Richard Shannon: No, no, I will not, Scott.
Scott Bibaud : That’s okay. By the way, I just want to be clear, I’m comparing the three months from kind of the beginning of November until now, from last year to this year. And last year, it wasn’t really that impacted by COVID. So it’s pretty fair comparison. This is normally a time of year with the holidays, and everything that you don’t see a ton of travel happening. But we are, I mean, we’re just — we have lots of irons in the fire. And it’s a fun, kind of exciting atmosphere where we’re constantly preparing for the next customer meeting and for the next set of data that we have to do to show to convince them to move in the application area that we’d like them to move in. So — yes, so that’s where all that comes from.
Richard Shannon: Okay. Okay, fair enough. And let’s see here. Because you announced the customer moving into Phase III, and you’re guiding to know revenues for the quarter. And it’s obviously not a revenue generating event, or at least not immediately. What do you expect that at some point to happen with this relationship well in Phase III or not and can you characterize any sort of work technology product or et cetera, that you’re working with them on?
Scott Bibaud : Yes. I don’t think I can talk about the specific work area, but I can say, it’s a quite a large customer. We’ve been that in Phase III most of our customers go through Phase III in a month or two. This customer wanted to run some very expensive tests in Phase IIII because it helps them to understand what our technology can do. So they’ve been in it for a few quarters, got the final results in December, and then we’re very excited by them and move very quickly into Phase III. Usually, when we start Phase III, it means a customer has to start running some new wafers on their side, build them up to a certain point and send them to us. And that can take a while for them to do in this case, the customer was so excited, they react extremely quickly and sent us the wafers quite rapidly.
So it feels like this is something that’s going to have a high priority, and hopefully, will, will move quickly through the development pipeline and get to a point we’ll have something in natural.
Richard Shannon: Okay. Fair enough. And let’s see, on the fourth quarter revenues, you recognize, obviously, a small amount here, which you guided for zero, there’s something there. Can you describe the activity that triggered that? And did I understand correctly, this customer came from North America? Is this one of the licensees that you’ve been asked in the past?
Scott Bibaud : Well, what I can say about it is that it’s MST TCAD revenue, which we disclosed. So it’s MST TCAD revenue from North America.
Richard Shannon: Okay. But you can’t say whether it’s an announced licensee?
Scott Bibaud : No.
Richard Shannon: Okay. Okay. Fair enough. And let’s see here, just scanning my question list here, make sure I didn’t miss anything. Scott, maybe I’ll just kind of finish up with a question here on leading edge. Just wondering kind of help us understand the importance of what you’re doing to Gate-All-Around and other sorts of initiatives in leading edge. And if just any way that you characterize the probability of success and timeframe, I think most people on this call are expecting a fairly long period of time. Anyway, you characterize that would probably be helpful in that, I think that’s all for me. Thank you.
Scott Bibaud : Yes. It’s a very interesting situation. We do a lot of work in the legacy nodes. And in theory, the legacy nodes could, they’re relatively simpler to work on. They’re in volume production. So you’d think they would change over pretty quickly. But there’s — but what we do run into there is that even if we show a customer great benefit on the legacy nodes, sometimes they’re not planning to make a change to their legacy nodes for some time, we have to wait for that time to come around. But on the leading edge on the gate-all-around, we know every big semiconductor company is working on it, they’ve got a ton of engineers dedicated to it. So when we bring in some ideas, there’s a big crowd that’s ready to listen. And if they like what they see, they’re probably going to want to start running some experiments with us.
And they’ll have a ton of resources to do those experiments and get results quickly and hopefully, move fast. So the gate-all-around is, as I mentioned, my remarks is very complicated. People are taking ideas from a large number of industry players like the equipment OEMs, and universities. And we’re also contributing a lot of ideas. So we’re hopeful that if we’re adopted by one or more of these players will become kind of a standard thing that gets added in to everybody’s, that kind of goes on to the industry semiconductor roadmap. And that would be kind of a straightforward way for us to continue licensing our technology out to every one of the companies is developing those processes in the future. So, big opportunity. We have done a lot of science on it.
And I think quite an exciting thing for us,
Richard Shannon: Scott, appreciate that perspective. That’s all from me guys. Thank you.
Mike Bishop : All right. Thank you, Richard. And just two more quick questions here before we conclude the call. First one is has Atomera done any simulation, or MST TCAD work on 3-nanometers?
Scott Bibaud : Yes, for those of you who don’t know about 3-nanometer, so in the semiconductor industry, the most advanced transistor that’s being worked on right now is the 3-nanometer transistor. There’s already work and thought going on beyond 3-nanometers, but 3-nanometers is the most advanced node and that’s where they’re using for the most part, the gate-all-around architecture that we talked about. There’s a lot of challenges in 3-nanometers because everything is just so small. But our technology — that’s one of the things that our technology does is to help people to control dopant when you’re trying to deposit them in very small areas and not have them go to other areas, and to help people with a number of other things, which I’ve spoken about in the past.
But so I think the question about whether we’ve done simulation whether we’ve done MST TCAD on that level? Yes, we have. We don’t a technicality when we run TCAD, we don’t run a transistor on TCAD, we run areas that are even smaller than a transistors, but we’ve done a lot of simulations on how you would use MST in a gate-all-around 3-nanometer or smaller device so that we can go into customers and show them that type of thing. So, we talk frequently about our MST being a technology that’s 100 angstroms thick, which is 1-nanometer. We experimented making it even thinner for these type of applications. And we’ve done those experiments on simulations using TCAD that we can show prospective customers, so yes.
