the yield advantage, which is more than the cost of test, they also get it cheaper than they would any other way. And we’ve chosen to position this product that was its initial intent. We think we’ve successfully done it, and we’re focusing now on being able to ship enough to everybody in the world if we need to.
Bradford Ferguson: And tagging on to Jed Dorsheimer’s last question, there’s — and there’s also a second customer with no silicon carbide announced plans that is kicking the tires with Aehr.
Gayn Erickson: Yes. Okay. So specifically, if you want to call it, the third customer that bought an NP system, they also — they have not actually announced — they haven’t publicly announced that they’re selling silicon carbide MOSFETs yet. We know they’re talking to customers. So we don’t really understand the strategy on that, but that’s okay. They’re a big player, they’re serious, and they are very well qualified to be a big customer of ours. We also have benchmarks. We’ve talked about it before in our previous calls. We’ve had an ongoing benchmark with one of the other large suppliers for well over a year now. That’s a very extensive automotive benchmark that has gone very well during the quarter, and we would hope to give you guys some updates on that over the next — at our next call.
Bradford Ferguson: 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 practices? This is a known good — not only a known good die, but this has been best practices burn-in in Aehr certified wave?
Gayn Erickson: There’s multiple things to that. I like everything you’re saying, okay? So first of all, we actually do — we 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-politization of IP. And we’ve done that with multiple customers so that we can give them a risk-free demonstration of show there, their failures on their wafers with the equipment. That has proven 100% successful so far. So we do that. Second, we actually have — we haven’t announced our name yet, which is kind of an odd thing to. But we have a partnership with one of the largest subcons in the world who has our tools both in their front-end engineering as well as in production.
Stay tuned for some announcements on that during the year. But we — during this next half, but we already are working with them to qualify them to be able to do silicon photonics-based or silicon carbide-based burn-in in addition to the silicon photonics that they’re doing today. And that would allow us to direct someone towards them if they wanted to do services, et cetera., different than us trying to actually be in the services business. We’re still kind of focused on capital equipment engineering support services and the consumables themselves. Related to an endorsement by Aehr, there’s something to that. We get to see a cross-section of all of the wafer — many of the wafers around the world and see kind of the good and the bad and the whole thing, I have some very strong opinions about what burn-in time should be, what test conditions should be.
And we — what I will tell you is, we’ve started working with the — what’s referred to as OEMs, which is the end customers related to, can there be an industry standard for what those burn-in times should be in order to achieve a specific level of quality? And I would hope to try and drive that in the industry if nothing else for the good of the overall industry because there is a difference. And if people want to cut some corners or something along those lines, candidly, I’d prefer they don’t do it on my machine. So that’s it, thank you for the thoughts there, Brad.
