Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Elizabeth Sun. I'm a senior associate here at Citi. I'm working with my analyst, Atif Malik, on semiconductor equipment stocks. And here now, I have FormFactor CEO, Mike Slessor, with me this afternoon for a fireside chat. And I guess I'll start with some questions first, and then I'll open up to the audience to see if there are any in the audience. So first, Mike, thanks for joining us today for our tech conference.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks. Maybe you can start with a very high-level introduction of what FormFactor do, for those who are not that familiar with the company, and what's new in the past, like, six to 12 months.
Sure. So let's high-level view of FormFactor from our investor presentation, which is on our website. FormFactor, a leader in semiconductor and broader optoelectronics test and measurement. Trailing twelve-month revenue's a little under $700 million, and that business splits primarily into two reportable segments. The first, the business for which FormFactor is probably best known, something called a probe card. This is the consumable that serves as the interface built by automated test equipment, built by people like Advantest and Teradyne, and our customers' chips on the wafer. So, large customers, 10% customers recently have been people you see on the lower right here, like Intel, TSMC, Micron, SK hynix , and Samsung, essentially leaders in the semiconductor industry. And for some of our foundry customers, they're fabless customers as well, are our direct and indirect customers.
Probe cards comprise about 70%-80% of our business, really geared towards enabling customers to ramp new designs on advanced technology nodes and achieve high yields so that they can meet their shipment targets. The balance of the business is the other segment that we report called engineering systems. And these are mostly capital equipment used very early in our customers' product development cycles. Again, similar customer makeup, similar customer composition, but instead of being used in production, these are used in early development as customers characterize devices broadly from brand-new transistor structures to some of the qubit structures for quantum computing. We've recently seen some great growth in this business from silicon photonics and co-packaged optics , so really enabling our customers' next generation of development in the systems business.
We're a little over 2000 people worldwide, and as most leaders in this industry, we do have a global footprint arrayed throughout the world in supporting these businesses and our customers. I think I went through, touched on some of this. The leftmost picture you see there is a probe card, and a probe card to test DRAM devices. In that business, essentially, we make contact with every chip on the customer wafer, approximately 150,000 individual MEMS-fabricated probes, all making precise contact with various points on the wafer and testing all of those chips at once. Some of the drivers that you've seen in our business are really at work even here today, during a pretty significant semiconductor industry downturn.
Advanced packaging is a very exciting opportunity for us, and that, you know, may be a little bit confusing in that we're a test provider, so why would advanced packaging be a driver for us? It turns out that changes and drives up both the complexity of test and the intensity of test. So customers, when they break a chip into chiplets using these advanced packaging processes, need to test each of those chiplets much more comprehensively than they do the composite chip. So that extends lead times, extends test times, leading to higher test intensity, higher spend on probe cards, but it also raises the technical requirements for the probe card. Higher speeds, higher temperatures, different kind of voltage and current relationships, so really raises the bar on the technical requirements for the probe card.
That's one of the reasons, as we see in this middle bar, that we really take a significant amount of revenue and reinvest it in R&D. Again, paired with these leading customers, we're really pointing that R&D budget and our priorities at solving some of their next-generation challenges, like higher speeds and higher temperatures associated with testing. As we've gone through the downturn, we've maintained non-GAAP and, in most cases, GAAP profitability, so got a structural model. Even though we're fairly heavily vertically integrated, we've managed to adjust our cost structure and continue to generate cash as we've gone through the downturn. And, you know, are a product and want to continue to be active in mergers and acquisitions.
Yes, we want to organically execute on the businesses we lead and serve today, but we also believe that M&A is a very important part of the broader diversification and growth of the company. Again, around the themes of test and measurement, metrology and inspection, but M&A has been a part of our history, and I think hopefully will continue to be, a part of the company's future. So maybe with that, we'll stop there and see what questions Elizabeth has.
Yep. Thanks. Thanks for the introduction, and I really like you highlighted the opportunities in advanced packaging, so we can probably get back here a little bit later on.
Okay.
To dive a little bit deeper. So, let's start with some broad market questions. So how do you look at underlying market growth and, you know, how FormFactor is positioned, right now? I mean, and also, like, if you could provide some sense of, like, how much of your business is unit driven versus, you know, like, CapEx driven.
Yeah. Well, I think there's different demand drivers in our different businesses. If I start with the probe card business, one of the important things to understand about this business is it really is driven by customers releasing and ramping new designs in volume. So there's an element of new design release, but there's a number of units they're gonna produce on that new design as well, 'cause that drives the number of test cells and probe cards that they're going to need. So it's a bit of a hybrid demand driver of new designs and the number of units on that design. As a consequence, you can often see in our results and our competitors' results and the overall probe card industry a decoupling from WFE, a decoupling from industry capital expenditures. And in some sense, we've been seeing that now.
You know, we'll come back, I think, to some of the segments, but we saw, going from Q1 to Q2 of this year, an approximately 50% increase in DRAM probe card revenues amidst one of the grimmest DRAM overall market situations we've seen in a long time. And the reason for that is customers releasing and ramping new designs in volume for a memory technology called HBM, or High Bandwidth Memory. This is enabling a lot of the compute infrastructure associated with generative artificial intelligence, and at the risk of jumping on that bandwagon, it, it is a significant driver of our DRAM business and gives you some sense of how we're a little bit different than CapEx trends in the industry. To see a DRAM business increase by 50% in the middle of this year, I think, is pretty unusual.
Different drivers, across the systems business, that's more driven by customer R&D spending, as you might imagine. And again, we're seeing some nice growth at present associated with silicon photonics, co-packaged optics, some of these things that are just coming into initial pilot production. So the demand drivers there, again, are gonna be different than WFE and CapEx, more driven by customer innovation and R&D investment.
Okay. That's encouraging to, to hear, even, especially in this down WFE downturn. So you just touched base on DRAM. You said DRAM in the Q2 was, like, 50% growth and driven by HBM and DDR5. So how should we think about DRAM growth going forward, like, in the second half of the year or, like, even going into next year?
Yeah. We do expect, and this was, if you parse through our Q3 outlook that we gave in the August earnings call, we do expect DRAM demand to stay relatively stable at the levels of the Q2 , as we come through the Q3 here. We haven't set expectations or given an outlook for the Q4 , primarily because, one of the interesting things about the probe card business is you operate on very short lead times. Typical lead times are well within a quarter, think of an average of being 6, 7, or 8 weeks, primarily because, you're essentially providing this device-specific consumable just in time for customers to test the wafers, and so your lead times are indexed very closely to wafer lead times in the fab.
That comes with the challenge, obviously, a fairly limited backlog visibility, so we tend to only provide an outlook for the current quarter. But as Elizabeth notes, we did, we did indicate that, we expected DRAM to remain at these surprisingly strong levels through the middle part of the year here into the Q3 , again, primarily driven by HBM and our strong competitive advantage in that area.
Okay. Sounds great. You said lead time is very short in this DRAM. Is that the same, about the same level for the corporate average, for the foundry logic as well?
Yeah. I think probe cards in general is a business where customers really... Yes, they have plans on what wafers they're gonna start, and therefore, what probe cards they're gonna need, but they really don't trigger the buy signal and the purchase order to us until either the wafers start or very close to the wafer starting in the fab. And for those of you who follow the industry closely, that ends up being, not coincidentally, 6, 7, or 8 weeks for the wafers to transit through the fab. So we and our competitors in the overall probe card industry have basically built operational strategies and architectures that allow us to deliver on those lead times and give ourselves, the customers, the flexibility to adapt their tooling buy plans, so that, again, the probe cards are there just in time.
It does create quite a burden on-
Yeah
having very high incoming quality and making sure you're delivering on time and delivering something that works at the right time.
Yeah.
But I think the industry, us and our competitors, have done a good job of improving and evolving over the years to drive on that very efficient just-in-time model. But think of probe cards very much as being indexed to the cycle time of wafers going through the fab.
Mm-hmm. Okay, that makes sense. And also, we talked about DRAM, and then I wanna move on to foundry and logic. I think you guided, next quarter gonna be, like, September quarter, quarter gonna be higher, quarter over quarter. So is it mostly driven by, I guess, it's mostly driven by trailing edge versus, like, leading edge, because everyone's talking about leading edge, like, weakness? Or is it, and is that, like, a lot of driven by advanced packaging?
Yeah. So one of the other important things to understand about FormFactor in the advanced probe card business in general, is it's very heavily leveraged towards the leading edge. Because essentially, what you're doing is helping customers screen out die that are essentially bad at the end of the wafer fab and are not gonna end up as good at the end of the packaging process. You're helping customers screen those out, and you can imagine that yields at advanced nodes are not that high.
Mm-hmm.
And so the value of doing wafer tests with a probe card is much, much higher for an advanced node and advanced packaging, where the packaging costs are relatively high, than it is for trailing edge nodes. The flip side of that is, you know, where the capital equipment providers, suppliers have had some very strong results from trailing edge nodes, primarily out of China. We really haven't seen that. You know, FormFactor, again, you can think of as being leveraged primarily to the leading edge, primarily to advanced nodes, without a lot of trailing edge exposure. So as we come through the middle part of the year, and we did sequentially guide the foundry and logic business up, a lot of that's just puts and takes between the quarter.
Okay.
You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't read anything sort of structural. We're certainly not calling, you know, the next upturn here at this point. I think we've been relatively consistent as we've gone through 2023, that we're, you know, pleased to see demand levels stabilizing at these reduced levels. For us, somewhere around $160 million-$165 million a quarter. But we're certainly not calling the next upturn here with a slight sequential increase in guidance.
Yeah, that's fair. And, thinking of the advanced packaging, how much share gains or, or like, additional, like, content, is there, is there for, like, probe cards or in general for FormFactor?
Yeah. So advanced packaging is interesting for us. And because, you know, go back to why, fundamentally, customers do wafer tests. They're trying to screen out bad die from the downstream processes. And in advanced packaging, this is an even more important step to do because you can imagine that if you're assembling an advanced package with four or five different chiplets in it, at relatively low yields, any one of those four or five chiplets could end up killing the other four or five, the other three or four chiplets in the package. You know, HBM is a great example of this. HBM is, you know, these high-speed memories built by stacking a set of DRAM die on top of each other, sometimes eight high, sometimes 12 high, even 16 die high.
You can imagine, in assembling that stack, our customers want to make sure that each of those die is good, especially as they get to the top levels of that stack, before committing the next die to that stack. That's raising what we call test intensity. Essentially, the amount of time it tests, test each of these chiplets, and therefore, the number of testers and probe cards required to test each of them. A general rule of thumb, although there are differences, as with any rule of thumb, specific differences, you know, advanced packaging on a like-for-like basis, you tend to see about a 20% higher test intensity.
One of the proof points of that is if you look at industry spending on advanced probe cards over the past decade or so, 10 years ago, probe cards were about 0.35% of overall semiconductor revenues. Over the past several years, that's moved up to as high as 0.45% of semiconductor revenues, and that's a good indicator of the increase in test intensity associated with trends like advanced packaging in the industry.
Got it. Another key technology transition is Gate-All-Around, so I want to touch base on that, make sure we touch base on that. So what are the opportunities there for probe cards in the Gate-All-Around transition, and will, like, FormFactor gain share through this transition?
Yeah.
When do you think that's gonna, like, start to ramp up?
Yeah. Well, although, you know, Gate-All-Around a very exciting front-end innovation for the industry, honestly, I don't think it's gonna have a really big impact on FormFactor. As excited as we are about advanced packaging, you know, I think we're probably, you know, new nodes are nice, so the transition from 5 nanometer to 3 nanometer is good just because it drives new designs. But in and of itself, the transition from FinFET to Gate-All-Around, I would not expect to have a big impact. Primarily because, you know, you'll see a little bit of impact associated with customers trying to resolve the new yield loss mechanisms associated with Gate-All-Around.
So that'll drive a short-term bump up in test intensity, but I don't think there's really anything structural there that they won't be able to figure out over a relatively short amount of time as they drive up a yield learning curve.
Just like at the beginning of this transition.
Yeah, just like any node transition-
Okay
... I think. So where we're really excited about advanced packaging, and, you know, that's one of the areas where we think we have a lot of exposure to the industry and are continuing to drive additional exposure for FormFactor. I think Gate-All-Around is probably business as usual for us.
Okay. All right, that makes sense. And, I want to ask about the end market exposure. So could you give us some sense of your end market exposure among, you know, PCs, smartphones, like, all those servers? I know you guys talk about, like, one third to memory and two thirds non-memory, and about within that two thirds, like, how is that?
Yeah. So if you think about those end markets, you know, in the probe card business, you know, the exposure is quite heavy towards high unit volume, consumer type applications. So client PC, mobile handsets are definite big demand drivers for us. Now, right now, those markets are fairly weak.
Yeah.
They're, you know, you hear from our customers, anybody exposed to those is working their way through inventory corrections, you know, pretty tepid demand compared to where it was certainly in 2021 and into 2022. That has a consequence on our business as well. If I back you up to the first half of 2022, you know, we were operating at levels near our target model, $850 million of annualized revenue, 47% gross margin, and $2 of non-GAAP earnings per share. We're well off of that as we go through the current downturn. Primarily, you know, that's due to the outsized exposure that a company like us, that's unit driven, design driven, is gonna have to things like mobile handsets and client PC.
Automotive, some exposure, but again, go back to our comment about advanced node, leading-edge nodes versus trailing-edge nodes. A lot of automotive chips are built on trailing-edge nodes, and so we're not gonna have a lot of inherent exposure there. There are counter examples for high-performance microcontrollers, where we do have some nice recurring business. But, you know, really, the leverage at present is primarily geared towards advanced nodes and high unit volume, consumer-driven applications like client PC and mobile.
Yeah, that's really helpful. I wanna switch gear a little bit to systems. It has been holding up really well in the, in this year. It's actually during this down cycle, and I think right now it's about 25% of your total revenue. So I think that was kind of your target model range of 25%, systems. I wanna ask about, is that going to do you expect this mix to hold up, maybe, or maybe, like, shift a little bit as, you know, market recovers a little bit? And like, also, like, how should we think about your trajectory moving towards a target model when you achieve your target revenue?
Right. Right. So yeah, the systems business, we spend a lot of time here on probe cards, but the systems business is a very important part of the overall strategy, both from a technology engagement standpoint with our customers, as I said, working with them in early development on next generation devices like co-packaged optics and quantum computers. But it's also a nice financial contributor. As Elizabeth notes, we've been operating essentially at record levels at about $40 million a quarter. Good gross margins in this business, in the neighborhood of 50%, so above what we've been delivering as a corporate average.
I think as we continue to move forward, we're gonna look for organic growth in that business, but as we progress back towards the $200+ million quarterly levels, revenue associated with the target model, the growth is really gonna come from the probe card business.
Okay.
And I think primarily from foundry and logic. If you think about where the growth in advanced packaging is, where a lot of the innovation is in the industry, it is in the foundry and logic space, and we expect to be able to participate in that and have that drive the primary delta in growth from where we are today-
Okay.
- back up to target model levels.
Okay. All right, that makes sense. And what about the U.S.-China restrictions, does that have any impact on FormFactor, and like, how do you compete with, you know, like local, like domestic, or like non-U.S.,
Yeah.
- competitors?
Yeah. So the export controls associated with semiconductor tooling and consumables and equipment into China for advanced nodes have had a relatively large impact on FormFactor. Again, not too surprising, given the advanced node exposure that we have and the bias of the export controls restricting advanced node tooling and technologies. If you look at backing up a year and a half ago, we were doing something like $50 million into the region. And you can go back and look at our disclosures. We do report overall revenue into China. The important thing to recognize about that is it really is split into two very distinct components. One is revenue shipped to domestic China customers. The other is revenue shipped to the multinationals that operate in the region, some of our 10% customers.
Those have very different risk profiles. The domestic China revenue, as you might imagine, both as a direct result of the export controls and the domestic China customers' legitimate and rational response to those export controls, they've tried to work FormFactor out of their supply chain. Interestingly, they've tried to work most foreign suppliers out of their supply chain and tried to work mostly local options. Now, that comes at a cost, right? Yields aren't as high.
Yeah.
The technology's not as good. The cost of test is higher, but nonetheless, they are able to build and test chips.
Yeah.
We've been, I think, fairly transparent, but probably relatively pessimistic compared to the rest of the industry, that we expect our domestic China revenue to essentially go to zero in some time frame here over the next year, year and a half, maybe 2 years. There doesn't appear to be any reversal in these export controls. Present day headlines may be accepted, but I think there's gonna be continued headwinds in an advanced node technology provider like FormFactor, supplying into the region, and the demand those customers will have for a U.S. supplier like us.
Got it. Yeah, go ahead. So, so long way.
Okay. So for the last, you know, ever since you reported Q2 in the early August, right? So there seems to be a lot of, you know, changes specific for HBM, as you probably heard. There's order rates by like Samsung, SK hynix and Micron, and there's, you know, tons of, you know, investment out there. And, I'm just wondering, 'cause, your Q3 , you know, guidance seems to be based on the, you know, both from the FormFactor side, based on the, you know, CFO commentary. But, is there any, like, upside potential from HBM, given that, there's a huge $2 billion investment out there from the, from your partners?
Yeah, I think so. I don't know whether people on the webcast could hear, so I'll basically paraphrase the question. And it was essentially, is there any upside associated with HBM here in the Q3 compared to the guidance we gave back at the start of August? You know, we have not revised guidance upwards, and primarily the incremental growth going from Q2 to Q3, Elizabeth noted earlier, was primarily associated with foundry and logic. Anytime you have these sort of rapid ramps, you can see investment in advance of our customers producing chips.
So a lot of the headlines you're seeing now associated with HBM, FormFactor delivered some of those probe cards and some of that tooling in the Q2 , and that was what was responsible for the 50% step up, and then continuing at those levels here in the Q3 , for by and large, for DRAM probe cards. In any of these new technology, new product ramps, there's a lot of different constraints throughout our customers' production. I don't think we're one of the constraints right now, but there's various places where they're having to make some large investments, even to use the probe cards they already have. So we're not revising guidance upwards.
Maybe there's a little bit of noise or upside or downside around the Q3 guidance, but by and large, I think the themes we conveyed a month ago on the earnings call remain intact.
Can you share with us, in terms of the market share dynamics right now, in the big customer, say, like, Samsung?
For DRAM? For DRAM. I think historically, so the question about market share, probe card market share, DRAM. DRAM probe cards, by and large, there's two suppliers, FormFactor and a Japanese company called Micronics Japan. Historically, FormFactor has had stronger share at SK hynix . MJC has had stronger share at Samsung, although, we've made some pretty good gains at Samsung in various areas as we've, as we've gone through some technology progression. I think anytime you see a two-supplier market like this, I think both suppliers understand that they're gonna be competing with each other, but there's also gonna be a fairly narrow market share range that customers want to keep you in. Our customers need two suppliers.
They need two strong, viable suppliers, and they're gonna continue to cultivate us and give us both business, where we offer them some value from the technology they've brought. By and large, that's where the market share shifts occur, and because we have some competitive advantage in the detailed requirements associated with HBM, we have seen some nice share gains through the middle part of the year.
Is it fair to say, like 60/40, because of more-
That's a good general rule of thumb window to think about: the 60/40, two-thirds/one-third window.
All right, thanks. Is any other questions from the audience?
It's Jeff Rucker, and how you think about. The question is regarding operating expenses, which have held kind of flattish, even as the business has turned down, how you think about managing that? What flexibility there is or isn't, as you build expectations for future growth?
Yeah. A couple of different elements to OpEx. One that is an important part of our operational philosophy is quite a bit of incentive-based compensation is geared towards company profitability, and as we went through 2022, you saw that step down pretty significantly as profitability decreased in the second half of the year. Other elements of OpEx that are maybe more structural in nature, I view, and I think we as a management team, view R&D, sales and marketing, and G&A, as three very different and distinct buckets. R&D, we're investing today to drive revenue, competitive advantage, and gross margin expansion a year, two years, three years from now, right? That's the innovation that fuels your roadmap.
That's working closely with key customers that you see on our 10% list, to make sure we're ready to solve some of the problems that they're gonna face as they embark on things like advanced packaging and in volume production. Sales and marketing, you know, you've got a broad-based footprint around the world supporting all these global customers, and that sales and service team is an integral part, especially in a business... You know, both the probe card business and the systems business are very high customer touch, high customer intimacy businesses because of the degree of interaction, because of the degree of customization you have inherent to these products. And so those are investments as well. I think G&A is an area where we continue to strive to drive efficiency.
You know, we've recently gone through, not so recently, but during the pandemic, went through a major ERP transition, which gave us some degree of efficiency gains across all of the different operations, really consolidating a lot of disparate systems from FormFactor's acquisition history and getting most of the company onto the same platform. G&A is an area where we're gonna continue to try and squeeze efficiency and make sure that those costs don't scale with revenue. R&D costs, honestly, I would expect, and if you look at the target model, I'd expect R&D to continue to be a significant investment. I don't remember exactly what the target model is, but think about it as 15% of revenue, feels about right.
Can you share with us in terms of ASP profile for HBM, you know, probe card versus DRAM?
Yeah. ASPs and probe cards are a bit of a dangerous notion because, again, you're customizing to each individual customer chip design. And so the configurations they choose, in DRAM, for example, you know, the picture you see on the left here, a one-touch-down DRAM probe card, a probe card that tests the entire DRAM wafer at once, bears a much higher ASP than a two-touch-down probe card. Yet, sometimes customers will choose the two-touch-down probe card because they have extra test capacity. So we try and steer away from ASPs because it really is a notion that's not so useful in this business, given the degree of mix and customization.
Just in terms of, like, you mentioned this, you know, testing density, complexity, and all that, that gives a much higher profitability for the, you know, the HBM probe card versus the normal.
Yeah. For advanced packaging in general, we've said, and this is consistent with the narrative I think you've heard from the ATE vendors as well, Teradyne and Advantest. On a like-for-like basis, so, you know, same number of DRAM bits out, advanced packaging drives something like a 20% increase in test spending, in test intensity. That's turned out... Sure, there's areas where customers spend more. There's also areas where customers spend less, but that's not a bad rule of thumb, and if you go back to the comment I made about overall industry spending on probe cards, you can see that the probe card industry has outgrown the semiconductor industry, in part because of that increase in test intensity.
Any other questions from the audience?
Talk about the margin intensity or the margin profile of the advanced packaging business versus the probe card business.
Sorry, as the-
The margin profile.
Across the probe card business?
Versus the Aadvanced packaging. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, there's different, and again, this goes back a little bit to ASP, the comment I made about ASPs. I would say, in general, you know, a more complex probe card, a probe card with higher degree of capability, maybe that's higher speed, maybe that carries more power to the chip, will carry a higher price, right? Customers will pay for performance, will pay for capability. But then there's other trade-offs with things like, well, maybe they don't test as many die at the same time, so a lower parallelism card. So in the same way that ASPs are a somewhat dangerous notion in probe cards, so are general rules of thumb associated with advanced packaging versus die.
What I will say is, as test complexity increases, so if I'm, one of our customers testing individual chiplets before they go into the advanced package, and I need to test at higher speeds, that's a degree of capability that does drive a higher price. RF, for example, high-speed digital, does drive a higher price, again, on a like-for-like basis, same number of die, everything else being equal. So I think, it's reasonable to expect that if we're able to execute, when we're able to execute on our technology roadmap associated with the capabilities in advanced packaging, that you will see us move higher towards the gross margins, again, associated with our target model, something like 47%.
Any other key drivers that goes to the for target 47% gross margin?
Yeah. I, I think one of the big ones, and you've seen it work in reverse, is we've gone from, you know, the $200-ish million of the quarters, Q1 2022, Q2 2022, down to the $160-ish million levels we're at now. Volume has a big, big effect on our gross margins. We're a pretty vertically integrated manufacturer. The technologies, like our competitors, required to produce probe cards are fairly specialized, and so you end up developing those technologies and then building fairly vertically integrated factory structure to deliver those technologies in volume... The consequence of then a downturn is you're underabsorbing a lot of the fixed costs.
Although in the Q3 of 2022, when it was clear to us that there was a downturn on the way, we took our cost structure down significantly. That was primarily associated with labor and things that were variable in the short term. We've continued to improve our factory footprint. We've continued to invest capital in making sure we have world-class facilities that can deliver the products we're developing on the lead times and quality levels that we need to remain competitive. You know, I think those are costs that you're just going to carry through the COGS line during a downturn like this. So volume, right, becomes one of the really big drivers on the way back up to the high 40% gross margin of the target model.
Okay, that makes sense. We are almost run out of time, so before we wrap up, just want to ask if you have—there's anything that you think investors are not fully appreciative of, FormFactor?
Yeah. So I think one of the interesting thing that's happened as we've come through the middle part of 2023, not just FormFactor, but the industry. So I think there's been a rapid increase in people's understanding of the importance of advanced packaging for the industry.
Okay.
If, you know, I back up a year, I think it was largely underappreciated how important advanced packaging and chiplets were going to be for the industry. I think one of the things that's happened, you know, against the backdrop of a pretty significant industry downturn here in 2023, is the strength associated with some of the advanced packaging projects like high-bandwidth memory, like CoWoS, to deliver the capability for the logic side of AI. And I think, ironically, the downturns help provide some degree of contrast for how important advanced packaging is going to be for driving industry innovation and growth going forward. It's one of the reasons, one of the key themes for FormFactor.
We've made organic investments there, we've made M&A investments there, and continued to try and position ourselves to be heavily levered towards the- what's one of the most exciting trends in the industry, certainly in the 25 years I've been in.
Okay, great. All right, thanks, Mike, for joining us today. I really appreciate your time.
All right.
And, thanks for the audience.
All right. Thanks for having us.