Hello, and welcome to the Aehr Test Systems Fiscal 2023 First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentations, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Todd Kehrli of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to Aehr Test Systems First Quarter Fiscal 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. With me on today's call are Aehr Test President and Chief Executive Officer, Gayn Erickson, and Chief Financial Officer, Ken Spink. Before I turn the call over to Gayn and Ken, I'd like to cover a few quick items. This afternoon, Aehr Test issued a press release announcing its first quarter financial results. That release is available on the company's website at aehr.com. This call is being broadcast live over the Internet for all interested parties, and the webcast will be archived on the investor relations page of the company's website.
I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements that are based on current information and estimates and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which may cause the results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, are discussed in the company's most recent periodic and current reports filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements, including the guidance provided today, are only valid as of this date, and Aehr Test undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Gayn Erickson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Aehr Test.
Thanks, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the first quarter conference call. Let's start with a quick summary of the highlights of the quarter and momentum we're experiencing in the semi sector wafer level test and burn-in market, and then Ken will go over the financials in detail. After that, we'll open up the lines to take your questions. We're off to a good start this year, finishing the quarter with revenue and net income ahead of consensus estimates and strong bookings of $19.1 million. Revenue for the quarter was $10.7 million, which is up 89% year-over-year, and we generated non-GAAP net income of $1.3 million.
As we've noted before and discussed last quarter, over the last couple of years, our first quarter tends to be our seasonally softest quarter, as it was again this year, and we expect each consecutive quarter to ramp higher throughout the year. Let me get right to it and talk about how we're doing at getting into more accounts, focused on silicon carbide for electric vehicles and other markets, since that's where a lot of the questions are coming in at. We're currently engaged or in discussions with almost all the existing and future silicon carbide suppliers now regarding our unique low-cost multi-wafer level test and burn-in solution that enables contact to and test of 100% of devices on every wafer.
This allows our customers to burn in every device at a lower cost than they could in any other form due to our ability to contact thousands of devices on each of 18 wafers at a time with our FOX-XP multi-wafer test and burn-in system and proprietary FOX WaferPak. All the major silicon carbide companies expect that electric vehicle traction inverters will move to multi-chip modules as this is where the electric vehicle manufacturers are driving the industry. As such, they've told us they must move to wafer level stress and burn-in to remove the inherent failures before they put these devices into multi-die modules to meet the cost, yield, and reliability goals of those modules.
Aehr's technology provides a total turnkey single vendor solution to meet these customers' critical test and stress requirements at a cost and test floor footprint significantly lower than any other alternative on the market. Our lead customer for silicon carbide wafer level burn-in continues to ramp up use of our Fox XP multi-wafer systems and wafer packs, placing yet another significant order with us during the quarter. Similar to past orders, they purchased the systems without the necessary wafer pack full wafer contactors, and as such, we expect significant orders from them for wafer packs to match these systems. This need for additional capacity is being driven by increased demand for silicon carbide customers for electric vehicles.
This customer recently announced that they expect their growth rate to accelerate faster than previously forecasted, and they continue to forecast orders for a significant number of FOX systems and WaferPak contactors with us over the next several years. Beyond this lead customer, our previously announced benchmarks and evaluations with two additional major silicon carbide semiconductor suppliers continued to move forward with great progress this quarter. Following the end of the quarter, we announced an initial purchase order from one of these suppliers for our FOX-NP multi-wafer test and burn-in system, multiple WaferPak contactors, and a FOX WaferPak Aligner to be used for qualification of our wafer level burn-in solution for silicon carbide devices for electric vehicles and other markets. This new customer is one of the world's largest suppliers of silicon carbide devices, serving several significant markets, including the electric vehicle industry.
We now have two of the top four silicon carbide market participants as customers. We've already shipped the system to this new customer's facility, and we believe we'll achieve their specific performance and functionality evaluation criteria on their test floor during the next three to six months. This new customer indicated to us that Aehr Test is the only provider that has a product that is scalable to high volume production to meet the production capacity they need to address the increasing demand for silicon carbide devices. They have provided us with forecasts for our Fox XP systems for volume production of their silicon carbide devices at multiple facilities around the world, and we expect that they will purchase Fox XP production systems to be shipped before the end of our fiscal year, ending May 31st, 2023.
The benchmark with the other potential customer, which candidly has been slow and steady over the last year, has also progressed significantly since last quarter's conference call. We completed a significant milestone using a new capability we publicly announced today, and I'll discuss later, where we tested a significant number of wafers for a correlation of an automotive device, and we believe that we will successfully complete their production correlation over the next few months, allowing them to also move forward with our FOX solution. We expect both of these major silicon carbide suppliers to implement our FOX platform solution into their volume production manufacturing production flow as they look to capitalize on the fast-growing demand for silicon carbide devices in electric vehicles.
Folks, demand is building for wafer-level burn-in of silicon carbide devices and specifically for traction inverters and onboard and off-board chargers for electric vehicles. During the last few months, multiple additional silicon carbide suppliers have asked us to provide technical feasibility, quotations, and schedules for production test and burn-in of their wafers. While some of these companies want to do on-wafer validation of our solutions before they place orders for systems from us, others are planning to move directly to purchasing our FOX systems and or WaferPaks to accelerate their time to market. An example of this is just a few days ago, we received orders for WaferPaks on two designs from a brand-new customer for silicon carbide MOSFETs targeted at electric vehicles.
This multi-billion-dollar semiconductor company that is already making silicon carbide MOSFET wafers that we have in-house, by the way. They have not even gone public with their silicon carbide MOSFET introduction plans. The silicon carbide market for electric vehicles and its supporting infrastructure requirements are growing at a tremendous rate. With Canaccord Genuity estimating that wafer capacity will increase from 125,000 six-inch wafers in 2021 to over 4 million six-inch equivalent wafers in 2030 just to meet the EV market alone. Add in the other applications for silicon carbide, including solar power conversion, industrial, and other electrification infrastructure, and the market size doubles.
This past month, Vernon Rogers, our EVP of sales and marketing, and I met face-to-face with multiple potential customers at their facilities in both the U.S. and Europe, and we are very encouraged about our prospects for winning this capacity with these prospective customers. We also had very productive meetings around our participation in two important industry conferences in Europe. Vernon attended this year's International Conference on Silicon Carbide and Related Materials, known as ICSCRM, in Davos, Switzerland, considered to be the most important technical conference series on silicon carbide and related materials.
He and I also attended the EU Power Semiconductor Executive Summit in Munich, where I gave a presentation on Aehr and the impact of wafer-level burn-in on reliability and stability of silicon carbide devices to a large audience of power semiconductor industry leaders, as well as automotive and other users of silicon carbide power semiconductors from around the globe. From our many discussions and introductions at these events, two themes were very important. Number one, it's clear there's a continued momentum in silicon carbide. In fact, there seems to be an acceleration of the expected adoption rate, as well as an increase in the expected growth in electric vehicles. Several silicon carbide and electric vehicle companies are now saying electric vehicles are more likely to account for 50% of all vehicles made in 2030, as opposed to the 30% number we've been stating.
In fact, VW Group, the first or second largest automotive supplier in the world, depending on the year, along with Toyota, said in a presentation that they expect electric vehicles to comprise 50% of all their vehicles sold by 2030. I guess I should say in 2030. The number two theme is there's an increasing consensus that not only do you need to do 100% burn-in of silicon carbide devices that are going in the automotive space and other mission-critical applications, but that burn-in of the die must be done at wafer level before they're put into the modules for the traction inverters, in particular for electric vehicles.
In my presentation at the EU summit, I noted that in addition to the obvious cost advantage of removing device failures before they're put into a module with many other devices, companies also want to stabilize the inherent early life drift of threshold voltages observed in silicon carbide MOSFETs, and then select devices with matching threshold voltages to put into multi-chip modules. Higher than acceptable infant mortality rates of silicon carbide MOSFETs require 100% production stress and burn-in testing to achieve automotive and industrial quality levels. The value and requirement for doing stabilization of the devices goes beyond just infant mortality to include critical parametric parameters such as the threshold voltage.
With the transition from discrete silicon carbide components to multiple silicon carbide die modules or integrated power modules, the gate threshold voltage stability is critical to the module reliability. Driven by the prerequisite to have matching and stable gate voltage threshold die to die. Aehr's technologies and capabilities enable gate threshold stability and reliability at the wafer level. Module manufacturers are requesting, and in fact, requiring devices with matching threshold voltage or total on resistance between the drain and source in a MOSFET. The major silicon carbide companies expect that most EV traction inverters will move to multi-chip modules, and have told us they must move to wafer level stress and burn-in to remove the inherent failures before they put the devices into multi-die modules to meet their cost, yield, and reliability goals.
Aehr's unique low-cost multi-wafer level test and burn-in solution provides the test electronics and the device contactor technology that enables contact to 100% of devices on a single wafer, and the handling and alignment equipment to provide a total turnkey single vendor solution to meet the needed critical test and stress requirements. We believe we'll have multiple more customer wins in silicon carbide for our solutions this fiscal year. In addition to our progress with silicon carbide applications, we're seeing an increase in our wafer level burn-in business for silicon photonics devices used in data communications. We shipped multiple Fox NP systems this quarter to support the characterization and product qualification of new photonics-based devices.
We've also received multiple orders for upgrades to existing systems that enable a higher number of devices and higher power per wafer, as well as multiple new designs for wafer packs from several companies. We expect these will be first ordered for engineering and new product introduction, and then they turn to volume production with higher quantity orders. As I've noted before, we expect to see a nice recovery in the silicon photonics market segment sometime over this to the next year, as we're being told by our customers. We're expecting customers to resume buying in the current fiscal year 2023 and fiscal 2024, and several customers addressing the silicon photonics market have forecasted additional FOX systems and WaferPak, DiePak contactor capacity needs during that time. Let me spend a minute on our R&D investments.
On our last earnings call, I mentioned several test system enhancements we plan to introduce that will extend the capabilities of our FOX-P wafer-level test and burn-in platform. Today, we formally announced two new advanced test and burn-in capabilities that enable silicon carbide and gallium nitride semiconductor manufacturers more flexibility to address a wider variety of stress and burn-in conditions for the engineering qualification and production needs. These include our FOX Bipolar Voltage Channel Module or BVCM, which provides customers a wide range of bipolar voltage programmability from positive 40 volts to negative 30 volts applied to the gate for positive high temperature gate bias or negative HTGB. This solution, in combination with our proprietary WaferPak full wafer contactors, delivers a unique capability benefiting power silicon carbide diodes and MOSFETs in both E-mode, D-mode, gallium nitride power MOSFET manufacturers.
Enabling these tests is essential in threshold voltage and gate oxide stabilization and screening, and the new VHVCM extends our current capability even farther. The other enhancement is our very high voltage channel module, or VHVCM, that enables customers to perform high temperature reverse bias testing on wafers of up to 2,000 volts on MOSFETs and diodes, and measure individual device leakage current. Aehr's proprietary WaferPak contactor implements arcing mitigation technology to alleviate high voltage arcing on the wafer, especially with fine pitch die to die geometries. The modularity of the FOX-P system offers customers the ability to configure solutions to provide advanced test capabilities for their power electronic device wafers. These advanced capabilities are designed to enable manufacturers to ship product with higher reliability and parametric stability necessitated by an EV's traction inverters and onboard chargers.
Feedback from current and potential new customers has been very positive, and we've already taken orders for both systems and WaferPak for these new options that we discussed with customers under non-disclosure agreements. This includes the new major silicon carbide customer announced last month, and the brand-new customer I just mentioned who ordered multiple WaferPaks for a planned FOX-P system purchase from us for their silicon carbide products. We expect these new enhancements to drive incremental bookings and revenue for our FOX-NP systems for new product introduction and engineering qualification needs, as well as our FOX-XP multi-wafer systems to be used for high volume production with these new features.
We're also quoting and will accept orders for our new fully automated FOX WaferPak Aligner, which is configured to fully integrate with our FOX-XP multi-wafer systems to enable hands-free operation, and includes full integration with our WaferPaks. As capacity and volume forecasts increase, eliminating all manual interface for automated handling can become critical. We expect to see our new aligner with this full automation capability to begin shipments by about the end of our fiscal year. All right, let me try and wrap this thing up. While the timing for volume production decisions, initial production orders, as well as follow-on orders from customers is never certain, there's no doubt as to the way the silicon carbide market is developing.
As many of you know, onsemi, one of the top silicon carbide suppliers in the world, announced in August it will increase its silicon carbide production capacity by five times and almost quadruple the number of its employees by the end of this year at its new silicon carbide facility in New Hampshire. Last month, Wolfspeed, another top supplier, announced a new manufacturing facility in North Carolina, a $1.3 billion factory with a tenfold increase in wafer capacity. ST, who last year was the largest silicon carbide supplier in the world, just announced it will build an integrated silicon carbide substrate manufacturing facility in Catania, Italy, right next to its existing device manufacturing facility, with production expected to start in 2023. The decisions being made today are in response to the explosive demand in silicon carbide.
We're very encouraged by the continued positive momentum and expanding growth opportunities we're seeing with current and prospective customers. As such, we're confident with our previously provided forecast for total annual revenue of at least $60 million-$70 million this fiscal year, which would represent a growth of at least 18%-38% growth year over year, and clearly emphasize our belief that revenue will grow substantially through the fiscal year to achieve these levels. This includes our belief that we'll receive production system orders from several silicon carbide customers beyond our initial lead customer and begin shipping systems to meet their production capacity by the end of our current fiscal year that ends May 31st, 2023. We also continue to expect bookings to grow faster than revenues this year, particularly to address the ramp in demand for silicon carbide and electric vehicles.
Lastly, I just want to quickly announce a couple of changes in our organization. I'm very excited to announce today the appointment of Nick Sporck as Vice President of our Contactor business. In this role, Nick will be leading the effort to manage and grow our wafer pack contactor and die pack carrier consumables business, which has become more and more strategic, and has grown into a significantly larger part of our overall business. Over time, we expect consumables to not only grow in total revenue for Aehr, but as a total percentage of our business, approaching 50% of our business on an annual basis. Nick has an excellent background to lead this effort, with broad experience in the semiconductor and electronics industries, leading people, engineering teams, and organizations in multiple areas covering product development, product design, manufacturing applications.
Nick started out as a product test engineering manager at LSI Logic, which is now part of Broadcom. He then worked at FormFactor for 17 years in various roles, but mainly as VP of Design Engineering. After leaving FormFactor, he was VP of Design and Applications at Translarity, VP of Business Development for ISC, which is a Korean sockets and probe card company, and most recently, he had his own company making various components for the probe card and test industry. We're extremely pleased to add someone of his caliber and experience to our executive team. At the same time, I'd like to announce that Dave Hendrickson, our Chief Technology Officer, will be retiring at the end of this fiscal year next May.
Dave has served as a valuable member of our executive team for more than 20 years and contributed substantially to our product portfolio and many of our business practices. Most recently, he has led a focused component sourcing task force, where his combination of engineering operations and business skills has allowed Aehr to achieve our business growth in the face of a global semiconductor crisis. He's also been leading the effort to grow our consumables business through strengthening and collaborating with our supply chain partners. Dave will continue as a part-time employee through the end of the year as we transition our component sourcing leadership to our new Chief Operating Officer, Adil Engineer, and our WaferPak and DiePak technologies and business VP, Nick Sporck. With that, let me turn it over to Ken before we open it up for questions.
Thank you, Gayn, and good afternoon, everyone. We're off to a solid start to fiscal 2023 after a record Q4 in fiscal 2022. During our first quarter, we recognized strong revenues, increased backlog, and improved cash flow. As Gayn noted, revenue for the first quarter was up 89% year-over-year. Both our top and bottom line results came in ahead of analyst estimates for Q1. Bookings in the first quarter were $19.1 million, and we ended the quarter with a healthy backlog of $19.5 million. Included in our bookings were announced orders of $16.8 million from our lead silicon carbide customer for additional systems, WaferPaks, and a high-volume production WaferPak aligner.
Looking at our financial results, net sales in the first quarter were $10.7 million, which is down 47% sequentially from our record sales of $20.3 million in the fourth quarter and up 89% from $5.6 million in the first quarter last year. The first quarter sales were consistent with our expectations, and we are forecasting significant growth in the upcoming quarters. The sequential decrease in net sales from Q4 includes a decrease in WaferPak DiePak revenues of $8.7 million. These consumable revenues accounted for only 5% of revenues in Q1 2023, compared to 45% of revenues in Q4 2022. Customers often buy systems and then WaferPaks later after they've completed their WaferPak designs.
While our lead customer has ordered several systems recently, we have yet to receive all the WaferPak orders to match up with these systems. We expect to receive these WaferPak orders later this year. This change in product mix had a direct impact on our gross margin in Q1 2023, as our consumables business delivers higher gross margins. Gross profit in the first quarter was $4.5 million or 42% of sales, down from gross profit of $10.5 million or 52% of sales in the preceding fourth quarter, and up from gross profit of $2.3 million or 40% of sales in the first quarter of the previous year. Direct materials accounted for an increase in cost of sales of 3.5 percentage points from Q4 2022.
Contributing to the decrease in gross margin from the preceding fourth quarter was an increase in unabsorbed overhead cost to cost of sales related to lower revenue levels compared to Q4, accounting for a 3.3 percentage point impact on gross margin. Lastly, an increase in other cost of goods sold, including increased inventory reserves, freight, warranty, and tariff costs accounted for a 2.7 percentage point impact on gross margin from the prior fourth quarter. During this challenging supply chain environment, we have maintained the ability to meet customer commitments. As our FOX-P platform contains a high concentration of common parts across the platform, it allows flexibility among various customers' configurations. Also, the use of contract manufacturers provides ability to scale easily and quickly without increasing our fixed costs.
We expect our gross margins to improve as we move through the remainder of the year as we recognize more consumable revenue, and our absorption of our manufacturing overhead improves as revenue increases throughout the year. Non-GAAP net income for the first quarter was $1.3 million or $0.05 per diluted share. This compares to non-GAAP net income of $6.5 million or $0.23 per diluted share in the preceding fourth quarter, and a non-GAAP net loss of $414,000 or $0.02 per diluted share in the first quarter of fiscal 2022. Non-GAAP net income excludes the impact of stock-based compensation. In the first quarter of fiscal 2022, non-GAAP net income also excluded the impact of forgiveness of $1.7 million in loans from the Paycheck Protection Program that we received in fiscal 2020.
Operating expenses in the first quarter were $4 million, a decrease of $625 thousand or 13% from $4.6 million in the preceding fourth quarter, and up $749 thousand or 23% from $3.3 million in the first quarter last year. The decrease from the preceding fourth quarter is primarily due to higher incentive payments and stock compensation in Q4, related to bonus objectives resulting from our record revenue and bookings last fiscal year. The increase from prior year Q1 is primarily due to increased headcount, higher incentive payments, stock compensation, and an increase in shareholder relations costs. We continue to invest in R&D to enhance our existing market-leading products and to introduce new products to maintain our competitive advantages and expand our applications and addressable markets.
These new products include the recently introduced new advanced testing capabilities on our FOX-P systems for silicon carbide and gallium nitride technologies, and our fully automated and integrated aligner. Turning to the balance sheet for the first quarter. We finished the quarter with a strong balance sheet. Our cash and cash equivalents were $36.1 million at August 31st, up $4.7 million from $31.5 million at the end of the preceding quarter, and up $29.6 million from $6.5 million at the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2022. The significant increase year-over-year includes the $24 million we raised in our ATM offering in Q2 2022. Working capital at August 31st was $49.4 million.
Inventories at the end of the first quarter were $17.2 million, an increase of $2.2 million from the preceding quarter end, and $7.1 million from Q1 last year. We've noted before, we have been ordering long lead components for systems and wafer packs to ensure adequate supply to meet customer lead times and to support our expected growth in fiscal 2023. Now turning to our outlook for the 2023 fiscal year, which ends on May 31st, 2023. We are confident in the company's growth trajectory and our unique capabilities and product offerings to meet customer demands. As such, we are reiterating our previously provided guidance for full year total revenue of at least $60 million-$70 million, representing growth of at least 18%-38% year-over-year, with strong profit margins similar to last year.
We continue to expect bookings to grow faster than revenues in fiscal 2023 as the ramp in demand for silicon carbide and electric vehicles increases. The company continues to make investments to support its future growth. This includes investments in headcount and operations. The company plans to make improvements to its corporate facilities to allow for increased production. In addition, the company has invested in expanding its foreign operations, including its Philippines repair center. This repair center places resources close to our Asia customers in a lower cost region to support repairs, installations, and upgrades. This also provides for lower freight costs and faster response times as the Asia market accounted for 90% of revenues in fiscal 2022. Lastly, looking at the investor relations calendar. Our annual shareholders meetings will be held at our corporate headquarters on Tuesday, October eighteenth.
We'll also be participating in several investor conferences in the next few months. On October 25th, we'll be presenting at the LD Micro Main Event taking place in Los Angeles. On November 17th, we'll be participating in the Craig-Hallum Alpha Select Conference taking place in New York. On December 13th, we'll be participating in the CEO Summit Conference, which is also taking place in New York. We hope to see some of you in person at these events. This concludes our prepared remarks. We are now ready to take your questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed, and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.
Hey, good evening, guys. Congrats on a great start to the year.
Thanks, Christian.
Could you give us a number? You talked about being engaged in discussions with almost all existing and future silicon carbide suppliers as you see it today. You know, how many potential customers is that?
Well, that's a good question. I actually don't have that in front of me. I'm kind of mentally imagining the list that Vernon has, and it's a pretty long list. I'm kind of guessing here, but you know, a dozen or more kind of range, I'd say.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Then as the several new customers ramp, you know, throughout the course of this year, is this the type of ramp that you expect to accelerate strongly this year and be greater next year? You know, can it ramp, you know, to the level that your largest customer ramped once they started making, you know, production type of orders on a kind of a...
I mean, a couple questions in there. I mean, the traditional model is people usually take, like, one system and they will, I call it, sit on it and work through some issues or just make sure it gets rolled into production. Then they'll order another one and, you know, you go through lead times and then start shipping it. I would say that's not what the shape looks like with these customers. It's more of, you know, several full systems, maybe multiple systems in a short period of time, in some cases, in multiple facilities, and it's kind of go, go. Now the other customer has, you know, our lead customer has been making some really significant investments.
They, to some extent, led the industry in this wafer level burn-in push, and it's certainly being felt in the industry. Everybody's quite aware of it. You know, they took a pretty long time to absorb the first one and then started ramping pretty hard. My guess is that it's, you know, softer during the first six or 12 months, and then it gets stronger thereafter. We'll see. It depends on the customer. You know, it's kind of interesting. I mean, even with test times, I've been engaged with customers, and they'll tell me their test time is, you know, such and such over and over and over again. They go to place the order, and then they tell me their real test times, and they're longer than they were. Why is that?
Is it just they're trying to be coy or not tell you everything? Right now, one thing's happening is we're definitely trying to ferret out long lead and, you know, forecast for multiple customers, as we just stated, to just make sure we have plenty of material on, you know, that is being purchased. You know, I think they will start a little slower and then gradually pick up. You know, as we had it, if you look at the amount of capacity that everybody's talking about to hit in 2025 calendar wise, you know, most people are just really focused on, you know, second half 2023 and into 2024 is where just a lot of capacity is coming online. It may be less to do with the timing of us as the timing of that silicon carbide ramp.
Our goal is to get qualified before that ramp happens and have a ton of capacity and material on hand to be able to address it.
No, no, that's a great question, Gayn. Can you remind us what you think your yearly manufacturing capacity is or could be, you know, by the time you get to calendar 2025?
Yeah. I mean, it's made up of maybe a few things. One is that seemingly what most people think is the obvious, which is if you come look at our facility and you say, "Well, how many tools can you build on the floor here?" In reality, that's in some ways the easiest thing. The testers basically bolt into water and power, and they test themselves. We have a pretty good-sized facility here with enough test space to build significantly. Ken alluded to that. We're actually gonna be doing some investments, probably $ a couple few million into the facility, over the next couple of years, putting in additional power, water drops, and some other enhancements to support our wafer pack business as well.
That would allow us to have maybe 10+ drops, meaning we could be building 10 systems at a time on two-week spreads. I mean, that's a lot of capacity, more than the whole industry would take right now if we were building 20 systems a month, for example. The next one is the subcontractors that are building all those sub-assemblies that come to us, and then I have to go down the list of them. But basically, you know, we have multiple chamber suppliers, multiple blade suppliers, multiple printed circuit board suppliers. You know, generally speaking, even as grandiose as we are excited, you know, we don't really press that. The key here is we've been able to do this without really being impacted by everybody's, you know, whining about supply chain.
Outside of one thing, and that's the last one, and that is the semiconductor components. Semiconductor components, we have a really, really good handle on. We know exactly how many that go into the system. We're forecasting, and we're buying semiconductor components right now 12 and 18 months out and have been for 18 months. Because of the quite frankly, massive leverage of semiconductor components to our revenue, we're able to afford to buy a lot of semiconductors ahead of time. We're just not really being caught. Now, having said that, we still have our onesie, twosies along the way and hiccups, and the guys are working their butts off to just make sure it look like it's easy. For the most part, we've just not been impacted, and it allows us to keep both our lead times down and our capacity up.
You know, could we go ship, you know, $100 million, $200 million, $300 million worth of FOX-XP systems in a year? Absolutely.
Great. Then just one last question, and I'll let others chime in. In your guidance of $60 million-$70 million, you know, can you give us just kind of your rough expectation of what you think your lead customer will be of that?
Well, not as much as it was last year as a percentage, so that's a good sign. You know, some of the upside within that range and some of the upside beyond that range includes them, and just not always having all the perfect visibility. Obviously, we know a lot we're not sharing, but you know, they're going through all kinds of different manufacturing plans, so it's scenarios where they're gonna be putting systems, more facilities, and you know, even with our current installed-base customer, we don't have perfect visibility. Partly we just buy enough material because we can anticipate the amount of market share that we're gonna have. We definitely have within that number, you know, several new customers and not just, you know, engineering, but production-first production systems being installed.
You know, the part of the front end of that too is how many will we get installed in time? Will we have any kind of rev rec things with respect to being right on the edge with their acceptance? That creates some of the sort of uncertainty. Guys, if we didn't have to do quarters or years, you know, you hear it from CEOs all the time, my life would be a lot easier. The reality is, if I just look, you know, in the next year or I look out to next December, you look at what that ramp looks like, I'm way more focused on that. But I get it, we've got street expectations to meet, and we wanna make our shareholders happy too. I just think, you know, exactly timing everything within a quarter sometimes is harder.
That's where you see that kind of wiggle room of at least $60 million-$70 million, and then we make statements like, we have capacity to be on that. Okay?
That's great. Just a quick follow-up on that. You know, using your words, if you could just look out through December, you know, of next year, you know, if we looked at your business on a calendar basis next year that you're excited about it, I mean, how big of a revenue range opportunity are you thinking about?
Yeah, I'm not gonna go there, Christian, sorry. We spent a lot of time making sure. That's the one thing we do discuss as a board pretty hard to make sure. I apologize for that. I will tell you, I'm very confident and, you know, I'll go ahead, and it's not a big stretch out there. We definitely believe that we'll grow next year over this year. Let me leave it at that.
Great. All right. No other questions. Thanks, Gayn.
Okay. Nice try, though, Christian. It's all good.
The next question comes from Bradford Ferguson of Halter Ferguson Financial Group. Please go ahead.
Hello. I'm curious, is your lead customer successfully making their own substrate? Wolfspeed has come out and said that on a go-forward basis, as of some certain date, they're not gonna be selling substrate or extra substrate to other suppliers of silicon carbide devices. I'm curious if this is a risk for Aehr Test Systems.
Obviously we have insight under non-disclosures, and given the fact that I said I'm talking to all the major suppliers, you can imply I'm talking to every one of the big guys, including the ones you mentioned, and then some under non-disclosures. That gives me, in many ways, way more visibility than others, but primarily related to the devices. They're, you know, exactly what they know, you know, non-public related to their substrates. I don't have as much visibility, and I wouldn't really share. It's my belief that all of the major suppliers are all having, you know, success and counting on success of developing their own substrate supply chain. Obviously that includes the big guys. You know, Wolfspeed, of course, has been the major supplier of it. They're obviously expecting to be very successful making devices out of that.
ST, with their announcement of their new fab or their manufacturing facility, is absolutely counting on ramping their own. Obviously, onsemi is another one along those lines. Of course, Infineon's got some work going on too. It's my belief that all of them will be successful. I'm not hearing anyone that, you know, can genuinely say. There's certainly people that are saying it's not as easy as it looks. It, you know, takes some time, but there's a lot of money being put in. I mean, you know, Wolfspeed spent 30 years working on this stuff, and you know, their competitors are spending more money to make builds in this year than maybe Wolfspeed spent in their whole career or so. I don't know if that's fair, but it feels like that.
You know, there's a lot of energy to go try and solve this problem, and my belief is they'll find it. They'll figure it out.
One name I haven't heard you mention is Infineon. Are there any large silicon carbide makers who aren't doing wafer-level burn-in or doing that en masse as the others intend to do?
Let me do it differently. Most of the companies today have either little or zero wafer-level burn-in, with the exception of our lead customer. I actually happen to know by quantity how many wafers of capacity, and it is a very small fraction comparatively. Keep in mind, one of my systems can test 18 wafers at a time. We've publicly talked about our competitors. I choose really not to do it in this forum 'cause then they can read about it, and it's not because it's. The people that are out there test one wafer at a time with a prober. It just doesn't scale. I mean, in the same footprint.
I actually use this analogy. I apologize if I did it on this group before, but our tester and the surrounding area that it takes to actually service it is about the size of, like, a small Prius car, and it sits in a parking lot. Like, imagine that space, okay? That's what our system is. In that stall I'm looking at at our parking lot, in that room, actually it's smaller than that, but in that room, you can test 18 wafers. That's about the same size as our competitors test one.
If you go through the math, and I've done this before, if you realize that the world needs 8 million wafers in 2030, that was a Canaccord number, and I round down using, like, 8,700 hours a year with inefficiencies, et cetera, you need 1,000 wafers an hour, okay, to meet that demand. If you start looking at, like, a 10-hour burn-in time, you have 10,000 wafers of capacity. That's a 10,000 car parking lot by my competitor. Now we're 18 times smaller. It's, you know, we're not zero footprint, but in the cost of the of a manufacturing floor of a wafer fab, that's enormous.
If you're a player playing in a market that's gonna need 10,000 wafers of capacity of testers, and you wanna have 20% market share, and you need 2,000 wafers of capacity, where are you gonna put that? There's no test floor in the world that has 2,000 wafers that it can support 2,000 wafers of wafer probers for silicon carbide. There's no way. We have this, you know, obviously a very big opportunity.
Can I ask one more?
Sure.
You mentioned a brand new player that's an experienced chipmaker. Are there chipmakers that are gonna enter this market and size as, like, the current announced plans of the top three players? Like, are other people going in?
We're talking to several now. I had to go double-check that because we've been talking to these guys for not very long, by the way. I mean, I don't even think it's been four months that we went from zero to first order in four months with these guys. I had to go double-check to make sure they haven't publicly said anything when I wrote that, but they haven't. There's another customer we've been working with that has never said anything public either, but I did notice they showed up at one of the trade shows recently. I still not gonna talk any more about it, but we know they have massive plans, you know, on the order of some of the current top fours. Keep in mind, and this is always.
I've done this math before, it's always interesting. If you just go through the simple math of these forecasts that say there was 125,000 wafer starts to do silicon carbide last year and there's 4 million, I think as I remember, it's like 25 times. Another way of thinking about it is that all of the silicon carbide that was built last year, right? Is not even, you know, what? 2% or 4% of the overall market. You get that? All of the suppliers today don't even dent the market in 8 years. They all have to grow substantially. People need to grow a lot to just sustain a small percentage market share. They're gonna need a lot more players.
I mean, I've sat in in meetings where leaders like STMicroelectronics, who is the number one at a conference last May in San Diego, he stood up and said, "Listen, I just wanna be very clear. We have no plans to build enough capacity to maintain a 50% market share like we did last year." They just don't. They're not gonna spend that much. By definition, they're gonna lose market share from being number one at 50%, but they're still planning to grow like, you know, a huge amount, but they're not gonna grow 25x. The world actually needs a lot more players.
Okay. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
The next question comes from Gregory Ratliff with Nobis Partners. Please go ahead.
Hello, Mr. Erickson. Congratulations on the company and the opportunity. One thought I have is to carry on with that final question. If you were to look at maybe the weaknesses in the structure of the company currently or the competitive threats down the road, could you give us a bit of your thinking regarding what you need to do to continue to be a champion or to be?
Yeah
A champion with the tough competition ahead? That's all for me.
Okay. You know, I'm not foolish to think that as the market is obviously large and growing, there won't be people trying to figure out how to get into it. We are in a particularly unique scenario where the way we do our testing is truly unique. Perhaps you could say it could be in a negative connotation. If you look at every wafer tester in the world, I've been in this industry for 35 years, I built them for most of that. The way you build an ATE system to test semiconductors is all the same. Every one of the companies, all 20 of them in the last 20 years have done it the same way. You build a tester box that sits on one of the three main wafer prober companies' probers. It docks to one of 20 probe card suppliers.
The three different industries, the tester, the prober, and the probe card supplier, have effectively multiple people competing for the same capability, and then people buy those tools, integrate it themselves, and put them on their floor. That is a very successful business. It's, you know, combined, it's, you know, a big chunk of the $13 billion semiconductor automated test business last year. The problem with that is that those test times are all designed around seconds of test time. That test cell might be an average somewhere between $1 million and $2 million to test the wafer. If you just look at the capital depreciation, testing one or two or four or eight devices at a time, it's extremely expensive to do it, but the test times are so low, it's okay. Now you take that exact same test time.
By the way, that's how you test silicon carbide at wafer level today. Functional test of a silicon carbide device takes about two and a half seconds, and most of the testers that are in production today are between one and eight devices at a time. It's really cheap and easy to do that. When you go to burn them in, they now take 12 hours. Well, how are you gonna do that with a tester that can only test eight at a time? You just can't do that. We built a machine aimed at a completely different market, which is the idea that we're gonna take package part burn-in level costs and parallelism and implement that at wafer level.
We made investments over the last decade to do that, quite frankly, looking at macroeconomic trends of heterogeneous integration of semiconductors, of automotive devices going in this direction, of multi-die modules going in this direction. Do not kid yourself. We did not think silicon carbide eight years ago was gonna be this great hot market, or that the world would actually be contemplating that we're all gonna be driving electric vehicles in 20 years. Okay. What we did do is anticipate the market trends that we're headed in this direction, and quite frankly, we're sitting out in front of this when the silicon carbide hit us, you know, sideways. We're just, you know, call it what it is.
We called the shot that it was headed in this direction, and we were ready and prepared to take advantage of the wave. It's really exciting. It is not that easy to do what we do, and we have an entire list of patents to defend it, and we will defend that with any company that tries to build a tester like ours or any customer that tries to use a tester built by someone else that looks like ours. In the meantime, we have a long head start, and our goal is to get engaged with as many of these customers as we can.
Also, we're working directly with some of the automotive suppliers now, who now would look to qualify the tool, and then they could qualify it backwards into multiple vendors so that once we're qualified, I don't think anyone's gonna wanna switch anyhow. I know I'm being pretty specific about our strategy, but that's how it's playing out right now. Having said that, we're also running like hell. We're absolutely making sure that we do not limit anyone in capacity of testers. We have the shortest lead times of any tester company I've heard of. I mean, I took an order two weeks ago and shipped at the end of the week. I'll take an order. I'm not gonna talk about when my next orders are, but I'm gonna be announcing some orders. They're gonna ship within a quarter. Okay?
We have that ability, and we can tell the customer we can meet their capacity demands that they're imagining, you know, out 12 and six and 18 months. Right, 12, you know, 18 and two years. Sorry. The next thing is just technically. There are some things, and it's not so much a weakness as it is people would like to do more testing or be able to do. We took our power supplies that were going at about 30 volts, and we increased them to 40 volts. We're now trying to make sure there's no technical reason you need to go away from us.
Now we have the ability to give you a technical solution for engineering characterization of high voltage, high gates, all the different threshold voltages and stuff that you do for qualification, and then move that into high volume production, either in the same configuration or in cost optimized configuration that we don't really get to on these calls. We have some tricks up our sleeve to actually do characterization with higher cost performing systems and then go to a production volume, one that hits a price point that is very novel. We're trying to hit it on all phase, technically, you know, commercially, capacity to be able to address it. We have IP patents to protect ourselves, and then we're just paranoid and running as fast as we can.
Thank you so much for that.
Thank you, Greg. It's nice talking to you.
My pleasure, sir.
The next question comes from Matthew Winthrop with Equitable. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hi there, Gayn. How are you?
I'm good, sir. In a particularly good mood these days.
You sound it. I wanted to just blow some smoke for a quick second. As you know, as a retail advisor, I've been following Aehr for four or five years now. Lived through the downtime, and you were so brutally honest when things weren't great, and I just wanted to thank you and commend the fact that you guys have kept your eye on the ball and obviously you're starting to see some successes. That's a rare attribute in this environment that we're in. Nice work. Sorry.
All right. I really appreciate that.
Real quickly, it does seem on the outset that you're having shorter lead times, just about, well, a customer wanted to see and then they got it and they messed around for a while. Am I interpreting that correctly? The mass adoption or that your system really does work that well, but what's changed now? Are there more in the workforce that it suddenly sounds like the sales lead time is a little quicker, unless I'm misinterpreting that.
Yeah, I think I got it. You broke up a little, so I apologize, but I think I got the gist of it. Let me kind of repeat it back a little bit. This idea that it seems like things are going a little faster, maybe the sales cycle is a little shorter, et cetera. There's
Yeah.
That's absolutely the case. I think there's a few things going on there. This really is one where COVID being over helps. I mean, it just, things were so slow with current and new customers and people weren't traveling, and it's just hard to sell and it's hard to communicate. You know, you can only do so much over Zoom. That's definitely one of them. There's also this element that, you know, three years ago, right, we were selling these systems. People know the lead customers on this platform were Apple and Intel and STMicroelectronics and some of these because they were 10% customers for us. But they're still kind of-
Right.
Is it real? Does it really make sense? You know, it's kind of niche-y. You know, whatever it is, right? It's like, I'm not sure. Then all of a sudden, as people know, that one of the big silicon carbide customers came along and bought this and, quite frankly, bought one system and sat on it for more than a year. Of course, COVID was going on. So there's still sort of this, is it real? Is it really gonna work? Does. You know, that whole thing. Then all of a sudden they start ramping.
All of a sudden, from what it feels like, and I've heard this directly, they, companies that they're selling to are kind of coming back because they really have done a good job of marketing themselves as being quality differentiated, selling the modules, selling the quality of the modules. Quite frankly, they did presentations that talked about their wafer level burn-in early on, and I think it's come through. Then they're winning deals, and those customers, their customers, are turning around and talking to now their competitors and saying, "Oh, do you have wafer level burn-in?" There's no doubt some of that's going on, okay? We're doing everything we can do to foster that environment, okay? Because all we have to do is get somebody to say, "I wanna do wafer level burn-in," and right now we win.
We're done because our value proposition, you know, our solution, our lead times, our price points, they're a slam dunk. Right now it's like, you know, we're not taking advantage of this. We're not raising our prices. We did not raise our prices, guys, okay? Did not do it. We had some things where our costs went up. I mean, I had to pay $50,000 to ship a chamber in last Christmas. It was crazy, but I didn't pass that along to my customer. I'm not doing that, Gabe. We make good money. We're gonna make a lot of it. We're gonna provide a value to our customers, and we're gonna be there for them. I think that we're in this, you know, in a good position because of that.
That's great. I have one follow-up, if I may. I'll act like an analyst here. Last quarter, what were you projecting for potential revenues for what the calendar fiscal 2023? Because now I think you've released that $60-odd million, maybe more. Has that number just in the last quarter increased dramatically, or was that?
No, we really only provide guidance annually, and we only do it once a year, although we have kind of fallen into the we reiterate or in some cases we've updated. We provided that guidance and I get it. People said, "What does that mean, at least 60 or 70? Is it 60? Is it 70? What?" We were not intentionally trying to be cute, but it still feels about right. I mean, we think we're in good shape for that, and it just really depends on some of the timing of these customers' ramps. Sometimes I don't feed anyone questions, but I'm gonna feed you a question, and that is, were you able to ship everything your customers wanted last quarter? Yes. Why was it only 10 whatever?
That's all they wanted. I mean, that's the reality of it. You think you're gonna grow. Why? 'Cause the customers want more, and I can build more. You know, it's like, it's sort of like that. We're actually ahead of the game on this. Now I get into why is it that it seemed softer than Q4, and I know some of those reasons. Some very private around customers' ramps and their design wins and when they wanted WaferPaks and, you know, I got facility issues with people that are talking about bringing on new facilities, and some of that stuff's just hard to handicap and know what the answer is. Of course, I have to guess correctly with these guys. Some of this is.
You know, I'm pretty confident in winning these customers, but, you know, it'll feel good when they give us the first POs too, right? you know, it's a little bit hard to guide that way. yeah, we did not change our guidance, if you will. I guess we said we're very confident of that number. you know, as our backlog builds up and if the backlog and the customers ask for more than that, we'll guide up at that time or, as it makes sense. again, we're not trying to play that game.
Nice work.
Okay.
I appreciate your efforts. Let's make sure I get to see you when you're in New York.
Okay, awesome. It'll be good to go back. I love to travel personally, so.
I know. You've talked about Europe all the time. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
The next question is from Larry Chlebina with Chlebina Capital. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, Gayn. Real quick question on this new version of your XP in terms of the higher voltages or the adjustable voltages. If the testing that you did in the past for a particular large silicon carbide customer, I think it was in August of last year, does that mean that this is the process that they're gonna use, these higher voltages one? I think you just sent them something here before you-
Yeah, let me try and answer it as clear as I-
The follow-on is the higher voltage or this adjustable voltage the way you think most potential customers are gonna go or are they still gonna go with the?
I'm glad you asked it that way. That'll be easier for me to answer 'cause it's. I'm not trying to be coy here, okay? Let me try and capture this. There are several ways, not ten. There's primarily two main ways that you can stress these MOSFET devices to weed out infant mortality, okay? A MOSFET is a transistor. A transistor, if you imagine a water valve like on your sink, is a great analogy. All you do is a transistor allows electrical current or water to flow through it when you turn on the valve, or in this case, apply a voltage to the gate. That's it. You apply a voltage, water flows through it, you turn off the gate, the water stops flowing through it. If the device works properly, when you turn it off, it doesn't drip.
We call that leakage. If you put a big power pressure behind it might leak a little, and they actually specify how much it leaks, but if it leaks more than that, it's bad. Okay? Now, there are two main stresses you can do to verify that. One of them is a gate bias, a high voltage gate bias on the gate itself. Imagine the valve I'm describing. I want you to put your hand on the valve, and I want you to turn it over as hard as you can. Try and break it on, okay? Sounds kind of odd, but that's exactly what we do. We basically over-stress the gate, and if the gate breaks, it snaps off. We actually call that a glass rod snap in-house. It, we love showing those to customers, particularly when they take 24 or 48 hours to show up, okay?
That is a failure that shows up. It is the primary failure in silicon carbide MOSFETs that everybody talks about, and you have to get rid of those. Those show up in cars, and you have what we call a walk home event, which is you get out of your car and you walk home when it dies, okay? Those need to be weeded out, and that's what we do primarily, okay? Because the gate oxide has defects in it in the manufacturing process that I'll get into it, but they're not going away, that if those flow through all the way to your end customer, that's bad. Okay? We apply a high voltage gate bias onto the gate to over-stress it to try and crack it off, and that's a primary way of doing it.
Another test is called the reverse bias, which is, imagine putting really high pressure on that valve, water pressure, it's called voltage in this case, and it shouldn't leak through. Now, the difference between that test, that's a good quality test or a reliability test, meaning you wanna do that during your process to validate the devices do not fail, and you'll do that over, say, a 2,000-hour. That's not necessarily a production test. The production test may only take a few seconds. There are people that want to do qualification of that high voltage, and there's some people that have done it in production, and we are now provide them with a solution to do that, okay? Having said that, you can't do the same as the gate.
You actually, if let's say the device is rated for 1200 volts, you don't apply 1800 volts to the device. It will kill it. It will weaken it, and it will not be shippable. You can only put 1200 volts on it. It's not really a burn and stress condition. It's a functional test validation, and you might wanna do it for a few seconds, but it's not necessarily a production test. You know what? If you wanna put my system in production with that, you go for it. It costs a little bit more. I'll be happy to do it, and I'll sell you FOX-XP's forever.
Our opinion, and we've been fairly open about it, is that you wanna do characterization, you wanna do that, and you wanna get that out of production as soon as you can, and you should go to this gate bias testing, and that's our story. We now have the tools to give you whatever you wanna do. You can buy whatever you want. We'll be happy to sell it to you. It is more expensive to do reverse bias, but we're cheaper than anybody else by a long way. Okay?
So you-
Now-
Do you think most of the systems will be like the original version going forward or?
I do.
Okay.
I think over time, that's really where the cost is going. By the way, the new BVCM, I know nobody cares about our language here, but the new bipolar voltage, it actually allows us to go a little higher voltage. We had some people that wanna do that. Interestingly, as the devices mature, the voltage is actually going down. We kind of feel like. There's some people that ask for it, particularly in the gallium nitride, and so we're like, "Sure, no problem." We also have a negative voltage, and there's some technical white papers out there that people are doing to do that as an accelerant, and now we have, I think, the only solution out there to do that, even in package parts.
Now we have the ability to do a negative voltage, which is something people may want to do too, and we'll be happy to sell in those systems. It looks just like our current system. It just simply goes a larger voltage range. Okay?
Okay. I'm glad you introduced the fully automated aligner, which gives you the fully automated XP. Do you have a name for the XP fully automated yet?
No, 'cause I'm leaking that we're taking orders, but we haven't even put it on the website yet. I don't yet, but actually, I do if you're under nondisclosure, but you have to qualify first as a silicon carbide buyer, and you don't qualify. I'm kidding. For everybody who's watching, Larry always asks me about this thing. We'll be talking about that in a little bit here, Larry. Yeah, as Larry alludes to, we are selling as a turnkey solution with an integrated XP with the automated aligner attached to it. We'll probably make those announcements with those first production orders that we get from customers.
I know that was originally targeting memory, and there's a lot of memory activity out there.
Yep.
To be able to get to a record-setting for that sort of wafer sorting, 'cause, you know, you talked about the need to sort wafers or devices for threshold voltage and silicon carbide so that you can match them up later. Don't you have a similar need in flash? To sort those based on quality or available cells. Is that kind of the same thought process?
Yeah, I mean, I'm probably a little too familiar with that because you got it a little wrong, but generally, yes. The cycling test of a NAND flash memory in wafer level is potentially critical. It's a good idea before you put it into enterprise-based solid-state devices. There are people that are doing that today. You are correct. Our Fox XP system, when we first were talking to it, we were engaged in talking with some of the memory suppliers, and our Fox XP system is capable of testing flash memory. It's kind of funny that a MOSFET is a single transistor and the tester is also capable of testing a full memory.
As people know, one of the challenges we had at the time, we did not have automation, and candidly, we were pretty small, and we were on the drawing board with this solution, as opposed to now we're shipping it in volume. That may give you some insight, as to what our long-term intentions are.
Just one more thing on that score. You can potentially get two birds with one stone. You get the infant mortality screening as well as, the sorting. How are they doing that currently? What are they using?
Are we talking about memory guys?
Yeah.
Memory guys use a memory ATE system primarily from Advantest, Teradyne or in-house built systems and.
Those are single wafer systems, aren't they?
There is a solution out there for people that use a multi-wafer prober. They're basically like 12 probers kind of bolted together and on top of each other. They're very expensive, but with a custom in-house test system that does it. That architecturally is significantly more expensive than us, and it has a larger footprint.
Yeah. Your system is substantially smaller footprint because you can do 18 at a time. It seems to me that while these guys are starting to plan out new fabs, and you mentioned in the last time there would be a new fab deployment, you'd wanna get to a record status as soon as possible. You might think that that would upset the people that sell those testers en masse because there's whole floors for them, right?
Does it upset me if I were selling them testers? Yes.
Just one last thing. In the past, you mentioned even though you can do 18 at a time, the volume would be so massive, you would still need how many potential XPs for a typical, say, a flash fab?
75-100 per floor.
Fully automated?
Yes. If you were counting. Folks online, Larry, I do want to be also clear, we do not currently have revenue expectations for shipping into the memory guys this year. But if you are investing in us, you are always investing in us getting into memory someday. I just want to balance the enthusiasm. Larry knows darn well that it's one of my absolute pet peeves and one of my passions is to get this company into the memory business. Thank you, Larry, for teeing that up.
Hey, great job and keep up the great work.
Thanks, Larry.
We're counting on it.
At this time, there are no more questions in the queue.
All right.
I would like to thank.
I'm glad we are able to get to everybody. Thank you, operator. I'm glad we had a chance. A couple of times ago, I think we cut off a little early. We're trying to get our canned statements in in the first 30 minutes and give people enough air to get their questions in. I really appreciate all our shareholders that have been sticking with us. We're really excited about this new market opportunity this year and heading into the next years. We'll look forward to seeing anyone that happens to be coming into town to visit. We do take those or at one of the shareholder meetings or the investor conferences. We're getting a lot more miles on us these days. Thank you very much for your time, and we'll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now.