Aehr Test Systems (NASDAQ:AEHR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

It’s very — that I am going to say how well thought out it is. But anyhow, the team really did a good job of thinking through all of our learnings over this and we know, I think, more about wafer level burn-in than anyone else in the world. And so one of the subtle things is that or not so subtle, it can be in what we call a standalone mode where you can have feed at cassettes a wafers and it will automatically align wafers and then put them into a cart and so you can load up a cart with 18 wafers and that cart then can be moved over to one of our systems. You open the door and you put 18 wafers in, close the door and hit go, okay? So it’s more automated than our current one, which only does one WaferPak at a time. This can actually move the WaferPaks around and load up a cart.

But in that case, it’s offline and you can share it amongst multiple FOX-XP systems. That exact same aligner can also dock to an XP, and instead of a cart in back, it has an XP in back and it will open and close each of the blades and allow you to have a continuous flow of 18 wafers at a time in this very small footprint. Now some companies feel passionate if that’s the only way to go and some companies think, no, I want them off-line, and candidly, we don’t argue with them, whichever way you want is fine with us. But if you feel you need automation, we got you covered. If you feel I like to do it manual, I want it to feed. There’s different reasons people do it. We have that covered as well, and in fact, we have taken orders for both. So, and you can interchange them.

If you wanted to, you could take an automated aligner that’s in a standalone and we can adapt it probably in a day or so and move it and have an XP dock up to it. It’s really well thought out. It’s one product that will work across multiple customers. It will work across 100-millimeter wafers for RF, GaN devices and like those types, 150-millimeter type devices from GaN and silicon carbide, 200-millimeter GaN silicon carbide and silicon photonics type devices, 300-millimeter silicon photonics, memory devices, large scale microcontrollers and other processors. So it’s a very flexible system that we are really proud of. So I hope that helps.

Ken Spink: So, hey, to add to that Gayn, the topic of rev rec. Yes, absolutely, we do have the automated aligners that we have not recognized revenue yet, because they have not been accepted at the customer. So those fall into the same criteria that you had talked about earlier in our rev rec policy.

Dylan Patel: Thank you.

Gayn Erickson: Thank you, Ken.

Dylan Patel: So

Gayn Erickson: And by the way if

Dylan Patel: Okay.

Gayn Erickson: Yeah. Sorry, just one more thing. And a customer that places an order for an integrated system with both the XP and the aligner, if we ship the XP ahead of time and then upgrade it, we still don’t recognize the XP revenue, okay? Because we have a continuation of that until those aligners are accepted and that’s right now kind of that’s what’s got a lot of this stuff related to. When is the revenue going to happen? Is it going to be Q4 or Q1, okay. Sorry, go ahead.

Dylan Patel: So, should I think about this as a way to increase tool utilization from the companies that kind of like it a lot or does it or more so is it and — but while it does increase your — the FOX-XP utilization, there’s also they are paying a bit more for the 1:1 with the aligners that are automated and made it directly to the XP. How should I think about that for you and your revenue going forward, right, because it isn’t a cheap thing, right? It is an increased cost and revenue per sort of XP that you deployed?