Welcome to Advantest Corporation's IR technical briefing. Thank you all for taking the time to be here. I'm Yoshitake Kobayashi from the IR Department of the Corporate Planning Group, and I'll be your moderator today. Our technical briefings are designed as deep dives into the technological and performance evolution of the semiconductors that we test, which affects demand for our products as much as growth in semiconductor production volumes. Exploring these connections can yield important insights about the market. Today, we are focused on high-end SoC devices and test technology. Let me introduce today's presenters. First, Koichi Tsukui, Director and Executive Officer, CTO or Chief Technology Officer, and leader of our ATE Business Group. Mr. Tsukui was involved in the development of measuring instruments and later served as a sales representative in Japan and overseas, as well as General Manager of the President's Office.
Currently, as the leader of the ATE Business Group, he directs the whole group's tester business from research and development to customer support. Ralf Stoffels, our Senior Vice President at Advantest Europe, who is in charge of the V93000 marketing within the SoC Test Business Unit. Mr. Stoffels got his start in the semiconductor test business at HP in 1994, and has been involved with the V93000 from its initial launch. He has held various leadership positions in marketing, and today he has worldwide responsibility for the V93000 platform as a Senior Vice President for Marketing at Advantest. Today, Koichi and Ralf will give a presentation titled Test Needs and Solutions in the High-End SoC Semiconductor Market. We will take his questions. We will deliver the presentation only in English.
Presentation materials are in English only, but its notes are prepared in English and also in Japanese. Please refer to the investor section of our website, where the materials are posted under News. Before we start, I would like to emphasize that the future outlooks described in the session is based on the current forecast, which naturally involve risks and uncertainties. Please be aware that actual results may differ from our forecasts. Well, Mr. Tsukui, go ahead please.
Good afternoon. My name is Koichi Tsukui, and I'm the CTO of Advantest. Thank you very much for taking the time to attend our technical briefing today. I will explain how the SoC test business has changed and how our R&D management is responding to these changes. I will explain our dynamic SoC test business and how I have been working on R&D management. After that, Mr. Ralf Stoffels, Senior VP of Marketing for the V93000, will speak about the market environment for SoC semiconductors, future test needs related to high-performance computing, which will drive the SoC test market in the future, and the solutions we provide. Let's start with a look at the SoC test business environment. Semiconductors support global safety, security, and comfort. The use of semiconductors is expanding, and technological progress is making our lives more convenient and comfortable.
Amid these changes, semiconductors are being used in more applications. The demand for semiconductor test is increasing as the technology evolves. Looking at the direction of technological evolution, in addition to the trend toward miniaturization of advanced process devices, there is a trend called 2.5D, 3D scaling, intended to boost energy efficiency through improvements in circuit integration. All these changes in various semiconductor technologies, which we call waves, accelerate the difficulty and complexity of test. Next, I will explain the R&D management for capturing these waves. We maintain a high level of R&D investment as a driving force for value creation and social contribution.
During the period of our second midterm management plan from year 2021- 2023, we plan to invest a total of JPY 170 billion in R&D, an increase of JPY 50 billion from the previous midterm plan period. I will briefly introduce our R&D management efforts since 2018 when we launched our first midterm management plan. First, we promoted R&D based on a long-term roadmap that takes its shape from semiconductor technology trends. We are striving to expand our platform strategy to a wider variety of customers and applications. Secondly, we provide integrated test solutions. We are expanding our business domain from semiconductor mass production test to the design and evaluation and the system-level test processes, which are adjacent markets. We are also working to strengthen our test interface business.
Third, we are seeking to develop a test business that utilizes the cloud software and the data analytics. We are launched Advantest Cloud Solutions, a cloud service, and are working on commercialization with advanced semiconductor companies and partner companies that develop and provide solutions. In addition to these three initiatives, we collaborate with leading customers and participate in industry consortia and work to solve customer problems. Next, I'd like to introduce our R&D network. Our main R&D base are located in Böblingen, Germany and Gunma Prefecture, Japan. About 30% of Advantest total of 6,500 employees are in R&D. Böblingen mainly develops the V93000, and Gunma develops the T2000 and memory testers. Previously, V93000 R&D and T2000 and memory tester R&D are separated.
In fiscal year 2018, we integrated them into a single organization, and the global personnel rotations were implemented to speed up information sharing and development efficiency. I'm here in Böblingen today, and we have about 600 employees here. Various waves of technological evolution in our business environment, today's focus is high-end SoC test. HPC devices, a market growing year by year, represent only a small fraction of all semiconductors, but their test intensity is much higher than other devices. Test technology requires not only measurement accuracy, but also technology such as thermal and power control. In response to these needs, in addition to our SoC tester platforms, we have strengthened our test interface and system -level test with integrated solutions. Ralf will now introduce our V93000 tester solutions.
Good afternoon. [Foreign language] Konnichiwa. This is Ralf Stoffels, and I'm going to introduce our strategy and the market situation in the area of high-performance compute, which is one of the major drivers for SoC test, and in that way, very important for our corporate strategies. Let's take, first of all, a look into the overall market. I have chosen a very historical view here, starting from the 80s of the last century. It shows the semiconductor revenue growth over that long period. It also, in a very simplified way, connects the major growth waves with the technology which was introduced in that era.
When you look at the early phase, the dark blue, era, it was the era of PC and Internet, and that drove the first big consumer wave in computation. Later then, it was added by the area, so the area came on top, of the era of mobility, which actually added a lot of capacity and a lot of equipment for the next big wave. That was basically driven by the mobile phone and all the mobile internet applications. I think, we can very clearly see where the next wave, and that is this upper, part in this greenish color, is going to be driven by.
It is the area of high-performance computing and the area of artificial intelligence, AI. You can see very clearly that the speed of innovation and the speed of growth have increased over time, because each of those segments of those technologies have made it even more into the lives of everyday people. It is, while the area of PC was very much driven by commercial applications, only one family per PC, the area of mobility was driven by a phone per person. The quantity went up significantly, while the incoming era is even further driven by proliferation in almost every aspects of life and every aspects of industry. You will later on see that there are other drivers as well, not just only the volume to which drive the growth of that market.
This is also a history of our own product line, and I'm just showing here the history of the V93000. The test system for SoCs, which actually got started with the area of the PC. The 93000 was introduced in 1999 and with the first generation we called Pin Scale. This actually enabled us to serve the test requirements of the PC and the internet connected devices. As the next generation of devices came up, the big SoCs driven by mobility, driven by smartphones, we actually introduced Smart Scale. Like the smartphone, we actually addressed this with a Smart Scale generation. That generation of the 93000 tester platform actually drove a tremendous growth in the industry and also a tremendous growth of our own product, the V93000.
We just recently, a bit more than a year ago, introduced EXA Scale. EXA Scale, the generation, which actually adds the capabilities which are required to test the new upcoming supercomputers and AI engines. Most of my presentation here will deal with the challenges and the upcoming opportunities which this gives us by our position in the market. One of the reasons why we had such a successful growth of our platform was the ability to offer a compatible and upgradable system and a path for our customers to go from one innovation to the next innovation without having to change the essentials of their test programs and their investments they have made in the ATE.
We could always move our customers with a very little effort from one generation to the next generation of their technology, and also from one generation to the next generation of our tester. This is also the case for our newest EXA Scale generation, which seamlessly fits into that platform family. It was not only the compatibility, but also the innovations we have driven during that time, so which brought us basically, as it's shown here, to 10,000 systems. That is just an estimation. We are of course, continuously growing, so we are probably already beyond that number. The innovations I would like to introduce also to you here on this page.
We started already in 2000 as one of the first, or we were, I think, the first, who actually could already address 1 Gb/s as test speed for high-performance devices at a time when most of the other testers in the market were at far lower speeds. It was also very essential that around 2005, we were the first ones to introduce an instrument which could have 160 amp of power supply, and we could actually add this to more than 1,000 amps, which was especially important for the big graphics chips which were arising at that point in time. You will later hear also a bit more about what I expect, what we expect the future is going to be in terms of power.
In 2012, that was also the time when the V93000 became part of Advantest and Advantest platform strategy. We introduced the first card, which on every channel of the system could offer 1.6 Gb/s That was also, again, the fastest ATE in the market. We also at that time had the fastest and also deepest scan capabilities, the most vector memory in the market. This was actually complemented by high speed cards, which actually had an IO capability of 16 Gb/s . Also again, at that time, the fastest in the market. To an extent, it is still the fastest today. Just recently, as I mentioned before, we introduced EXA Scale.
EXA Scale actually adds the capabilities for the coming five to 10 years in terms of capabilities, speed, vector memory and power. With the new cards, Pin Scale 5000, which goes to 5 Gb/s , we are offering a card which actually offers the headroom our customers need for the development during that AI and high-performance computing phase, which I showed on the previous slides. The power supply is the other very important thing in this era here. We are talking here about devices which consume hundreds, if not thousands of amps of power. With the new power supplies, the XPS256, we are offering that capability, and we offer a growth path to even more. Again, this is all in one scalable and compatible platform family.
Even innovations we have actually driven into the previous generation can be leveraged into the new one, and it is all compatible so that our customers can very easily move from one generation to the next without a big break. And for our OSAT customers, so the contract manufacturing customers, it is also a way to preserve their investments in the previous generation, which is a big factor for them to choose the V93000 because they can actually really earn money continuously even after we have introduced the new platform generation. With that, I would like to also take a look into the technology changes in the market. Before I talk a bit more about the really technical innovations. We find for quite some time, a market situation which is very much distributed into key players already.
We segment the market into PCs and server CPUs, into PC graphics and into mobile APUs and modems. We use this segmentation because customers, but also technology needs are different in these different areas. Let's start very briefly talking about the PCs and CPUs. That's mainly the classic players. We're talking about two big companies serving that market as which are our customers. In PC graphics, it's very much the same situation. We're talking about maybe, yeah, mainly two big drivers and a few very small ones. In mobile, it is also very much the same. We are talking about, let's say three to four big players which serve the entire market of application processors and modems for mobile phones today.
It is very easy to foresee change here. Let's actually look first at the upper segment, the PCs and server CPUs. We find ourselves already today in a situation where, first of all, of course, the existing players are still the strongest ones. That's the upper box here. That's the CPUs based on the Intel x86 architecture. Of course, it is very obvious already and visible today, we're seeing new computing architectures coming up. Most prominent, of course, Arm, which is already in a very, very strong position in the market for several years now and actually serving a lot components into the Internet, into mobile devices and so on. There's also an upcoming new architecture called RISC-V, which is an open architecture and offers new opportunities.
Definitely both can be seen as a competition and/or an add-on to the classical x86 architecture. Also here we see a different way of segmenting. That's why I show two boxes here. One is that we have the PCs and servers driven by chip makers, by the classical chip makers. We see a lot of them coming up, especially in China. We see many startups arising right now serving those processors, while on the other side, and that is the second box, we also see many system builders. The big hyperscalers in the industry doing their own processing engines. Not only processing, but also AI accelerators.
They get integrated by those who in the end operate the servers. That is basically their competitive advantage to build chips exactly to their needs. It has a lot to do also with power consumption and efficient use of power, which is one of the big key performance indicators in that market. Let's also take a look at the PC graphics. There is less of a, of an architectural change. I think the big graphics players will stay the same, but they will actually get new competitors, especially in China, because China is on its path towards independence from technology, from the traditional technology.
Therefore, there are a lot of startups coming up which actually also engage in computer graphics, which is, of course, for us, a new opportunity, a new market segment to serve as well. Finally, for the modems and application processors, we also notice a change towards more players, especially also, again, China, and in two different business models. One business model is, again, the chip makers, the classical ones who are serving chips to those phone makers, but the phone makers themselves start more and more to design and manufacture their own chips. That is also a new development which leads to more growth, but also to a different set of requirements by them to the ATE. They require, for example, much more turnkey services.
It's a very important development which we take into account for our strategies as well. Having actually shown the Changes in the market as such, let's also take a look at the technology moves. This is a very important view, although I need to carry you a bit into technology details. It is the driver for innovation and is the driver why we invest into new versions and new generations of our ATE. Let's actually pick these six different ones and start with the upper left one, the integration. As I mentioned earlier, integration is going on, especially for the big servers.
As one means to do this, we will see much more Chiplets, so multiple singulated chips in one package, as the solution to grow the complexity as it is needed for those servers. That is also a very important fact for us as a test equipment vendor because it has new requirements for tests. I mentioned already the Arm CPUs here are shown, which is mainly a source for new players enabling new computer architectures and is actually a very strong competition to the classical x86 architectures.
On the complexity axis, you see that on the upper right, as just illustrated by this picture, we have with each major semiconductor generation change, so the node change, the basically miniaturization change from, for example, five to three, with each of those, we also have new technologies coming in. For example, some of the big foundries will change their technology already for three nanometer from these FinFET transistors to Gate-All-Around transistors, while others will do this in the two nanometer generation. That means that failure simulation models they use to determine or to design test for those transistors are changing. That means there's a long period of time where a learning phase needs to be overcome for testing those or for producing those technology nodes.
Testing is the major tool for them to learn how to ramp the yields towards the next generation. That is where test is very much a fundamental helper and the test systems are being bought, especially in those phases. Other areas like on the lower part of this slide, like 3D packaging, increased complexity, like power and thermal is driven by the fact that all this, what I described before, happens at the same time. More transistors, 3D packaging and also the next nodes are always driving for more power. That is a big challenge, not only in operation of the device, but also during test of the device.
Means that we actually are very closely working with our customers to find solutions to test those supercomputer chips in their next generation. Finally, on the right lower corner here of this slide, we have, of course, a lot of interconnecting problems. The larger a data center becomes, the more our customers are dealing with fabrics of data communication between the different computing engines. That is to a big extent, high-speed technology challenge, but to another extent, also a power question. A lot of the power in today's data centers is actually used for the interconnects. Therefore, naturally, the industry is looking for better solutions, including optical connections. We, of course, very closely working with them to see what is the next larger trend.
We'll be talking a bit about that, what are the challenges, and to what extent we need to extend our offer also to optical solutions to test those kinds of fabrics. Just zooming here a bit into the complexity of the transistors. I think I said before, it is not so much driven by the sheer volume of devices, whether we grow, whether ATE needs to provide more testers. It is to a big extent driven by the complexity of the devices as well.
When you look at those different segments here in the growth of, let's say the millions of transistors here, then you see that the biggest driver per chip is the server CPU and GPU, while the next one is then the more the client, so that means the personal computer. Then the least of the drivers, and it is still a super big driver, is smartphone APU. In a very simple way you could say the test depends on the number of transistors. The more transistor, the more test is required because every transistor ideally gets tested. That means that test times and the requirement for more testers are driven by the numbers of transistors tested. That means we need to always keep the equation in mind.
Number of devices tested, times the number of transistors per device. That's probably a very good approximation. It is not exact, but approximation of how much test is required. We see this. For the past several years, the test times of individual devices went up significantly by factors, maybe a factor of 100 in the last 10 years. We also noticed that we have more tester insertions. The device gets put many times, several times, on testers during the initial production phase of a device. For a long time, this was actually tackled by reducing data by compression. It is very hard to achieve in the future, therefore, we expect that the test times will even further increase.
Of course, in very close cooperation with our customers, we try to reduce test time in order to make it always commercially viable solution for our customers. The big gains in terms of data compression are not to be expected in the future. Therefore, we believe that this gain will be on the number of testers required. This is, of course, driven by new failure mechanisms, by 3D integration as well, as I mentioned earlier. Also new methodologies need to come up, and I will talk a bit about them.
All in all, I think, we can say, with what I showed before and with this transistor model here, that it is very fair to believe that the increase of semiconductors, which is projected from now until 2030, will also be an equivalent growth, or will cause equivalent growth in ATE as well. We believe that testing will actually track the growth of the semiconductor market, which I've shown on my initial slide. Let's take a look a bit into the challenges, for ATE, and what kinds of solutions we actually introduce and are envisioning for the future. I talked about complexity, and I think it can be actually twofold.
It can be the transistors as such, so the type of transistors, the challenges with testing those transistors, but also the sheer amount, Moore's Law, more or less. Moore's Law and together with stacking devices, I talked about chiplets. Here we see a picture of 3D stacked devices. Our customers go into the third dimension, will actually increase the data volume to be tested by a factor of about 100. This is easily foreseeable. It could be even more. This requires testers to also use the technologies which our customers use. With the 93000, we have chosen a path where we use the same way of integration in order to grow the capabilities of our tester without making it more expensive in the same way.
You see here a picture of our test processor. The test processor is an engine which actually we have in every resource of the tester. We have thousands of these test processors in the system. You see the system is a very compact one. I think it is actually the smallest footprint in the industry. This is only possible because we use the same level of integration like our customers do. Here, for example, a 2.5D integrated multi-core processor together with a memory. This device is actually developed by us, by our own R&D. It is one of the core engines which power the growth and the capabilities of the V93000. This is, by the way, our latest generation, the EXA Scale.
You see here that we're the first ones and the only ones so far who can actually on every channel of the system offer 5 Gb/s , so the fastest in the industry. We also have the deepest vector memory, which by all this complexity, driven by that complexity, is required to test those devices which are today coming up. I talked about power. It is easy to imagine that those supercomputer devices, even though designed for consuming less and less power by their complexity, drive power requirements. We are talking here about 1,000 W or thousands of amps current which those devices draw.
Not only the current consumption as a static variable or static value are the challenge, but also the dynamics of power. Depending on what kind of test is done or during operation of those devices, what kind of load changes the devices have, the power can vary significantly. The challenge is that this power gets actually controlled very, very rigidly. If the voltages of those devices change when the power changes, then you can't be sure that you really tested the device correctly. It means during tests, it is one of the big challenges and the big requirements to keep the voltage very, very stable while you change the power in huge steps.
Also here we have chosen a technology which so far has not been deployed to test before. With the XPS256, our new power supply with the industry highest power integration, which has 256 A per card, and where we can go far beyond 2,000, it could even be more A in a system. We can actually combine many, many channels to actually provide those high currents and this maximum power to the devices. Not only that, we are first time using a full digital control loop, so it is basically also again computing and a performance digital architecture, which we apply to our cards, which enable us to regulate the power faster than it can be done with the traditional ways of analog regulation circuits.
With that come also some other advantages, like for example, we can protect the probe card of our customers from being destroyed by high currents. That is something you can only do if you have high computing power, even in such a, let's say, analog card, like a power supply for the devices. The other big challenge our customers have is the test coverage. I mentioned already more and more test vectors, but there is also a new trend being very clearly visible. The devices, like it's shown here in this very simplified picture of a computing engine. The devices are now dependent on software, even during their early phases and even during tests when they are not even in their system yet. They show a much, much more system-like behavior, even when they are still on the wafer.
A traditional ATE tests with digital inputs and gets digital inputs out, and this is all very much synchronized to the tester. We are foreseeing an era, and we are just entering this era, where software even has to be loaded into the device at the stages of test, which is a completely new way of approaching those complex systems. That requires innovation at the tester as well. Traditional test architectures cannot deal with the fact that the device is actually driven by something, very, let's say, unpredictable, like software algorithms. Traditional scan technologies need to be augmented by new, software-based, technologies. It doesn't mean scan will actually replace, but it is an augmentation by new methodologies. One of the new tech methodology is to actually provide a link partner to the device under test on the tester.
We just recently introduced the first of the industry's Link Scale card. We call it Link Scale because as I said, it is a link partner to the device. It links to the device and can actually interact with the device, with native protocols and native ports like, for example, PCI Express used in PCs or USB like it is in many devices, like mobile phones being used as a wired interconnect. With this, we are actually offering the first time in this industry a card which goes like every other instrument in our test head here, also in our very small form factor test heads. It actually offers a functional test coverage on the tester at a stage of the device where it is still on the wafer, for example.
That way we can find failures before the devices go into the expensive package and would basically cost a lot if we found those errors when they are already packaged. We move test content towards a probe, towards wafer sort. We also enable our customers with this card in the early stage of their design process to interact with the device much better than they could if they just had a normal test access like we have it for many years. Again, this will not replace our today's test methodologies, but it will complement. It will add to those methodologies we are using today. With that, I would like to summarize my speech here. I think we have seen the market has a lot of potential.
This picture shows the semiconductor market, but it was also very clear, foreseeable that the ATE, the tester market, will track this growth very much. We believe that the tester market will grow by the same factors. As analysts actually say, we are seeing a semiconductor market of about $1 trillion by the year 2030. As I said, we see the same percentage growth in the same in that same period also for ATE. A lot of this will be driven by digital integration. Of course, there are other important areas as well, but the major growth comes from computing engines, from integration of digital structures into devices which actually drive the complexity for test.
I talked a bit about the challenges and opportunities, and this 100x complexity growth is one of the big driver engines. Of course, it is also the amount of devices being tested, but it is to a big extent, also the or even bigger extent, the complexity which requires us to offer more and more clever ways of dealing with it. The market, the nature of the market is going to change. Like for example, big system players who operate usually the data centers are becoming system designers and even chip designers. They have different requirements than the classical ones. We are talking here about turnkey test, which demands from us as a tester supplier to also change our ways of doing business with those customers.
For them, of course, time to market becomes more and more a major challenge because competition has gone up. You have seen that on those pictures. Again, the way of doing this, we believe can only be by evolving our systems the same way the market evolves. The V93000 did that for many years. You could see that we developed the V93000 with the leaders in this industry and for those leaders in the industry. We always used very similar ways because we believe in integration in silicon.
The more we can use Moore's Law integration and 3D or 2.5D integration for packages, the more we can offer those innovations at a cost for our customers, which actually makes sense for their cost measures. Also here, we have proven this by being basically the market leader in the segment of computation. We have the major market share today, and there are good signs that we can continue this because we are right now again in the leading positions. With EXA Scale, that is basically the step into that next generation.
We have chosen the name, so we go with our scale, like a Smart Scale and now EXA Scale go with the same name. EXA Scale definitely also relates to the area of exascale computing, which is basically the driver for the growth, but also the driver for a lot of challenges which we address with our technology. With that, I would like to thank you for your attention and I'm available to answer questions afterwards. Thank you.