Atomera Incorporated (NASDAQ:ATOM) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Bibaud: Yes. I would say it’s a little bit of both, Cody, because they don’t report publicly about smart power products. What they report is as market segments, not technology segments, which is very common in the semiconductor industry, right? Your development teams work on technology segments and your marketing teams kind of work on market segments. And what they are reporting on market segments, so what we’re likely to see is very strong crossover of this technology into multiple different market segments. So as I was talking about earlier in my comments, we expect to see chip design starting that would be targeted at multiple different markets with multiple different requirements. So for example, higher voltage products may be for the automotive industry or 5-volt type of products for battery powered and consumer electronics or just analog sensors that might be used in the industrial space.

But we — what we don’t know now. So we’re not violating confidentiality and because we just don’t know, but we don’t know where those designs will be coming from and what the potential volume of them will be.

Cody Acree: And I guess, how much more would you be involved? Will you be asked to be involved when it does get to be a productization stage?

Scott Bibaud: Yes. I think we may get less involved, frankly, at that point. Our big involvement is going to be right now, during the development phase, and then helping them to get the MST working as efficiently as possible as they go through their production line. But once they have a released PDK, for the most part, our support requirements, I expect to die down to very low. We may, and what I’d like to do is that we keep involvement with their design team so they understand all the benefits that they can get by using the MST. But I still think, for the most part, their engineers will understand it once they see it in the PDK, and they’ll be able to do that without our help.

Cody Acree: And let me switch gears a bit to the RF SOI progress that you discussed in your script. Can you just help us to understand your engagements? Is this more on an IDM basis? Or is this through foundry partners?

Scott Bibaud: It’s both. It’s both. We have very wide engagement on RF SOI for most of the foundry providers and several of the IDMs as well. And the good news is there’s not 100 players in this space. There are a handful, and we know who they are and we’re presenting to them. So I do feel like, we’ve got good traction with the majority of the folks who will be out there producing products with RF SOI.

Cody Acree: And I guess, from an MST standpoint, is there a potential for you to be incorporated in a current design process that they’re working on today that’s delivering the products, delivering to customers? Or would it take or complete the bottom-up, reengineer, representation, requalification, recertification design wins, what we [indiscernible]?

Scott Bibaud: Yes. So Cody and — redesigning any existing chip and requalifying it in almost any market is a challenge. My understanding of this base, which I did work in for quite a long time, is that it’s more cellular in consumer electronics based. And so the design cycles are — happen every year or even more frequently. And so if you come out with a new technology, you probably wouldn’t redesign an older chip and try to requalify, you would design a new chip to take full advantage of all the new things that you’ve got going on and get that qualified to go in new phones or new consumer electronics products or something. And so I think that’s more what we’re looking at for the RF SOI space.

Cody Acree: Okay. Great. And then, Frank, I guess, if you can just talk about your liquidity position, $20 million in cash, $3.5 million a quarter burn. What are your options or your level of liquidity? And where are you comfortable with your cash balance?