PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Adnan Raza: It’s a great question, Gus. It’s for bringing up the node and controlling it. If you just look at PDF has had yield models based on product design layouts forever. We typically would run a test vehicle to extract kind of the intrinsic failure rates of metal shorts and opens, contact and via opens, and contact and via shorts. Those models would always show you that half of the yield loss you would see because of opens between layers, shorts and opens between layers, but you can’t see them optically. So the customer would run a test vehicle, our short flows to see the single layer shorts and opens, and the between layer shorts and opens. But then if you wanted to know, well, what does it really do on a product? Well, our test vehicle couldn’t give you that because it’s a test vehicle.

And the inspection tools could just tell you what’s happening at layer. They can’t really tell you do you have a failure in a billion or 0.1 failures in a billion or 10 failures in a billion on the contact and via layer? And the eProbe is the only thing that can really do that, can measure tens of billions and tell you, okay, what’s your real failure rate across all the layout styles on a real product? And that was the point the guy said, like, God, John, when we went from your test vehicle to product, we got caught by some issues. Took us months to solve it because we had no way to look at it. eProbe gives you a way to look at that, and that’s really the kind of – as people see that this is real, you can measure 10 billion contacts and vias.

Right? That’s a change of the game. And so even for twelve nanometer or 28 nanometer, that actually matters quite a bit. And we’ve always known in our models it’s half your yield loss, just hard to see in line.

Gus Richard: Perfect. That was super helpful. That really clarifies it for me. Thank you.

Adnan Raza: Welcome.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] There are no more questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the program. Thank you for joining us on today’s call.