Hello, everyone, and welcome to Atomera's second quarter fiscal year 2022 update call. I'd like to remind everyone that this call and webinar are being recorded, and a replay will be available on Atomera's IR website for one year. I'm Mike Bishop with the company's investor relations. As in prior quarters, we are using Zoom, and we will follow a similar format, with participants in a listen-only mode. We will open with prepared remarks from Scott Bibaud, Atomera's President and CEO, and Frank Laurencio, Atomera's CFO. Then we will open the call for questions. If you are joined by telephone, you may follow a slide presentation to accompany our remarks on the events and presentations section of our investor relations page on our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during today's call, we will make forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements, whether in prepared remarks or during the Q&A session, are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in the Risk Factors section of our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically in the company's annual report on Form 10-K, filed with the SEC on February fifteenth, 2022, and in our prospectus supplement filed with the SEC on May 31st, 2022. Except as otherwise required by federal securities laws, Atomera disclaims any obligation to update or make revisions to such forward-looking statements contained herein or elsewhere to reflect changes in expectations with regards to those events, conditions and circumstances. Also, please note that during this call, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial measures as defined by SEC Regulation G.
Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in today's press release, which is posted on our website. Now, I would like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Scott Bibaud. Go ahead, Scott.
Good afternoon, and welcome to Atomera's second quarter 2022 update call. Once again, we've had a very productive quarter with progress I look forward to sharing. After discussing how the newly passed CHIPS Act affects us, I'll turn the call over to Frank to review our financials and outlook. In the first quarter, we saw our existing customers reinvigorated by the ability to start new wafer runs as fab capacity started to open up. The second quarter was where new customer interest and projects with existing customers have really started to grow again. Atomera received a lot of inbound interest from customers at the industry's most important power and RF-focused trade shows, as well as the large VLSI and SEMICON West conferences held over the last three months.
These were great forums for Atomera to have the in-depth technical conversations necessary to deepen existing relationships and gain a foothold with new customers. We are starting to see the fruits of those efforts with our new addition to our customer pipeline. We expect that trend to continue as the number of targeted applications increases and R&D wafer runs become more accessible as fab capability continues to loosen up. The bigger news is that progress with our customers in phase three is going particularly well. We have a number of important wafer runs underway with licensees, JDA partners, and other customers, which hopefully will yield results encouraging them to move on to more licensing phases and ultimately into production.
Although none of those lots are finished, we have been able to look at some data prior to lot completion and have been very encouraged by the promising interim test results. As you know, we use MSTcad with customers to predict what kind of improvements they will see. Early indications are that the TCAD simulations, which showed enough potential to initiate customer wafer starts, are closely predicting the measured silicon improvements, and in many cases, the actual results are exceeding both our expectations and those of our customers. Results may vary when the final test data becomes available, so we must be patient, but those early results have folks very excited. Programs with all our licensees and JDA partners continue to make good progress, with the exception of AKM, which is still recovering from a fab fire.
As you can see from this chart, we now have 26 engagements with one new addition to the first phase. One customer has been in phase two longer than normal, which reflects an extended experiment they are conducting in that phase, different than those done by most customers. We believe that results from this effort will lead to a deeper engagement into licensing and production opportunities. There are two important factors determining how fast Atomera can make progress with new and existing customers. Our ability to meet face-to-face to gain trust and credibility, and then our customers' capacity to start R&D wafers in their fabs. For the last two years, we've been held back on both fronts. Today, we can travel freely in the U.S. and with only a few restrictions in Europe.
So far, travel in Asia has been slower to recover, but our first trips over there have gotten underway this quarter. Industry capacity constraints are starting to soften, which is a positive for Atomera, but this trend is not uniform. While memory manufacturers and mature nodes at IDMs and foundries are starting to loosen up, manufacturers of the most advanced nodes are still highly impacted, so R&D starts in that area are still hard to come by. Our goal is to take advantage of lower travel restrictions to get MST wafers started in as many customer fabs as possible and to build on the momentum we experienced in the first half of this year.
We are seeing clear signs of interest in our technology across certain segments of the industry, displaying the domino effect I've spoken about in the past. Engineers are more comfortable using a novel technology if it's being used by others, and we believe this is being initiated because of industry chatter even before anyone has gotten into production. In particular, our work on RFSOI, a technology which is critically important to the 5G cellular market, is something which has interest across the sector because of its ability to solve a difficult industry problem. 5G cellular devices can have up to 10 times the content of RF components as older 4G devices. At the same time, we hear consistent feedback from customers that continued improvement in key RF devices such as switches and LNAs, are increasingly hard to come by with internal process tweaks.
Accordingly, the payoff to customers who can implement industry leading RF device performance should be very significant. The interest from our customers in using MST to deliver such improvements is very exciting. Work with multiple customers is also underway with MST-SP for power devices at 5V and above. This is an area that will exhibit continuous growth over the next decade due to the emphasis on battery operation and electric cars, and we believe Atomera will benefit from this trend. Now I'd like to take a few minutes to explain a quite important new discovery we've made on MST for advanced nodes. Atomera's technology is remarkable in the number of different benefits it can bring to semiconductor devices, and it does so through several mechanisms, including, importantly, enhanced electron mobility.
While the electron mobility improvements have been confirmed for many years, the underlying physics behind how MST delivers those enhancements have not been fully understood. In silicon devices, electron mobility can be impeded through three different types of electron scattering, coulombic, phonon, and surface roughness scattering. Until recently, our assumption was that at very advanced nodes, MST primarily improved phonon scattering, leading to about a 5% overall improvement in electron mobility, which is good, but may not drive standalone adoption. Recently, we completed some characterization of MST devices at temperatures near absolute zero, which gave us a unique ability to separate out MST's impact on each scattering component. To our surprise and delight, it showed that MST enhanced electron mobility related to surface roughness scattering by over 50%, which is a massive improvement and something particularly important in the advanced nodes.
Okay, this is just one factor in a complicated transistor design, but the net result is that this new ability for MST to smooth the surface can bring greater than 15% electron mobility improvement to the most advanced semiconductor processes. As the process node gets smaller, the MST benefit gets larger, which means that MST, for only a modest incremental cost, could deliver a full node of performance improvement. Now, that is something that would be very compelling to designers working on the latest 2nm or 3nm gate-all-around transistors. Because this result is so new, a full peer-reviewed journal article will not be available for some time. But today we did post a white paper describing the phenomenon in much more detail on our website, and this will be used to start discussions with our advanced node partners.
Although a bit technical for most investors, it does provide an excellent background on our technology and explains the significant financial benefit for customers on advanced nodes. When a breakthrough in MST like this one is achieved, our team then goes to work documenting how it can be used in different applications. This is the valuable IP that forms the underpinning of Atomera's business model. I'm pleased to report that as of the end of Q2, we have reached 318 patents granted and pending, with particularly strong growth in our foreign patent portfolio. As the industry has come to understand the benefits of MST and how they might use it in their own future designs, it is becoming increasingly common for them to refer to our technology in their own patents.
This is a positive development for Atomera, as it not only validates MST's innovative value to the industry, but it also opens another path of dialogue for us and the customer. Last week, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion package that includes $50 billion in funding to develop and enhance domestic semiconductor manufacturing capability. Among the many reasons for passing this legislation is to make U.S. companies better at implementing the most advanced technology nodes we've just been talking about. $2 billion of the act was specifically allocated to improving legacy chip production, which is one of the key areas where MST provides a rare and much needed boost to the industry.
Atomera will be working with CHIPS Act administrators and our U.S. legacy fab partners to educate them on how our technology can improve existing fab capacity, throughput, and performance while improving their profitability. MST can enable those legacy fabs to meet the goals of this new legislation now, not sometime in the future. We believe CHIPS Act funding can help subsidize the cost of MST implementation at our fab partners. The CHIPS Act also initiates or strengthens several R&D initiatives important to Atomera, including the National Semiconductor Technology Center and our academic partners' efforts. Government advocacy for improving the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing prowess is another tailwind in conjunction with strong industry CapEx growth plans that will be a positive for Atomera as they both provide important catalysts for adoption of our technology. The CHIPS Act has capped off three months of intensive customer and R&D progress.
The many wafer runs we have underway are progressing well, and preliminary results look very promising. Our team is on the road, and new customer activity is starting to pick up. Inside the company, we are meeting milestones, generating new and innovative IP, and strengthening our team. I think we've accomplished a lot this year, but I also believe that the second half of 2022 will outshine the first because of the momentum we are carrying today and the customer opportunities in front of us. Next, let's have Frank review our financials.
Thank you, Scott. At the close of the market today, we issued a press release announcing our results for the second quarter of 2022, and this slide shows our summary financials. Our GAAP net loss for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was $4.5 million, or $0.20 per share, compared to a net loss of $3.7 million, or $0.17 per share in the second quarter of 2021. In Q1 of this year, our GAAP net loss was $4.1 million or $0.18 per share. The sequentially higher net loss in Q2 2022 over Q1 was mainly due to the fact that we recognized revenue in Q1 of $375,000, but we did not recognize any revenue in Q2. At the same time, our operating expenses increased only slightly over Q1.
GAAP operating expenses in Q2 were $4.4 million compared to $3.7 million in Q2 of 2021, and $4.3 million in Q1 of this year. non-GAAP net loss for the second quarter of 2022 was $3.5 million, compared to losses of $3.3 million in Q1 and $2.9 million in Q2 of 2021. non-GAAP operating expenses last quarter were $3.6 million, which was unchanged sequentially over Q1 and compares to $2.9 million of non-GAAP operating expense in Q2 of 2021. The increase in non-GAAP operating expenses in Q2 this year versus the same period last year was $697 thousand.
This increase primarily reflects a $336,000 increase in R&D expense due to our 300mm tool lease, which commenced in August 2021, as well as increases of $170,000 in sales and marketing and $190,000 in G&A expenses. Our cash balance at June 30, 2022 was $21.8 million, compared to $24.5 million at the end of Q1. We commenced our at-the-market or ATM equity program on May 31, 2022, and during the second quarter, we sold 31,652 shares at an average price per share of approximately $11.24, resulting in net proceeds of approximately $345,000 after sales commission.
I'd like to point out that on our cash flow statement, Q2 ATM proceeds are listed as $185,000 in cash from financing activities because all expenses related to the initial setup of the ATM are netted against the proceeds in that period, as required by GAAP accounting rules. Similar levels of ATM related expenses will not recur in future periods. As of June 30, 2022, we had 23.5 million shares outstanding. As Scott mentioned in his remarks, we've made good progress with our JDA customers and other engagements. At this time, we're not yet in a position to predict when we may reach revenue generating milestones under our second JDA, which we announced last quarter.
We're very happy that preliminary results are promising, and they've increased our confidence that this JDA will result in us reaching paid licensing phases and recognizing revenue. Since we cannot yet predict this timing, our guide for Q3 revenue is zero. Consistent with our past practice, we're not providing revenue guidance beyond the current quarter. On the last update and call in May, I guided that full year non-GAAP operating expenses for 2022 would be in the range of $15.25-$15.75 million. I'm happy to announce we've added two new engineering headcount in July, and we're catching up on our plans to grow our team.
As a result of these hiring delays, our expenses are trending lower than we originally planned, and I'm reducing the full-year guidance for non-GAAP operating expenses to a range between $14.75 million and $15.25 million. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Scott for a few summary remarks before we open the call up for questions. Scott?
Thanks, Frank. The past three months have been very positive for Atomera, with solid progress on the customer front and breakthroughs coming in R&D. Our team is growing, and the pace of innovation is exceptional. With in-person customer visits back underway, we expect to improve on the results we have delivered in the first half of the year, and our team is hard at work making that happen. The macro trends in the industry, including strong CapEx in combination with the new CHIPS and Science Act, continue to provide a very favorable environment for MST adoption. We definitely believe we'll be reporting more good news soon, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the future. Mike, we can take questions now.
All right. Thank you, Scott. If you wish to ask a question, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of the Zoom window, then feel free to type in your question, and I will do my best to aggregate the incoming queries and relay them to management. Alternatively, you can click the Raise Hand button, and we may call on you to ask your question live. Right now, our first question comes from Richard Shannon of Craig-Hallum. Richard, if you would kindly unmute and turn on your camera, you may begin.
Great. Thanks, Mike. Can you hear and see me?
Yes, we can.
Excellent. Thanks, Scott and Frank, for having me on here. A lot of interesting commentary from the call. In no particular order here, one thing I did wanna get was an update on the JDA contracts. Frank gave us a brief comment about not sure when the second JDA will necessarily get some revenues here, but maybe you can talk about the progress here. I guess my two specific questions here are. With the first JDA, I think you're just working with a single business unit after having transitioned out of work with the central engineering organization, wondering if any progress there or multiple business units. I guess with the second JDA here, it sounds like you've made some progress overall here.
Maybe you can just kinda add a little bit more color as to what progress you have made with the second one.
Yeah. Let me, I'll start with the second one. You know, I think we mentioned when we originally talked about the JDA, that we would be working with a, you know, kind of a lead business unit that was gonna be pushing to move very quickly and we have been pleased at the pace that things have been going. You know, the industry is still somewhat impacted, so if we had more capacity available, I think we would've expected to move even faster. Good progress so far. As I said in my commentary, we haven't gotten the final results, so we don't really have a good insight into what will happen next.
Sorry, I'm getting some echo here. We got most of the legal work done before we signed that JDA, and so we believe that we will move pretty quickly once we go from here. On the first JDA, I can't give a lot of details about where we are with specific business units until they reach a milestone that we can announce something with them. I can tell you that we continue to work with that first JDA customer pretty intensively, and we're hopeful that we'll be able to get to a point where we can make some announcements of it later this year.
I can't really give much more insight than that.
Okay. Fair enough, Scott. Thanks for that. In the early part of your prepared remarks, Scott, you talked about some data from recent wafer runs that haven't been quite completed here.
Right.
I guess one specific, you know, lead-in question to that topic here is I don't think you mentioned, you characterizing the technology or node that you were working on and whether this was on Atomera or customer infrastructure?
Yeah, I didn't talk about that, but generally speaking, I'd say it's almost always on customer infrastructure. We can do kind of phase two type of setup and material characterization work with our customer on our equipment. If we're doing phase three, it really has to be on their equipment in their fab. Yeah, that's really where it's been underway.
Understood. Okay. How long before you get the full data and can fully characterize what that really means here?
Yeah, it's you know I don't wanna talk about specific schedules. I'd say we're getting close. I'd expect to learn a lot more this quarter. It might go out into Q4. By the way, we're not just talking about one wafer run. We have a number of different wafer runs with different customers, and so I expect that we'll be seeing, getting some data out this quarter and some of it will be coming later on, and hopefully that will turn into more wafer runs from there, so.
Okay. Okay, fair enough. In terms of the discussion that you had on the advanced nodes and the white paper that came out, I brought it up, but I probably read about two sentences before the call started here. This sounds like it's fairly early stage in terms of engagement here. Is that a fair characterization of what's going on, or is it more advanced than what, I guess, my interpretation?
I would say that the testing work, the R&D work is pretty advanced. You know, we've gotten a lot of data, and I think we have enough. You know, make these type of assertions, which we're not making. You know, we don't just make them flippantly. They're based on a lot of simulations and so forth. But we don't have any ability to actually run wafers in the most advanced nodes to run experiments. We have to work with customers for that. Yeah, I would say it's quite early in our engagements with customers on this. Now, we have been talking to customers in the advanced nodes about our technology because it can be used in many ways. But this is a new phenomenon that we didn't know about before that we think will be very interesting to people.
Okay. All right. That's helpful. In the past few quarters, and I know for just reviewing the transcript from last quarter, you talked about this specifically in terms of RF SOI. I think the comments you made on today's call was that, and if I caught this incorrectly, please correct me, but it sounds like you're have nearly, you know, full engagement across the industry for RF SOI. Is that fair? Then also, do you still see that as a good candidate for the technology that takes you know, first across the finish line to volume production?
Yeah. I don't know if I would say across the entire industry, but across a lot of the industry, absolutely. Word is out on our technology for RF SOI, and we're solving a problem that people have been struggling with for years. Everybody's trying to figure out. That is a very, very fast growing market, a lot of innovation happening, and everybody's trying to figure out how to get the next leg up. What we're talking about is a real potential, game winner there. Your second question about whether it would be the first to production. You know, I've always said that we have been working on our power technology longer than the RF technology. Some of our customers that are doing power work are longer in the tooth, but we'll see.
I don't wanna make a prediction, but I'd say it would probably be one of those two that might be the earliest to production.
Okay. That's fair. Perhaps as my last question here, I'll think through this as I'm hearing your answer here, but one of your more interesting comments was that you think a lot of the interest coming into Atomera here recently is coming from industry chatter. I assume this is more kind of anecdotal, but maybe you could just share why you said that, what you're hearing and you know, kind of the benefit that you're receiving from that?
Yeah. Well, you know, it's inevitable that we've been working in the industry for a while. If you're working at one customer and you're bringing them a big potential solution for a problem, there's gonna be a number of engineers in that company that know about it. They might change companies, they might have friends, they might go to trade shows, they might actually see our presentation to start just chatting among them in a specialty that certain engineers will have chat rooms and things set up around. We are seeing the people from companies that are kind of reaching out to us unexpectedly because they heard from some other sources. And then, and hopefully that will lead us to some new engagements and some good opportunities.
That's the type of thing that we expected to really happen once we got into volume production because, you know, customers are really risk averse, but we're starting to see it happen just based on chatter.
Okay. Interesting comments. You know, I think that might be it for me. I'll jump out of line, maybe re-enter here, but congratulations, guys, on what sounds like some great progress, and keep up the good work. That's all for me.
Thanks, Richard.
All right. Thanks, Richard. Cody Acree from Benchmark has his hand raised. Cody, yeah, feel free to go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks, Mike. I guess maybe if we can start with Scott just on the capacity comments that you made for your 200mm and 300mm infrastructure, how is that running? I guess you talked about utilization being a key driver to engagement.
Mm-hmm.
Are you still running available capacity or are you at limitations now?
Yeah, I mean, I would say in general, I'm speaking more about our customer's capacity than our capacity. To the extent that they wanna run wafers with us, we find a way to make that happen with our infrastructure of EPI tools that we have in our two different EPI facilities. But as I was saying on the call, you know, if our customer's fab is completely full, it's very hard for them to run any R&D wafers. We're starting to see that loosen, but more so in the older nodes and the legacy nodes and also in the memory area. Obviously, there's you know, there's a well-documented kind of slowdown in memory area.
For the most advanced nodes, they're still really, really full, and it's hard to make as fast a progress as we would like with them.
You mentioned that you could only really run wafer characterization through phase two.
Phase two, actually, it's a good question 'cause I mentioned a customer that is in phase two and has been there for a while. Typically, our definition of phase two, a customer sends us their wafers, we deposit MST on there, and then both we and the customer look at how MST physically integrates onto their wafer. In most cases, this is a step that only takes a month, maybe a month and a half. You deposit some, make a few tweaks, and then it works fine, and you move forward with moving into phase three and running wafers. Some customers wanna do much more complicated structures or patterns on their wafers, and they wanna see how the MST deposits there.
In some cases, we need to do work with them to get it to turn out to work exactly the way that they would like it to. Yeah, typically, characterization of the MST itself is done in phase two. From there, we know that we're gonna have a good deposition on our phase three runs.
Your comments on MSTcad, how important is this progress that you called it out in the press release, and that, are you seeing more recent improvements in the characterization of your results, or is this something that's been consistent, and you just called it out here, on a specific program?
Yeah. You know, it's the type of thing that we announced our first major release of MSTcad , I think, a year and a half ago. But it's been continuously improved. You know, some people in the industry can be skeptical of the results that you get on TCAD. It's such a complicated process that typically process engineers that work in the factories, they say, "Let me just run wafers and look at the results," 'cause TCAD can be all over the place. Am I telling you I'm gonna get a big improvement, and then when I run the wafers, I get you know a reduction instead.
What we have been seeing is that our TCAD that we've been working on so hard is actually validating the improvement that we're showing beforehand. That's always what you need to build credibility in your simulation tools. That's been really gratifying to see because we can do a quick simulation with a customer before they run any wafers and show them what kind of benefits they can get. Then if we can say, "Okay, this works the last 10 times we've tried it, and so this is a very accurate depiction," that's very helpful.
Are you getting them to, I guess, accept your results as validation, or are they still at a stage where they're gonna need their own internal wafers to check your results?
I think it's gonna always be like a precursor to real wafers being run. You know, when you run wafers, you typically try a lot of experiments. If you don't believe the simulation, you could try 1,000 experiments and still miss what you're trying to do because you need to do 2,000, right? If you use TCAD, it can help to narrow that down, so you need a lot fewer experiments to actually see the result that you're going after. Of course, to believe that can narrow down your set of experiments, you need to have faith in the TCAD results themselves.
Yeah. I mean, if I could jump in on that 'cause I've sort of observed the dynamic, you know, that we've seen recently and that we talked about in the release and on the call about TCAD. You may have a situation where a customer is feeling marginal about, you know, the cost benefit of doing another set of wafers, particularly recent times when capacity is tight, and it's difficult to justify R&D runs. As they see that the TCAD predictions are actually being validated in the experiments they do run, then it helps to build more trust in our models.
You know, if there's someone who needs to be convinced or they're, you know, they want sort of further evidence to continue to run experiments in a particular direction, I think it's helped us to gain a lot more credibility with customers around, you know, trying other experiments with MST than they would have previously. I think, you know, they'll always wanna see it validated in silicon, but that dynamic, you know, helps to, you know, helps our engagement with customers a lot. We've seen that in, you know, in playing out in real life recently.
Thanks, Frank. Lastly for you, I guess, just with the CHIPS Act, with there being a sizable portion toward R&D and legacy development, you mentioned in the remarks about endorsement or a funding to your customers to reimburse to cover their implementation costs. But is there any opportunity in the CHIPS Act that you understand that would be a direct beneficiary to you?
I think that it can. I mean, the allocation of a certain amount specifically called out for what they call sort of mature technology nodes in the CHIPS Act can be interesting. These tend to be ones where if you can find an application that addresses an industry that's of great kind of concern to the domestic economy, like automotive products, which many of them are legacy technologies. I think that we could do that. You know, we're still relatively small, so we're not of a scale where we engage in directly lobbying politicians. From my standpoint, the work for us begins more now in talking to folks about where
As you know, as I understand the process, you get into not just the approval of the funds, but now the appropriations bills to allocate that into specific programs. I think that that's where we could be a direct beneficiary. I think that we're gonna be only ramping up our, you know, our efforts there, even more.
Great. Thank you. Thanks, Frank. Thanks, Scott.
All right.
Thanks, Cody. I don't see any raised hands at this point in time, but we do have a number of questions that came in on the Q&A chat. The first one is just basically a review of what the phases mean. Maybe, Scott, if you could review what the phases are for that we display in our charts.
Absolutely. Yeah, I do have. We do have formal definitions, but, let me just talk them through. Planning. Planning is not like the big opening on a customer funnel that you would think of in a traditional sales funnel. Planning is once we have worked with a customer long enough that they have, number one, they've signed an NDA with us, meaning that they're gonna start telling us about their manufacturing process. Believe it or not, these customers are very hard to get an NDA done with because they're very protective of that technology. Number two, they have to be actively planning on doing a wafer run with us. They're in engineering discussions between their team and our team. In many cases, in phase one, they've started running TCAD with us. There's a lot of work going on there.
They're not just any customer we've spoken about on the street. Phase two is when they've actually started wafers in their fab to send to us, and then we do our first deposition of MST on wafers, and then they characterize that, like through physical characterization and, not so much electrical characterization, but more physical characterization. Generally, phase two setup is pretty short, three months or so, but in some cases they can do much longer experiments. Phase three is the big, unpredictable phase where a customer starts wafers. They typically send them to us, and we do the MST deposition on those wafers, and then we send them back to them, and they build the wafers to the end of the line, and then they can test to see what impact MST had.
It's very typical for customers to do many of those wafer runs. Once they've done enough wafer runs, they feel comfortable, they move to phase four, which is where we give them a manufacturing license at that point, so they can get our secret sauce to installing MST onto their fab tool in their fab. They can do the deposition themselves. They start the wafers, and then they just run it right through the MST deposition in their factory, and they can continue their development until they're ready to go into qualification. Qualification is when a customer has decided to go to production, and so they're setting up their production line, and they need to make sure that they can manufacture these wafers very uniformly.
Qualification is a standard process that everyone in the semiconductor industry uses. It takes about six-nine months, and at the end of the qualification phase, you're in production. That's the definition of our phases.
All right, Scott. Thanks. I'm gonna combine a couple questions here. The first one is, how many tools are at customer sites that can create the MST layers on wafers? And then also, you know, can existing tools be used with modifications, or will they need to go to order and install tools to go to production? And then there's another question in there is, will Applied Materials be selling EPI tools that already come with MST capabilities? So maybe, you know, can you address the number of customer sites that create MST and also talk about.
Yeah. Now let me take all them. First of all, we have one customer site with an EPI tool. One EPI tool at our first JDA customer has had MST installed on it. We have three more EPI tools. Or, just so there's no confusion, we have three more EPI chambers because we have one tool with two chambers, and that tool can do 200mm wafer and a 300mm wafer. We have another EPI tool that can do 200 millimeters. We have been working with Applied Materials and ASM on their EPI tools for more than a decade now.
If a customer called up Applied Materials and said, "Hey, we wanna buy a tool for Atomera to do MST deposition," Applied would say, "Okay, we understand what that is." It's one of their standard tools. It will have to get hooked up to different gas lines, but that's always the case when you set up an EPI tool. There's different gas configurations you can set it up for. They know all about ours. They've done safety checks to make sure there's no problems with multiple gases mixing together. They're fully prepared to do that. It is basically a standard setup of an EPI tool when someone orders it, and then we can help the customer do installation and set up MST.
It's a very straightforward process, and the same would be true for an ASM tool.
All right. Thank you, Scott. Had a question on the foundry license from Q1. Can you elaborate on what kind of progress has been made?
Sorry, the first JDA, second JDA?
Second JDA.
No, no.
Oh, I'm sorry.
The licensee.
Yeah. Foundry licensee that we announced in Q1. Thanks a lot. Yeah, they continued. They're running wafers. We, you know, it's another case of some wafers that are in the fab that we haven't gotten final results on. We have seen some preliminary results there as well, and they look promising as we mentioned in our remarks. They're going pretty well. I wish that they could run a little bit faster, and I think they do too, but it's again, although the capacity in the industry is starting to loosen up, it's still not loose enough that we can get super hot lots that go through very, very fast. We're waiting on results, but things are going well.
A corollary to that is, of the wafers you're running with or for customers, are they predominantly 200 millimeter or 300 millimeter wafers?
Yeah. I would say today they're predominantly 300 millimeter, but we do have a lot of 200 millimeter wafers. Just to clarify that a little bit more, in the semiconductor industry, if you're making a technology at smaller than a 130 nanometer node, you're probably using 300 millimeter wafers. If you're using a technology that's older than a 130 nanometers, you're probably using a 200 millimeter wafer. At a 130 nanometers, there's a mixture. A lot of our customers in power and in RF are using 200 millimeter. Some of our customers in power and RF are using 300 millimeter, and anybody that we work with on any more advanced node is always on a 300 millimeter wafer.
Okay. There's a follow-up to the number of fabs question, and that is the second JDA does not have their own EPI tool or do they?
Yeah. I can take that because it kind of dovetails also, you know, around revenue generating milestones. That customer does have EPI tools, but they have not taken a manufacturing license, which is what we charge customers for when we deliver the MST recipe for them to install in the tool. That would be an important milestone to reach. As we talked about, you know, with the first JDA, that was sort of the first revenue milestone when we delivered the MST recipe to them, and they installed it in the tool. Second JDA customer does have a tool to receive the recipe, and we are hopeful that they'll get to that milestone soon, and they'll be depositing MST in their own fab.
Okay. Just to recap, Scott, how long do wafer runs take?
Yeah. A typical wafer run where they're sending us wafers to do deposition takes around 9 months. The fastest we've ever done has been a 6-month run where everything went very, very fast on both sides. These days, with the capacity issues, we haven't seen a wafer run that quick in quite a while. Some of them can last longer, but it's fairly typical that it's about 9 months from starting the wafers until we get test results.
All right. Great. At this point, Scott, I'll turn the call to you for closing comments.
All right. Thanks a lot, Mike. I wanna thank everyone today for attending today's presentation. It was great to be able to share with you our recent momentum and to give you a feeling of the excitement we're experiencing inside Atomera. Please continue to look for our news, articles and blog posts to keep you up to date on our progress, which are available along with investor alerts on our website, atomera.com. We look forward to seeing some of you during our scheduled marketing activities, including the Oppenheimer Technology, Internet & Communications Conference and the Needham Virtual SemiCap and EDA Conference. Should you have additional questions, please contact Mike Bishop, who will be happy to follow up. Thank you again for your support, and we look forward to our next update call.
All right. Thank you, Scott. At this point, you may disconnect from the call.