Good day, welcome to the Aehr Test Systems Second Quarter Fiscal 2021 Financial Results Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jim Byers of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, welcome to Aehr Test Systems Second Quarter Fiscal 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. With me on today's call are Aehr Test Systems 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 second quarter fiscal 2021 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 in the investor relations section of the company's website.
I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements today that are based on current information and estimates that 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 factors that may cause 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 guidance provided during today's call, are only valid as of this date, Aehr Test Systems undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements. Now with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Gayn Erickson, President and CEO of Aehr Test Systems.
Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon to those joining us on the conference call online, and also listening over the web. Ken will go over the second quarter financial results during the call. First, I'll spend a few minutes providing some details around the challenges we experienced during the quarter and how we responded. But I'll turn to what we're seeing now and why we think things are moving in the right direction. Following my remarks, we'll open up the lines for your questions. As we anticipated on last quarter's call, our bookings and revenue for the first half of our fiscal year were negatively impacted due to several customer-specific production ramp delays and pushouts of forecasted orders due to COVID-19 related impacts, as well as the continued challenging global business environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
These customers continue to indicate they believe the pushouts are temporary, and they will require additional system capacity and consumables in the current fiscal year. We continue to be optimistic about generating significant bookings and revenue increases in the second half of this fiscal year compared to the first half, based on these customer forecasts and the initial order flow we begin to see already starting in the second half. And in the third quarter, just last month, we announced that we received a design win for a new high-volume production test and burn-in application for a critical new mobile sensor application.
This engagement with a new customer, who is a supplier of sensors to a mobile-- a major mobile device manufacturer, began with an initial $4.3 million order for an initial test cell consisting of a FOX-XP production test and burn-in system, a set of DiePak Carriers, and a FOX automated DiePak loader/unloader. This initial test cell is expected to ship during this fiscal third quarter, and we expect follow-on capacity orders from this customer in this fiscal year for additional test system capacity, DiePak Carriers, and a DiePak auto loader solution for them. We're proud to have been selected for this application, which we were awarded due to our unique technical capabilities and cost-effectiveness of our solution that is critical to this application, which will require 100% test, burn-in, traceability, and validation of these devices.
Our highly differentiated FOX solution achieved this test requirement and met the customer's low cost of test targets due to the significantly higher parallelism that can be attained on our FOX-XP systems and DiePaks. During the second quarter, we also received a design win on an initial order from our lead customer for multiple DiePak carriers for test and burn-in of their next generation sensor modules for major mobile devices that we can't name today. This order expands deployment of our test solutions to additional devices with this large multinational customer, and we're excited to engage with them early in the design cycle for this product. The customer will use our proprietary DiePaks for production qualification, test, and burn-in of these devices.
We expect this to turn to volume production orders for additional DiePaks and had anticipated beginning shipment of the incremental DiePak capacity in our fiscal third quarter. However, this customer recently told us this capacity need is likely to be delayed until after our current fiscal year, and instead will push into the first or second quarter of our next fiscal year that begins in June. We continue to be optimistic about the mobile sensor market space and continue to see increasing interest in our FOX systems and DiePaks for production test and burn-in of complex 2D and 3D sensors in multiple mobile applications.
Since the beginning of the current third quarter, we've received multiple follow-on orders and are seeing an increase in bookings forecast for our proprietary WaferPaks and DiePaks consumables across multiple market segments for our installed base of FOX wafer and singulated die and module test systems. This reflects customer capacity and consumable needs for our previously announced design wins from customers for devices in Silicon Photonics, silicon carbide, mobile sensors, and flash memory. We're forecasting additional DiePaks and WaferPak orders during the second half of the fiscal 2021 from our installed base for these applications in these key market segments. As we've noted before, Aehr's proprietary test and burn-in solutions include customized WaferPaks and DiePaks that are needed not only for new systems orders, but also for each new design win or each new device added to production test.
As we increase our installed base of FOX systems with current and new customers, particularly with our FOX-MP and XP multi-wafer and singulated die module test and burn-in systems, we expect our consumables business will continue to grow in absolute value and as a percentage of our total sales. Over the long term, we expect these recurring consumable sales to account for up to half or even more of our total overall revenue. In Q4 of our prior fiscal year, we announced a new design win with a new tier 1 customer for a FOX-NP system that we shipped in Q1. This customer is a global leader of communication transceivers for data center, telecom, 5G infrastructure, and is forecasting to transition to our FOX-XP wafer-level test and burn-in systems during this fiscal year to meet their volume production forecast.
In addition to the order we expect to receive this fiscal year, we expect them to continue to place additional systems and consumable orders over the next several years. We also announced that we began a new relationship with a new customer that is the world's largest outsourced semiconductor assembly and test supplier. During the first quarter, we began an initial marketing and sales campaign with this customer for our FOX-P family of products, including Aehr WaferPaks and DiePaks for production test, burn-in, delivery, screening of devices at the wafer, singulated die and modules. This campaign is generating discussions with multiple potential new customers and continues to gain momentum with new customers, including yet another opportunity as late as the last few weeks.
They have asked us that we not name them publicly yet, as they see their move into the silicon photonics assembly, packaging, and test space as a strategic initiative. They want to gain market share with some critical customers before going public with what they see as a competitive advantage of being able to provide a total solution, including full wafer-level test and burn-in before assembly of the silicon photonics engines into the transceiver modules. We expect to make this partnership public in due course. We continued to expand the device wins and release to production of the FOX-XP for silicon carbide devices during the first quarter and second quarter. We added a couple new device design wins for the new high voltage silicon carbide devices on our FOX-XP system with our lead customer.
They are using the FOX-XP system for high volume production burn-in and infant mortality screening of silicon carbide devices at wafer-level for a few key applications, including electric and hybrid electric vehicles. They are forecasting additional bookings and capacity needs for our FOX-XP systems and WaferPaks during this fiscal year and for years into the future. For those who are not familiar with it, silicon carbide is a very impressive material for high power and particularly high voltage devices for applications such as the move to electric and hybrid electric vehicles, powertrains, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. That affects most, if not every EV or HEV Automotive company that is moving to silicon carbide-based power drive and charging systems.
The challenge with silicon carbide, it is known to have high infant mortality rates, but after a reliability burn-in screening, these hiccups can be completely removed to provide extremely reliable devices for these mission-critical applications. Aehr is able to provide a complete solution for one of the key reliability screening tests of an entire wafer at a time, while testing and monitoring every device for failures during the burn-in process to provide critical information on those devices. This is an enormously valuable capability that allows our customers to screen devices that would otherwise fail after they're packaged into multi-die modules, where the yield impact is 10x or even 100 x if possible.
A critical capability that only our solution can provide in the market today is the ability to test 100% of the die on a wafer in a single insertion, while providing 100% traceability of pass-fail results of every single device, including exactly what time during the test and burn-in cycle the device fails. This is a critical feature for this customer to provide confidence to their customers that they are removing all early life failures prior to shipment. This customer has made public presentations in industry conferences touting the cost and quality assurance advantages of our FOX solution compared to traditional package or module-level test. Our systems are not only able to test 100% of the devices at four or six inches, as well as the ability to test 12-inch wafers, but we can test and burn-in 18 wafers at a time on a single FOX-XP system.
We continue to see the total available opportunity for silicon carbide and silicon photonics wafer-level and single loaded die test markets to be approximately $250 million of yearly capacity, including consumables based on total wafer starts, yields, and test times. The silicon carbide semiconductor device market is growing at a tremendous rate, with unit growth of high-power devices expected to grow at over 50% CAGR from 2021 through 2025 per our research. Turning to our package part business. As we talked about before, we have started to see forecasts for renewed demand for package part burn-in applications, particularly from customers seeking high voltage capability with the move towards higher voltages and other market requirements for devices and automobiles.
We expect to see bookings resume from certain current Aehr customers this fiscal year, also expect to generate additional new opportunities with our planned introduction of a new package part burn-in product that has very high voltage test capabilities. We're being relatively conservative with our forecast in package part burn-in, as this segment still seems to be heavily impacted by COVID-19 delays and customer evaluations. We do see the need for high voltage capabilities in both wafer-level and package part as a high growth opportunity for Aehr, expect orders from several new customers, including both tier 1, tier 2 level customers for package part burn-in systems this fiscal year and next.
As we look to the second half of this fiscal year and beyond, we remain actively engaged in discussions with a large and growing group of potential new tier 1 and tier 2 customers that are considering using Aehr's products to support several high market growth opportunities. These not only include silicon photonics and silicon carbide production burn-in, but also applications for Automotive, memory in general, and microcontroller applications. The breadth of opportunity for our products makes us more and more excited about the broad-based adoption of wafer level burn-in. We continue to receive specific forecasts from existing customers for additional new capacity and expect with additional bookings and shipments and revenue for our systems and consumables.
These customers are in key growth segments that we have started to already penetrated, including silicon photonics and silicon carbide, and they have already purchased initial systems from us and are either in production or sampling to customers. They have told us explicitly that they plan for and will require additional capacity utilizing our FOX-XP systems to test up to with 18 full [inaudible] at a time or DiePaks with up to 1,024 [inaudible] in each of nine loads per system. These customers have asked us to anticipate and secure specific capacity to meet their needs and have indicated they expect to place orders for this capacity this fiscal year. We're certainly excited about this strong level of interest. At the same time, COVID-19-related impacts have affected our customers and hindered our ability to forecast the timing of these orders.
We continue to engage in ongoing discussions with a large number of potential new customers. These discussions have clearly been slowed by travel-related restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related precautions taken by several new potential customers worldwide, including policies for limited on-site engineers. This absolutely has delayed evaluations and initial orders for Aehr systems and consumable products in the first six months of this fiscal year. Given this fiscal year's guidance has been almost entirely based on current customer forecasts, we are taking a more conservative approach to our fiscal year forecast at this time and revising our revenue guidance for fiscal 2021 to be between $20 million and 25 million, while continuing to expect to be GAAP profitable for the fiscal year.
For the fiscal year second half revenue range of $16 million-21 million, this new revenue range reflects significantly increased revenue in the second half compared to first half revenue of under $4 million. We look into the second half of fiscal 2021, we remain optimistic about the growth opportunities for our systems and consumables with our installed base of customers, as well as our ability to expand the number of customers using our family of FOX-P solutions. We have additional potential customer engagements that could provide upside to our revenue for the fiscal year as well. We maintain our confidence in the long-term demand for our products, the attractiveness of the key markets that we serve, and our belief that we will come out of this worldwide pandemic stronger than we went in, with more production customers, more applications, and higher value products.
Our key customers are serving some of the highest growth markets, including data centers, IT infrastructure, sensors and technology for smartphones and tablets, electric and hybrid electric vehicles, and memory and data storage in computing data centers, mobile devices, and hundreds of applications that are keeping the world connected. As a result, we believe our products will be in high demand this year and for years to come. With that, let me turn it over to Ken before we open up the line for questions.
Thank you, Gayn, and good afternoon, everyone. As Gayn noted, our revenue and bookings for the first half of the fiscal year were negatively impacted by several customer-specific production ramp delays and pushouts of forecasted orders and the continued challenging global business environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these customers continue to indicate they believe the pushouts are temporary. Based on these customer forecasts and the initial order flow we have started to see since the beginning of the third quarter, we expect significant bookings and revenue increases in the second half of this fiscal year. At the same time, as we discussed on previous earning calls, we have taken significant actions to control spending and maintain our cash position as a result of customer orders pushouts and delays in production ramps.
In our fourth quarter of the prior fiscal year, we completed a restructuring that resulted in permanent savings of approximately $120,000 per year and also required mandatory vacation days to reduce costs. Starting in our current fiscal year, we implemented additional temporary cost reduction initiatives across the company. These measures included 30% pay reductions for our executive staff that took effect starting last quarter. The total of all cost reductions resulted in savings of over $550,000 in the second quarter. With our recent booking and improved forecast for the second half of the year, the temporary pay reductions for non-officers were eliminated starting in the current fiscal third quarter. The pay reductions for our executive staff remains in place.
It is also important to note that even with these cost controls, our operational capacity and bandwidth have not been negatively impacted, and our main focus continues to be growing our revenue base within the large market opportunities that Gayn mentioned earlier. Now turning to the financial results. Net sales in the second quarter were $1.7 million, down 16% from $2.2 million in the preceding first quarter, and down 76% from $6.9 million in the second quarter of the previous year. The sequential decrease from the preceding Q1 reflects a decrease of $484,000 in wafer level burn-in revenues, partially offset by an increase in customer service revenues of $155,000. The reduction in wafer level burn-in revenues was primarily due to a decrease in system revenues of $630,000, which was partially offset by an increase in WaferPak/DiePak revenues of $146,000.
The decrease from Q2 last year includes a decrease of $5.1 million in wafer-level burn-in revenues. This was primarily due to a decrease in system revenues of $2.8 million and a decrease in WaferPak/DiePak revenues of $2.3 million. Customer service revenues were flat compared to prior year. There were no packaged part system revenues in Q2 2021 or Q2 2020. Non-GAAP net loss for the second quarter was $1.7 million, or $0.07 per diluted share. This compares to non-GAAP net loss of $2 million or $0.09 per diluted share in the preceding first quarter, which excludes the impact of stock-based compensation expense and a $2.4 million adjustment related to the closure of our Japan subsidiary. And non-GAAP net income of $456,000 or 0.02 per diluted share in the second quarter of the previous year.
On a GAAP basis, net loss for the second quarter was $2 million or 0.08 per diluted share compared to GAAP net income of $107,000 or 0.00 per diluted share in the preceding quarter, and GAAP net income of $251,000 or 0.01 per diluted share in the second quarter of the previous year. Gross profit in the second quarter was $377,000 or 22% of sales, up 150,000 compared to gross profit of $227,000 or 11% of sales in the preceding first quarter, and down from gross profit of $3.2 million or 47% of sales in the second quarter of the previous year. The increase in gross margin from the preceding quarter is primarily due to a decrease in unabsorbed overhead cost to cost of sales, due to an increase in manufactured parts and inventory and a change in product mix.
WaferPak/DiePak consumable revenues accounted for 46% of revenues in the second quarter compared to 31% in the preceding first quarter. The decrease in gross margin percentage from the second quarter last year was primarily due to an increase in unabsorbed overhead cost to cost of goods sold due to lower revenue levels and an increase in warranty costs as a percent of sales. Operating expenses in the second quarter were $2.3 million, down 93,000 or 4% from $2.4 million in the preceding first quarter, and down $631,000 or 21% from $3 million in the second quarter of last year. The decrease in operating expenses from the preceding first quarter is primarily due to a decrease in R&D expenses of $80,000. The decrease from the second quarter last year includes a decrease in SG&A of $656,000, primarily due to cost reduction initiatives implemented in fiscal 2021.
SG&A was $1.5 million in the second quarter, flat from the preceding first quarter, and down $656,000 from 2.2 million in the prior year second quarter. R&D expenses were $820,000 in the first quarter, down from 900,000 in the preceding first quarter and up from $795,000 in the prior year second quarter. Turning to the balance sheet for the second quarter, our cash and cash equivalents were $3.4 million at November 30th, down 2.9 million compared to $6.3 million at the end of the preceding quarter. Accounts receivable at quarter end were $1.4 million, up 313,000 from $1.1 million at the preceding quarter end, relating to timing of revenue in the second quarter compared to Q1. Inventories at November 30th were $9.1 million, up 955,000 from $8.1 million at the preceding quarter end.
The increase in inventories includes an increase in labor and overhead of $371,000 related to an increase in manufactured parts and inventory. Property and equipment was $683,000 compared to 622,000 at the preceding quarter end. Customer deposits and deferred revenue, short-term and long-term, were $75,000, a decrease of 331,000 compared to $406,000 at the preceding quarter end, related primarily to the decrease in backlog from prior quarter. Our current and long-term debt of $1.7 million is related to funds received during the fourth quarter of the last fiscal year under the Paycheck Protection Program or PPP. The company applied for forgiveness of the PPP loan on November 6th, 2020, and the Small Business Administration has 90 days to review and approve the application. Bookings in the second quarter totaled $1.6 million and did not reflect any system orders.
Backlog at November 30th was $1.1 million, down 147,000 compared to $1.2 million at the end of the preceding first quarter. Since the start of our current fiscal third quarter, the company has received a $4.3 million order from a new customer for a FOX-XP test cell, and also additional WaferPak/ DiePak consumable orders, improving our overall backlog. Turning to our outlook for fiscal 2021. As Gayn mentioned, COVID-related impacts continue to affect our customers' customers, creating delays in some anticipated orders and overall caution with our customers that has resulted in delays of some of our customer collection ramps. With that in mind, we are taking a more conservative approach to our forecast for the second half of the fiscal year.
As such, we are revising our revenue guidance for fiscal 2021 down to between $20 million and 25 million, while continuing to expect to be profitable on a GAAP basis for the fiscal year, which includes the impact of the net gain on the dissolution of Aehr Test Systems Japan, and the anticipated loan forgiveness of the PPP loan. This new revenue range still reflects a significant ramp in the back half of the fiscal year compared to the first half. This concludes our prepared remarks. We are now ready to take your questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. We'll take our first question today from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum.
Hi, guys. This is Tyler on behalf of Christian. Thanks for letting us ask a few questions. First question.
Hi, Tyler.
Hi, guys. So, first question. Saw on multiple, I think you called it a dozen previously, or more than a dozen, tier 1 and tier 2 potential customers or engagements you have out of the silicon photonics or carbides, as well as other customers. In the next couple quarters, this fiscal year and into next year, should we expect a majority of the orders from these customers? How many of these customer pipeline would you expect to turn into orders?
I mean, that's a good question, and kind of tees up how we are looking at our forecast. I know we've had lots of feedback with respect to people on how we look at our forecasting that we're doing. Primarily what we discussed is forecast for revenues, and less about exactly what the bookings are. Obviously, bookings come before the revenues, because the book should get revenue. Right or wrong, when we started off the year, we tried to be clear in communicating that when we set the expectation for the year, we were basically communicating the majority of the forecast was only with installed base customers that were already communicating to us that they intended to buy more. Arguably, believed to be a conservative stance at that time, because the alternative was just sort of looking into when is COVID going to end?
What's going to happen, et cetera. How do we anticipate? We quite frankly just listened to what our customers were telling us. Generally speaking, when you look at forecasts, you actually forecast not only what the customers specifically tell you, but you anticipate winning new deals or that the customer will ramp or something, and that's typically always a bit of a challenge to do. In our latest, if you will, guidance, we again took now our current specific customers, including the deal that we just won again, and what are they specifically telling us? This is what we and the board have decided is our best way to communicate our guidance, because we have clear line of sight to those deals.
It also helps to explain, in my prepared comments, it says, "W e have other deals." Again, I just want to make sure people understand that most of what we are talking about when we guide is I have customer A that's told me they need this configuration for this price by this month, and that's how we build up our forecast. The downside, of course, to that is if the customer needs something, we can be wrong in specific incremental steps, and we just try to do our best at figuring that out. In that range, if you want to interpret, because I guess we could have been much clearer, you know, what they tell us is right then in the middle of that. Okay?
So, you know, and we said, "Okay, there's some downside and upside," and we're trying to be as appropriate as we can in this environment to give people some guidance, while we continue to still re-invent the business to ensure that we are profitable. By the way, in that range, you could also interpret we're profitable at the low end, so we must be pretty profitable at the high end, and that's a fair way of thinking about it. There's still a dynamic range within that forecast. You specifically asked about customers, and you talked about tier 1 and tier 2, and just for folks that have not listened in the last couple few calls, we were describing tier ones as customers that were significantly large enough to do maybe $6 million-10 million a year on a, we call it average or good year.
Whereas maybe a tier 2 might be $1 million-3 million. It's not how much we love those customers, but just sort of their buying power, which is a combination of their size, the markets they serve, et cetera. We have a number of both of those, both as customers that are already qualified, and as new opportunities.
Back to your question in terms of do we anticipate, in our forecast for current customers absolutely include some of our biggest current and former customers, as well as some of the smaller guys. In the case of the tier 1 that we announced that we won in late May at the end of last fiscal year, as they shift from buying their first, you know, NPI system to production, we see them be a tier 1 customer. They're physically a very large company and have a significant forecast with us. That's an example where they bought small to begin with. We consider them a tier 1. They were already a customer, but they'd only bought a small amount, and they're about to buy a rather significant test cell from us. We have that in silicon photonics for certain. We have many more customers.
We have about, I think, five or six customers that are already qualified for silicon photonics, and then we have over twice that many companies we're engaged with on the silicon photonics in the photonic space. Again, in our revenue forecast, primarily, there's no revenue in the waves that we shared with you related to new customers coming in. One of the challenges right now is the reality is we're one month into our third quarter. While we do have inventory, there's only so much time until even with large orders, we're not going to be able to necessarily ship it all before the end of May.
And so, I think as we anticipate this year, we can see that the bookings, for example, would continue to be strong as the ramp is mostly just shifted, which would afford us to have a reasonably strong backlog going into the next year. Related to just new customers going forward, again, we try not to forecast all the bookings and things like that. For certain, we do have over these next 18 months and certainly in the next year, anticipate that we will win a number of new customers across several segments, including silicon photonics, including silicon carbide, as well as some new application spaces that we haven't spent a lot of time on talking about, but we kind of allude to in the memory and buffer controller space and some other things.
There's actually a lot of activity and a lot of discussion in the market around wafer-level burn-in right now. I think one of the themes that, and I know I spend a lot of time answering this, but one of the challenges right now is there's a lot of folks. The semiconductor industry, I want to make sure people understand, is actually doing really well right now, which seem t o be a big disconnect with respect to why is Aehr having a couple of the worst quarters in recent memory. This is kind of a straightaway, if you will, where everyone going as fast as they can. You know, the Micron of the world, many semiconductor companies, they're basically buying exactly what they're doing, and they're just going fast. There's actually not a lot of kind of new development. There's not a lot of new process turns.
People are kind of just sticking to their knitting and doing exactly what they're doing. In a scenario like ours, where we're just winning into these new silicon photonic, silicon carbide applications, some of those customers have kind of pulled back, slowed down those ramps to their customers, and as a result, the bulk of our business is involved in this NPI or this new product introduction space. I'll just say one more thing here.
Last quarter, I mentioned it was absolutely dead on that prior to then, everybody was just completely holding their breath. We couldn't fly in and see them. Things were just sort of moving laterally. Over the last, I'd say, two months, customers have realized they're not going to wait for the pandemic to be over, and the conversations are, "Here's the order. It's coming. How are you going to install it?". You know, maybe later in the call, I'll go into the actual tactical logistics of us flying in people, and they're sitting in quarantine, then they do the installations, and the how to manage through all that. We need to do that because they're going to be installing a bunch of systems in the second half. Pass it back to you, Tyler.
That was great. I appreciate all the color, Gayn. Second question here. I want to follow up on your new customer order, this $4.3 million order, a customer serving a large mobile manufacturer. And so, I know we've kind of been surprised or maybe disappointed in the lack of follow-through previously here. So I'm just wondering if you could add some color, some comments on your conviction that this customer will turn into more meaningful revenue in the future. Just kind of your best expectations for that customer today. Thanks.
Sure. Let me add to your comment about using the word disappointed follow-through. I'm not sure you used that word, but I'll use it. For those folks that are kind of new to us or not familiar with the story, we had a very large mobile manufacturer who it turned out was the initial lead customer on our new FOX family of wafer level and some related die and module products. When they were first buying from us, it was unclear with how they would deploy the tool in terms of which high-volume applications, how long the test time was, and then as it turned out, what percentage of the devices were actually tested. What we have made clear is that we've seen that market space, in this case, turn to what is called sampling, which means they do not test 100% of every single device using a tool.
Instead, do it for quality, reliability sampling, which I won't go into a lot of detail, but the way to interpret that is if you're only doing a 5% or a 1% sampling, you only buy 5% or 1% of what you could. So there's a huge dynamic range there. In the initial orders from these customers and these applications, we did not know whether they were going to be doing sampling or high-volume production. In fact, the sampling rate was lower than expected, and therefore, while they bought $10 million, 15 million worth, they didn't buy $50 million worth. Now, specifically in this application, and we have to be really careful about what things we say, so I'm not going to try and say the same things I've said before and specifically in the release.
We have been told and are clear that this is actually a production burn-in unit. It's a 100% test. The good news is it doesn't have the 1% or 5% multiplier times it. The test time and the volume percentages, I don't want to get into. I never will. Technically, there's some even uncertainty exactly what applications it would go into, although there are some of us that are read into the programs and know more than we would ever talk about. All I would say at this point is that we have been told there is volume behind it. We absolutely believe it, and this is obviously one of the customers that's asking us to secure allocation of capital and stocks, et cetera, for additional capacity this year. So I-- my voice may not sound it. I'm actually really excited about this one.
I will maintain an extra amount of conservativeness and believe it as I see it, so far so good. It doesn't take a lot of $4.3 million test cells to have us maybe in this level of revenue. It was actually really encouraging. The other specific thing I want to say on that, because it may come out somewhere else on this new customer, I really mean it to come out through my pores. I am actually really excited about this, not just because of the potential dollars, which are significant, but that the customer specifically understood and selected our system based upon its capability for 100% validation of the device. This part could have been tested with what is known in the industry as a package part burn-in system. We sell them.
Subtly, one of the differences between a package part burn-in system with a traditional convection oven is that you have to use lots of shared resources. I won't go into it. All it means is you just do not have the traceability and the validation of every single device. The FOX products have as much as 100 times the resources available to the devices, which allows us to 100% know that part got tested, as well as thermally conductive cooling and heating gives us the ability to certainly know it was actually burned in properly. That is more expensive than package parts. In certain applications, we're able to, through wafer-level or singular die, test so many more in parallel that we can actually do it more cost-effective, while at the same time giving them much better data.
They specifically spent more money to ensure that this device was 100% burn-in and clarity. We have reason to understand why that was important to them. That is super encouraging to me because honestly, that's what we've been out touting for years, and they get it. That is just really encouraging, and I think this is going to lead towards more business and other opportunities that are similar to it because of the level of clarity of the value of this package burn-in, and test . Okay?
That's great. Appreciate that. The last quick one, and I'll turn the call and turn the question over. A little bit of a modeling question, I guess. It's all fundamental. You're implying second half guidance. With the visibility you have today, any color on Q3 versus Q4? Would you expect Q3 and Q4 to be kind of similar in size or more of a progressive improvement through the end of the year and then Q4 sequentially better? Any color there would be great. Thanks.
I would actually, this is when we talked about it. Let me put it out there. I think it's pretty fair to say that Q4 would still be bigger than Q3, given the current situation of our backlog, albeit when we put the press release out for that last order for the $4.3 million. We had orders since then, by the way. We just haven't put out press releases on them. I'm not sure if I even said it in the release. I think we got it at, you know, 9:00 A.M. in the morning on the first. It missed our quarter by less than 12, certainly less than 24 hours or something. It was pretty sad. It would have been nice to ship it in backlog. It was certainly in backlog from day one.
So, you know, you do need a little bit of a running head start to make sure you can ship things. We haven't announced any significant orders as we are expecting yet this quarter, but I would say it's fair that Well, Q4 would be revenue-wise larger than Q3. Bookings, I'm not sure. It might actually be still rather even, but I think revenue is going to be larger than fourth quarter.
That sounds great. I appreciate it. That's all for me. Thanks , Gayn.
Thanks, Tyler. Got it. Sure.
As a reminder, press star one if you have a question. We'll now hear from John Fichthorn with Dialectic Capital.
Hey, John.
Hey, Gayn. Thanks for taking my question. I appreciate it. A little bit of a follow on from the questions you just got asked in a slightly different way since he asked some of my questions. A, the bullet customer one with the $4.3 million order and then the bullet customer two, are those different customers? Or same customer?
You know what? Let me see. I actually do, alright, I'm actually getting some feedback, John. I'm not sure if that's you. Okay, it seems to be better now. Okay. We had not made that clear, although I think most people had interpreted, as you probably did, you did well, I mean, close. I do want to make it clear here. The end customer is the same. Okay. The subcon is different. The application and the device is different. That's a good thing for us. Just because the end customer is the same, I can tell you don't just win one application and then you get another one. Internally, the goods can be different, the applications are different, et cetera. This feels like a new win to us, certainly with the subcon, but even within the application and the goods that it is running.
One of the reasons I think I'm excited about is because there's cross-pollination going on in that customer to recognize. And, and.. You know, they found us in this application. They came looking for us and said, "Can you do this?" That's very much again.
Great. That sounds exciting. Without having to give any timeline around it, what do you think the total revenue potential is in these two products? Either one of them alone or two of them together, over whatever period of time. I don't care.
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. I'm going to leave my way out of this one a little bit. One thing is, just looking historically, sometimes it's good to just point to people what has historically happened, so you can say to the public who are out there. We have been having a couple of million dollars with the DiePaks in Q4 as it gets to the last three, four years or so. Right? Normally what we did is we did a set of DiePaks somewhere around fall, and then that turns into production around May. I kind of made it pretty specific. That's as we would have expected during this time, but then we got pushed into the summer. That's one example. That type of device has generally been maybe a few million dollars a year of just the consumables.
This new application, I'm going to just simply say there will be more. And you know, a test sell is $4.3 million or 4 million or so, they come in pretty good size chunks. We have ranges of what it is. We also know that all of the deep data is not in. And our visibility of this is actually still relatively limited, meaning we can see the capacity we need maybe in the next six or nine months or so. We will see as the device kind of gets out and it's deployed within all the different devices, what the growth rate is. I'll tell you, I'll share one thing. I think this is okay to say.
I have been told by the customers, they've given this to us in the past, this is how big it is and how great it's going to be, and then they have not bought that much. And this is a customer that has certainly done that before. This time they've told us less about how great it's going to be, but it's more obvious from their actions how big it's going to be. I don't know if that's a good thing, but it seems like when they tell us how great it is, it isn't as big as it is. Maybe the fact that they haven't said as much this time, maybe that's a good sign or not. We know it's a good idea, and they'll be more of them in the future.
I have to believe that they need to plan their business, and so they have to give you some level of visibility. What are your lead times today?
Yeah.
And you know, if they had a scope of those lead times, either lead time shifts or can you help us with ideas as opposed to revenue guidance through year end? Where do you think your backlog is at year end? Maybe that'll help us understand what you think the scope is as we move forward?
I think what I will share with you, given that majority of what we have done with our forecast is basically shifted in time, I think it's fair to say that we believe, and I think if things play out as we expect, we should have a pretty strong backlog going into next year. I know that's kind of a weak way of describing it, but I think it would be a fairly substantial backlog going into the year, which is very different than it was this year when we went into this year, and certainly last quarter. So I, you know, you actually asked a different question, and I want to answer that, and that is, given the lead times and stuff, how much visibility does it give you?
There's pros and cons about having a manufacturing capacity and infrastructure and supply chain to be able to ship significantly more than many of the revenue numbers we've talked about. I mean 10 times at least. The downside is that as the customers come in, and particularly this customer and other large tier 1 customers, they do a deep dive and make sure you have the capabilities to serve them. Okay? So they know darn well that if they give us a multi-system order, that we can ship that in five or six months. Okay? They won't have to give us too much visibility. They're not contracting 40 systems with us and think that we're going to ship those inside of six months. But, you know, even a $4 million test size, keep in mind, that's only one system to us.
We have no challenge shipping multiple of those per month with reasonable lead times. Our typical lead times on the street are in the 16 to maybe 24 weeks or so, kind of depending on configuration, backlog, and stuff. They don't have to give us that much visibility.
Okay. And so.. That was great, by the way, great weaseling out of answering a question. I applaud you. That was black belt CEO dodge. I'm very impressed. On the transceiver customer, that sounds kind of like a new thing. What is the size of that opportunity? Maybe you could answer that one.
Okay, so, it's interesting. First of all, it feels like all of these silicon photonics guys have kind of a similar pattern, and that is they start with one or two, what we call blades, which is say one or two wafers of capacity to begin with. We now can do that with our new FOX-NP systems. Then when they go to production, they buy XP systems that are either nine or 18 blades or something more. And so, I think a general rule is to think about it that way. In fact, each of our initial silicon photonics customers have all seemingly started off that way. I think except our initial lead customer, because we didn't have the NP systems to begin with.
The first XPs they purchased, they were doing all the quals and everything else in two, three, four wafers at a time, even though we ship them a nine or 18 blade system. So, you know, what it feels like is, oh, you buy our $0.75 million or 1 million field test cell or something, which is an NP system with a couple of wafers. You transition, and you're buying a $2 million or 3 million test cell as you move to production. You duplicate that over time. The capacity of that just gets into what do you think is the market size. So, there's.. If you look at silicon photonics, and, you know, John, I think you've looked into that before. Not everybody understands, but we throw these numbers out, what is a silicon photonics?
Silicon photonics is an industry description of an integrated device used for electrical to fiber optic or optical transmission. Historically, fiber optic transceivers, to and from, okay, are a very complex module made up of lots of different IPs and mechanical and electrical structures and lasers and things all integrated into this little package that is being used in the data centers.
It is used in telecommunication for across town. It's even used for underwater, undersea fiber optic transceivers. They all.. The cost of a transceiver can be from $300, 400, $500 or more, up to 10,000 for them. The industry had been working for, you know, maybe a couple of decades, companies like Intel, who said, "Listen, the world hasn't gone to fiber optics because the cost of those transceivers is just so expensive. We're not going to have a fiber optic communications hub in our house if the transceiver is $900 per channel." Okay?
This was actually one of the big misses in the 1999, 2000 hubbub around why JDSU and the world's going to go fiber optic, and then it went nowhere. The reason is, it was just too expensive. And so the world went in other directions and other kind of communications protocols and all. But the need for fiber optic or the end, if you will, of RF and microwave transmission through regular coaxials, et cetera, was running out of steam. Folks like Intel were saying, "I have an idea.
I'm going to integrate all that stuff into one silicon and take the cost out, the manufacturing advantages that we see with silicon manufacturing, and I'm going to make a wafer with 500 or 1,000 devices on it, and I'm going to take the cost from hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, down to tens of dollars . And that's what they're doing. Right. There have been several other big companies, Cisco of the world, that have been making these investments. The big deal is it allows the world to go to much higher bandwidth at much lower cost, like a 10th of the cost.
And when Intel introduced their first product in there, it was devastating to the industry because there were companies out there that were selling these products for $2,000 a piece or $1,000 apiece, and Intel was selling them for $400 and making huge margins on it. And so, there are a lot of companies that went away. The industry analysts have said, wow, it's an enormously elastic market, and as the world puts out as much silicon photonics devices as they can, they're going to shift from copper-based communication protocols to fiber optic communication-based protocol. So there's this elasticity where the cheaper they make it, the more they'll come. So, up until recently, the whole story is there's not even close to enough manufacturing capacity out there to meet the market needs. The big players include Intel, right?
People know that they happen to be just because they are a 10% customer of ours, okay, a favorite of ours. There are other players, some of which we have mentioned and some we haven't, that are in that space, and it's sort of a wild west of everybody's getting into it. The one thing that's interesting about the customer, I'm going back now to the customer that we won in May, okay. They are a large player in the transceiver business, right? And they're getting into silicon photonics. Unlike a lot of the players in the space that aren't actually making transceivers and are just getting into silicon photonics, okay? These guys are one of the biggest players in transceivers, and they're going to shift their business to silicon photonics. So there's, you know, the ramp is different for them.
As soon as it works, they, instead of selling C/A to a customer, they can sell C/B, and all the differences in the manufacturing cost and the reliability and the footprint is so much smaller that it's a better product for them. One other thing, just one other thing, background on the whole silicon photonics space is that fiber optic communications is measured, is noted in both protocols and speed. The speed of fiber optic communications were like 50 Gb or something, which is very fast, by the way. They're going to 100 Gb, and 200 Gb, and 400 Gb, and 800 Gb. Well, it turns out copper is completely running out of steam. The fastest fiber optic communication, or non-fiber optic communication, is like 112 Gb. As they go above that, they're going to have to go to photonics.
There's other reasons in silicon for people to go to photonics as a communication protocol. The good news is those photonics devices need not just a burn-in, but an aging and stabilization that Aehr Test provides with our wafer-level solutions. People that are going to whole wafer silicon photonics are all looking at how do I do wafer-level stabilization of these photonics devices? That's what we offer with this FOX-XP team. That's why right now, almost all of the players in the market are talking to us. It's unbelievable how they have, I'll call it stalled, in the last six months.
We were trying to figure out how we were even going to be dealing with all of the different benchmarks and all last summer when we put the new marketing and the clean rooms in place in our facility last February. And right now, it's just sort of a lot of Zoom calls and stuff, but it's nowhere near the activity that we think will come back as soon as we get through this pandemic stuff. So that specific customer has the ability to ramp significantly and, in fact, be bigger than our biggest customer in the space. We believe that in time he will.
Great. You almost answered in the last sentence, and I appreciated the warm-up. Bigger than your biggest would be great. I'll give it to somebody else. My last comment is, once again, I would like to reiterate that I think your board should continue to see some turnover. I appreciated that there was some last year. Boards should be refreshed. You did miss for six months. I think you guys should either add, or I'd like to see some board members buy some stock, or management. We're all out here risking our capital.
You're on this board for 12 to 44 years. Reach into your pocket, buy a share. Show us that you believe in the story also. It shouldn't all just be Christmas presents of gifts and pay to be a board member and have your four nice dinners a year. Shareholders would like to see you risking some capital alongside us. That is a message from me directly to them. So, thank you.
Thank you, John.
And.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, good luck in the back half.
Thank you.
Next, we'll hear from Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson.
Yeah. Hi, thanks for letting me talk to you. Just a couple quick ones. First is, when you look at the recent cost cutting you've done, has that impacted your ability to do trials with new customers, or has it limited your engagement with new customers at all?
I would say no. In no way have we slowed down anything. But my pause is, things have slowed down that gives us some bandwidth that has allowed us to do cost-cutting if need be, is candidly the case. Vernon or myself or anyone on my staff was working seven days a week anyhow, even though we all stepped up and said we're going to take direct cash pay cuts, you know, till we get to profitability because it's the right thing to do. But I don't believe that is the case. I don't think we're actually cutting off. We're doing anything with slowdown sales. We are absolutely engaged in commanding programs. At some point maybe I can give more color on that.
But you know, the clear focus right now with everyone in the company, improving every single day, the call is the pending purchase orders and the ones that we have ensuring that we can install them and ship them as quickly as we can get paid, et cetera.
Okay, great. And then let me take a quick question on the competitive front. The fact that things have stalled a little bit here for a few quarters, has that enabled any competitors to catch up with you, or have you seen any competitors try to do what you're doing in this situation?
At this point, I would say not at all. We have not seen any new competitors there. We have not heard of anybody working on something that could be considered a multi-wafer system for doing the kind of things that we're doing. There's no conduction-based multi or single loaded die or module systems like we do with our mobile customers. As a result, when we're competing, it's like we're competing with a DiePak burn-in system. It's interesting because keep in mind we also sell those, albeit arguably not much or none this year. There still is a.. There's some markets where packaged part is cheaper and people are willing to make those trade-offs. Very interestingly, we have examples like in silicon carbide, there's even some Automotive companies that are moving from package to wafer level, and so we see both sides.
So we do these cost of ownership models and convince ourselves why the wafer level makes more sense. So, what I'm trying to point out is when we're competing, we're competing against package parts, and that is arguably an alternative, but very differentiated in terms of its value proposition. Not only can we do more parallel, but we get the yield advantage of somebody doing it at wafer level before it goes into a package or a multi-chip module or something like that. And so that's the primary still alternative to us, no real competitors.
Okay. That's good to hear. Just so we know that you're not losing any business, it's just purely being delayed.
Yeah. Tom, let me make that very specific. We have not lost a deal. Okay? We have not actually said, "Oh, we lost to so and so," and said, "Hey, what happened?", you know, the entire last year. Nothing about the slowdown, the pushout is a result of us losing a deal.
Okay, great. Finally, just a clarification. Starting this quarter, very little backlog, and you say, going into next year with a fairly significant backlog or meaningful backlog. That means the new orders have to be quite a bit higher than the revenue, and the revenue in the second half of the year is projected to grow quite nicely. I just want to make sure that I understood you correctly when you said you'd have a fairly significant backlog going into 2021.
For now, Tom.
2022.
Again, that's correct. The only caveat I just said is based upon what we understand and know now, I believe that to be the case. Sorry.
No. Thank you. All right.
I mean, we have specific customer forecasts for the summer. They need to give us orders before then. Yeah.
Okay, great.
In the summer, I bring that up because our fiscal year starts June 1st. Anything in the summer is our next fiscal year. That's why.
Yep. All right. Thank you.
Thanks, Tom.
We'll take our last question from Larry Chlebina with Chlebina Capital.
Hey, Larry.
Hi, Gayn. I got some quick questions on timing. Your mobile center new customer. When you talk about more systems to come, you talk about this fiscal year. Is that plural? In other words, in Q4, is there one more system that you're sure of, or is there more than one? Just to clarify.
Yeah. Let me make sure I understand. Okay. You know, one of the, one of the.. Larry is able to understand the business very well because [inaudible] . One of the challenges is that ours— in the test business, the typical AT— automated test equipment and the test suppliers like Advantest, Teradyne, Cohu, for example, Verigy, that I came from before here. The testers in the wafer-level test one wafer at a time. One tester equals one wafer. Our solutions, we make single-wafer solutions with the CP, dual-wafer solutions with the MP, and up to 18 wafers with an XP. When we talk about systems and shipping capacity, you sort of how do I interpret it? Larry, the advanced question Larry is asking is how many XPs are you going to get versus just how many what we call blades or testers within it?
All we have stated, Larry, is and tried to clarify that there's absolutely more blade and systems testers with the capacity. More DiePaks and more loaders and unloaders. We're not giving clarity yet as to do we think there'll be multiple XPs in this fiscal year or not. I haven't gotten there yet.
Okay. You're saying you're going to have loaders, but if you already got a loader on the system you're shipping this quarter.
They need more.
You obviously have another XP that you need that loader on that you're shipping.
That's at least there. I'll tell you what, I'll go this far. They need at least another XP DiePak and loader.
Okay, at least there's one more system in Q4, you know, when [inaudible], It implies to me that plural maybe there's more than one, but there's at least one. Is that correct?
Yes.
Okay.
Hang on for it.
On your new NP, a certain photonics customer that's going to buy the XP, is that expected in Q3 or Q4? Do you know? You said this was Q3.
I'm expecting the order before I ship it, and I don't have the order yet. How's that?
What would be the cutoff on that system if you got the order this week?
Yeah, I'll tell you what. We do have the ability to ship things on relatively short lead time. Generally speaking, inside of like eight weeks or 12 weeks, you're pushing it. That goes to one of the original questions, I think, from Tyler, which is do you think Q3 and Q4 will be the same? No, I don't. I think Q4 will be larger.
And, so.
We do have revenue, yeah. We do have revenue in Q3, which ends at the end of February, that we have not booked yet. We definitely have revenue in Q4 we have not booked yet.
Okay. You haven't identified .
Q3 is not over yet, but not everything that we book in Q2 will ship in Q2, for certain.
The [inaudible] customer for data center, is that still on track for at least getting off the ground before this fiscal year? On the data center [inaudible].
Okay. We haven't really gotten the part of the system behind this forecast. For clarity, we won a new customer a year and a half ago for a data center related application that we continue to say is for this extremely high-volume application. We do continue to forecast that they will buy multiple systems for production and have every reason to believe that. They're absolutely using the tool today for early production ramp, et cetera. We're trying to figure out when the ramp is. We know for certain the ramp is delayed because of coronavirus. I'll quote him, 100%. We have not seen the end of it yet. I don't know exactly when that is.
Right now, I actually don't have that in our fiscal year anymore because I have not specifically been told by them that they're going to take it by me before I close it out. It doesn't mean that couldn't still happen, and we have the ability to ship, but I don't have the visibility with them as I do with some of the other customers.
On that application or that system, that loader system, if you got an order in a reasonable period of time, you could ship it quicker than say an XP, in four weeks ?
Similar. I actually have some FOX-CP capacity test cells around. I kind of understand for those that have come and visited, I know pictures of our products help a lot. The product family of the FOX-P has three different chambers, we call it. There's a single wafer, dual wafer, multi wafer. In those chambers, there are blades. The blades are interchangeable between all the customers. And then in those blades are channel modules specific to applications, but there's only three flavors, and everybody is made up of the same three. We just mix and match and configure the order. If someone needed a couple of FOX-CP systems, I could ship them almost immediately.
Okay.
With blades in them.
Lastly, I'll be quick because we're running late. I want to shift a little bit to this mounted memory potential that's out there. I don't know, four years ago when we were developing the XP, there were some fabs that got initiated, and they were looking for somebody to build them a system at the end of the line. I think they went with Tokyo Electron. We certainly were ready. The XP was even debugged, although perfected. Anything I hear about that application was a disaster. I think they had a [inaudible] system that worked around their IP, but it didn't work too well anyway. It would make sense that there's probably another one or two fabs that may be getting off the mark shortly. And, you know, especially with all the opportunities, you got a full plate and the resources are limited.
Wouldn't it make sense to joint venture? You have a proven machine now. It's proven, the XP, it's the key technology for that application, but you need automation, which you don't have. Would it make sense to joint venture with somebody out of Brooks Automation ? They got $5 billion market cap. You risk the entire project, so you could get it off the mark. Certainly, you could push XPs through your facility. You now have a good ops manager to help you do that. In order to secure that opportunity, I think it would dramatically reduce the risk for the customer if you would present yourself in that manner. Ultimately, if you could land something like that, you could live the rest of your life on the consumables. It would be something like 1,000 DiePaks or so on that, if you could have a win on that.
WaferPaks. The memory. You teed up a ton of stuff there, Larry. You've clearly done your homework. Okay. I just want to acknowledge several data points and maybe try and answer the one question that was embedded in there. I want to acknowledge, we do believe that some, but not even close to the majority of the memory companies have implemented wafer-level burn-in, and only in flash memory do they not do that. We believe that long-term, that it makes sense for all flash memory and potentially DRAM to go to wafer-level burn-in, and there's some specific reasons that this has taken some time, DRAM longer than flash, and we have a pretty good idea why. Okay.
The people that implemented wafer level burn-in first with flash did it in a, we believe, is a compromised way. We've gotten specific feedback that they're going to need more cost-effective, higher parallelism, lower footprint, more automation in the future. We do believe that long-term, that is an opportunity, and as long as I'm in the seat, we will ever always be trying to get into that space. We had shared vaguely with people that I will vaguely repeat it again, part of the investment in us as a company is actually got oars in the water related to automation and production cells extending the XP and its capabilities, so it is more applicable, and more cost-effective for massively high-volume applications such as memory. Okay. We are spending that money today.
In this downturn, in addition to the investments we're making in WaferPaks, DiePaks, high voltage, package part and wafer level burn-in systems, we're also engaged on automation and some other things that we think are particularly appealing to multiple markets, including and specifically the memory guys. Okay. You alluded to the risk associated with us as a small company, and certainly a big part of the risk profile for three or four years ago was the XP was but a glimmer in my eye, or our eye, and it was a sketch on a piece of paper, and that was too far of a stretch for a fab that's going to need up to 100 XPs per fab to go after it. I believe that we are on a path to be able to reduce that risk, and that gives us opportunities.
I will also tell people, do not invest in our stock because you think we're going to sell a whole bunch of memory systems in the next six months. But we are engaged in working on some things, and very specifically, the engagement in that area slowed to a halt during COVID. Not for us, but everybody. [Inaudible] guys are absolutely just focused on getting what they were doing done and not doing things. There's no belief or the understanding of any programs except that they're really digging into on the wafer level side of things right now. I do believe we're reengaged.
Your comment about should we partner with somebody, et cetera, I understand it makes sense. I don't want to comment about potential partnerships or things that are in play, but I will acknowledge that could very well make sense to companies before they go off and try and spend hundreds and millions of dollars of their chest on wafer-level bonding systems.
Particularly if you would just get your key technology, your XP system out the door, which would be a tremendous boon, but also the consumable business would be like I said, really set for life.
I believe that one of the critical weaknesses of the way people have deployed and one of the headwinds of why people have not been able to do wafer level burn-in across a wider segment of flash as well as DRAM is the contactor, where Aehr has proprietary technology with what we call our WaferPak that can address it. I think that's one of the differentiated things. I actually think the tester is as well, and the test cell and the automation. For certain, the probe cards that are out there cannot address the DRAM, the high density, high power flash memory coming up, and it's something the WaferPaks can.
It seems like why take on the automation? That's really not the key technology. Just what we said is the key technology, and by partnering with somebody, it would dramatically reduce the risk to the customer, and this is something to get down the road. Just my thought, but hopefully, you guys are seriously continuing something like that.
I appreciate the feedback, and stay tuned, Larry.
Sure.
Okay.
That will conclude today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to management for any additional closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much, Operator. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate you listening in and taking some really good questions and giving some good questions. I absolutely want to acknowledge we understand that the first half was certainly one of the less exciting times of Aehr's history, even in recent memory. I truly sit here at this edge and am so glad that 2020 is behind, because it wasn't just last six months, it was really all of 2020 that we were feeling it.
Starting out with this initial order and based on what the customers are telling us, it's not just COVID and all the other things going on in the world. We're actually really excited about 2021. I'll leave it there and appreciate it. As always, you know how to reach us. Reach out to us if you want to have follow-on conversations, et cetera. Thank you very much, and we'll talk to you next quarter. Bye-bye.
That will conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.