Aehr Test Systems, Inc. (AEHR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Well, I think we've got the logistics of this thing set up right here. Vernon, can you just acknowledge that sound is okay? All right. Folks, we'll go ahead and get started here. I'm Gayn Erickson, President and Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors of Aehr Test Systems. It's a pleasure to welcome you to the 2021 meeting of shareholders of Aehr Test Systems. First, I hope you're all staying safe and healthy during this difficult time. Due to the restrictions in place related to the COVID pandemic, we're presenting this year's annual meeting via webcast. As we noted in our proxy filing, you'll not be able to vote while viewing the webcast. However, our Inspector of Elections is at our corporate office to accept ballots for those attending the meeting in person. During today's webcast, we'll be conducting formal business required as needed for the annual meeting. We will then have a brief presentation discussing some of the opportunities for Aehr Test. And in this case, today, it appears that we're going to just keep it to the formal presentation portion of this today. But after our comments and the formal portions, we will open it up and see if there are any questions that will be taken. Online today -- with me today is our Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer, Ken Spink. Kenneth has been appointed as the Secretary of the meeting and will record the meeting of the minutes. And with this, we'll move to the formal portion of the meeting. First, I'd like to outline the formal business of this meeting as follows: I have received proof that notice of this meeting has been given and that the proxy statement, notice of annual meeting and proxy cards were mailed on or about September 23, 2021, to all shareholders of record as of September 3, 2021. The proxy statement, notice of annual meeting and proxy cards will be maintained with the minutes of this meeting. [indiscernible] has been appointed as the inspector of elections for the meeting. She signed an oath of office, which is available for your examination and will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. [indiscernible] has informed me that we have present, in person and by proxy, a sufficient number of shares to constitute a quorum, so the meeting is duly constituted. Let me describe briefly the voting procedures. We will vote by proxy or by ballot. If you have previously turned in your proxy, it will be voted as indicated. For those of you who are attending in person, if you are eligible to vote and have not submitted your proxy, or if you want to change the vote you have previously submitted, a supply of ballot is available with the Inspector of Elections. Please fill out all proxies or ballots legibly and sign exactly as your name appears on your share certificate. Our agenda, we're going to go over 5 items: the election of our directors; the approval of an amendment to the company's bylaws to change the authorized number of directors and permit certain amendments to the bylaws by unanimous consent of the Board of Directors of the company; the approval of an amendment to the company's 2016 equity incentive plan to increase the number of shares of stock reserved for issuance thereunder by an additional 1 million shares of common stock of the company; the ratification of the appointment of BPM LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending May 31, 2022; and finally, the approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of the company's named executive officers. We will then consider any other business that may be properly come before the meeting, and there will be an opportunity to discuss such proposals. Let's proceed with the election of directors. A total of 7 directors are to be elected. As disclosed in the proxy materials, the nominees of the company's Board of Directors are: Gayn Erickson, Fariba Danesh, Laura Oliphant, Rhea Posedel, Mario Rosati, Geoff Scott and Howard T. Slayen. Is there any discussions or are there any other nominations for directors for those attending in person? I see no hands, and therefore, the nominations are closed. Let us proceed to vote. For those of you who are voting here, please mark your proxy card and ballot accordingly. And thank you. [Voting]

I'll remind you that all proxy cards and ballots will be collected and counted after voting has been completed on all matters on the agenda. The next item of business is to approve an amendment to the company's bylaws to change the authorized number of directors and permit certain amendments to the bylaws by unanimous consent of the Board of Directors of the company. This proposal has been approved by the company's Board of Directors. Is there any discussion from those attending in person? With no hands shown, we'll proceed to vote. And please mark your proxy card or ballot. [Voting]

The next item of business is to approve an amendment to the company's 2016 equity incentive plan to increase the number of shares reserved for issuance thereby by an additional 1 million shares of common stock of the company. This proposal has been approved by the company's Board of Directors. Is there any discussion from those attending in person? Seeing no hands, we'll proceed to vote. Please mark your proxy cards or ballot. [Voting]

The next item of business is to ratify the appointment of BPM LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending May 31, 2022. The company's Board of Directors approved of this selection and is asking the shareholders for ratification. Is there any discussion from those attending in person on this matter? With no hands, we will proceed to vote. And again, please mark your proxy card or ballot. [Voting]

The next item of business is to approve on an advisory basis the compensation of the company's named executive officers. This proposal has been approved by the company's Board of Directors. Is there any discussion from those attending in person? Seeing no hands. We'll proceed to vote. Please mark your proxy card or ballot. [Voting]

Now let me ask if there's any other business to be addressed at the meeting from those attending in person? Any other proposals? All right. Hearing none, the polls for each matter to be voted upon at this meeting are now closed, and we will continue. Please pass your ballots to the monitors to collect them. We will report the results momentarily. Okay. Inspector of Elections completed the tally of the voting of this meeting. Of the 24,482,796 shares of common stock eligible to vote at this meeting, a total of not less than 16,188,075 shares actually voted. This represents a vote by 66.12% of the shares eligible to vote. For the first item on the agenda, the election of directors, I'm pleased to announce that the shareholders have elected the company's Board of Directors -- elected to the company's Board of Directors the following director: Rhea Posedel, Gayn Erickson, Fariba Danesh, Laura Oliphant, Mario Rosati, Geoffrey Scott and Howard Slayen. For the second item on the agenda, I'm pleased to announce that the proposal to change the company's bylaws to change the authorized number of directors and permit certain amendments by the bylaws -- to the bylaws by unanimous consent of the Board of Directors of the company were approved. For the third item on the agenda, I'm pleased to announce that the proposal to authorize an additional 1 million shares of common stock of the company reserved for issuance under the 2016 equity incentive plan was also approved. For the fourth item on the agenda, I'm pleased to announce that the ratification of the appointment of BPM LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending May 31, 2022, was also approved. And for the last item, the fifth item on the agenda, I'm pleased to announce that the compensation of the company's named executive officers was approved. With this, this concludes the official business of today's meeting, and the meeting is hereby adjourned. We've given an opportunity for those at the meeting or online to ask any questions. And I believe I have the screen in front of me. It was our expectation there would be a few. And seeing no questions at this time, we will formally end the meeting. I appreciate everybody's attendance -- oops, we have one. Hold on a second. This is not as easy as I thought it was. Okay.

All right. I have some -- I have one question out there. And the gentleman, it looks like -- okay, there it is. It's coming in, but I get the question here. So the question is related to electric cars and how many are using silicon carbide versus silicon? And I think I can answer that. So there's maybe a couple of ways of looking at this. Today, in reality, certainly by contrast to the number of cars that are to be built that would be battery electric vehicles is actually quite small. I think it's about 1 million automobiles that will be built or on vehicles that were built this year. Whereas by 2030, the estimates are to be about 30 million or more electric vehicles by that time. So there's -- the 2 questions are, how many have silicon carbide today and how is that going to change? And I think that dynamic is probably a better question to answer. So today, the dominant supplier of the electric vehicles, of course, is Tesla. And Tesla is credited along with STMicroelectronics as the company that really started the silicon carbide revolution, if you will, for electric vehicles. Silicon carbide has been around for well over a decade or 2. And folks like Cree have been building it for smaller application spaces and touting the benefits of it, particularly as an advantage over silicon-based high-voltage devices like IGBTs or Super Junction FETs. But it wasn't until a Tesla actually introduced the Model 3 with silicon carbide as the main component in the drivetrain. It's actually referred to as the traction inverter. Traction, I guess, related to the traction motor that creates the traction to make it go forward. And the traction inverter is the electronic system that converts the battery power, which is a DC, into the AC power that drives the engine. That inverter is made up of semiconductors traditionally IGBT or silicon-based semiconductors. And each of the models from Tesla had all had IGBTs in them. With the Model 3, they introduced it with silicon carbide for several key benefits that included the high -- not only the high-voltage and high-power capabilities, but the efficiency that allowed it to be able to extend the battery life by estimates ranging from 5% to even 15% or more. It also has benefits in its ability to charge faster. And between range and charging, those ended up being 2 of the dominant things that were going on. And so the Model 3, which is I believe the most successful battery electric vehicle by a mile right now is all on silicon carbide. Since they did that in 2017 or '18 introduction, it is under -- my understanding is that they -- all of the Tesla vehicles are now shipping with silicon carbide. And as a result of the benchmarks associated with that, most, if not all of the new electric vehicles are coming out with silicon carbide. And most of the folks that I have seen estimates -- estimate that a minimum of 70% of all electric vehicles will have silicon carbide by the end of the decade. So if you start looking at 30 million cars at the end and 70% of them are going to have silicon carbide, you can start to understand the enormous growth that is ahead. And why that plays in, and for those who are kind of coming up to speed on this is that Aehr Test has demonstrated a unique capability to be able to do a critical manufacturing step of silicon carbide devices in mission-critical applications such as this automotive power device. And we can test entire wafers of these at the same time on our FOX system, and in fact, 18 wafers at a time on a single system. And in doing that, we have an enormous competitive advantage, and we've been able to demonstrate through our customers and then through them all the way to what's called the OEMs, which is the Teslas of the world the advantages of being able to do this quality and reliability step on something that's so critical that if it were to fail, you would actually have to get out of your car and walk home, right? Silicon carbide has been known. It's industry-wide, understood that it has a high extrinsic defect density, which is the infant mortality of the devices, but through a process such as the one that Aehr Test provides, we can actually remove those infant mortalities, creating that highly reliable device that is expected to last for decades without failure. And so the fact that the silicon carbide market is increasing in the percentage of cars that it's going to go into and that the explosion of these electric vehicles over the next decade is one of the key market opportunities for Aehr Test. All right. We've got a number of other questions. So let's see if we can go through here. All right. So I have an -- all right, so let me -- I'm going to have to pause for a moment here. Vernon, can you actually hear on a mic check test here? We'll do it one more time. All right. Well, at risk of this being -- having to be -- we'll probably record it and we will put it out later. I have a couple other people that are online are saying that they actually cannot hear the meeting at all. And so I'm not clear if that's widespread or not, but I'm going to go ahead and complete the process here, which are the questions as best I can, and then we'll publish this on the web afterwards for people to hear. All right. All right, our next question is related to -- okay, if people cannot test their wafers using Aehr Test wafer burn-in system, well, then how would they do that? That's a really good question. And what's important to understand is that if you follow the time line of the introduction of our FOX solution, really over the last couple of years to some other major semiconductor and mobile phone suppliers, it's relatively new in the silicon carbide. There were devices such as the ones that ST was being able to the automotive space like Tesla. And it's widely understood that all silicon carbide devices are being what's called burned in or the reliability test on what's called in our industry a packaged burn-in system. So that device is actually tested on a different manufacturer's system. We make those systems as well. But interestingly, customers are really only interested in our wafer level system for the silicon carbide application. And the reason for it is that if you look at the package, particularly the new modules that might have as many as 8 or more devices in a single package, if you burn in that device at package level and one of the devices fails, you have what's called a hostage failure where the other 7 devices and the entire package has gone away. By contrast, Aehr Test will test those devices while they're still in a die form in an entire wafer before they're singulated and certainly before they're put into that package. And by doing that, we removed that fatal flaw before it's put into that module. And so you get the enormous advantage of not having to throw away a package or the other 7 devices in that example. So there are lots of people doing package part. It is our understanding that all of them are moving to wafer level for the reasons that we described. And with Aehr Test believes that we have one of, if not the most competitive offerings out there that we believe we can have an opportunity to gain a substantial market share. Let me go on with the questions here. Okay. Another question is how many WaferPaks would an 18-wafer FOX-XP require in practical use? Well, first of all, the question is what's a WaferPak. A WaferPak is what Aehr Test has named a proprietary contactor that is effectively a cassette, if you will, that you place a wafer in with a highly sophisticated tool that we also supply called a WaferPak aligner, and it optically places the wafer into this cassette so that you can make contact with all of the devices at the same time on a single wafer. Then a FOX-XP will take 18 of these WaferPak contactor cassettes, if you will, and test them at the same time. So in each application or each we call it a test or burn-in run, you would be using 18 WaferPaks. But a customer may choose to buy more WaferPaks than that in order to address different types of devices. And with each new device design, you would buy a different WaferPak, and in this case, multiple WaferPaks. Something that's novel, and I always like to point out is our 18-blade, as we call it, FOX-XP, it can actually test 18 wafers of the same kind using the same 18 WaferPaks, but it can also test different wafers, technically, test 18 different wafers with 18 different WaferPaks. While we haven't seen that, we regularly see customers testing several different wafers with say maybe 6 WaferPaks each. All right. Another question is related to, I guess, other devices that are going into automobiles, such as ADAS and LiDAR systems and other critical sensors. The question is actually, would they also be comprised of silicon carbide, and therefore, another market for Aehr? Well, I would actually say, in general, no, those other devices are not so likely to be silicon carbide. Silicon carbide is particularly valuable for high-power, high-voltage power conversion. Whereas sensors generally have different applications or needs. Having said that, one of Aehr's biggest markets traditionally before silicon carbide came along and in fact, sensors. I believe our first production wafer-level burn-in system that is still in action today with multiple systems and tens of wafers of capacity has been doing full wafer burn-in of automotive sensors for 10 or 12 -- I think it's 12 or 13 years now. And so we're doing that. We also do that with automotive on other mobile sensors as well. So there's -- for different reasons and for different applications, there's also wafer level burn-in opportunities that is a key market opportunity for Aehr Test. The reason people do that is slightly different, but fundamentally, the critical nature of sensors where you cannot have a sensor fail requires the extra reliability. And by doing it at wafer level instead of in a package level, the value proposition still holds up. So we absolutely see opportunities in lots of different automotive devices and sensors, in addition to silicon carbide power semiconductors used in the powertrain, particularly with battery electric vehicles. Another question following up a little bit about the WaferPaks. And just asking about the economics about it and how it might contrast to what would be deemed in the industry a probe card? So again, a probe card is the traditional name for a card that is adapted to an electronic automated test system that can make contact with some and, in some cases, have memory applications an entire wafer at a time. Memory probe cards, if you think about DRAM probe cards from some of the industry leaders that are out there, can cost several hundred thousand dollars a piece, up to even $0.5 million, there by anyone's math quite expensive. But at the same time, they're testing every single device on the wafer at the same time and so have proven to be quite economical and have driven the business of people like Form Factor to hundreds of millions of dollars of business every single year. So yes, at a face value, they are "expensive". But if you look on the cost of test per device because of the parallel device, they're actually very cost effective. Having said that, our WaferPaks are a lot less expensive than folks like that. And we are actually aiming not only to be cheaper, if you will, than other probe cards, but actually cheaper than the traditional package per burn-in cost effectiveness that's out there. And our goal has always been that way. So we're able to offer WaferPaks that are very effective, have very short lead times, can be designed to customer needs quickly and can have massive amounts of capacity to be able to address their needs. And we do that, again, with a proprietary contractor that we call WaferPak that Aehr has a significant number of patents and IP related to. All right. I actually -- because of just the user interface, I was sort of -- I got one more. So it looks like somebody just got in under the wire. So I'm going to -- if you have another question, get it in quick. If not, I'm going to end the meeting here in just a moment. So there was a question just simply say, well, how long does a WaferPak last? That's actually a great question. A really long time. It turns out people often will call it a consumable, in fact, will often do it or do the same thing. But in reality, it isn't really consumed. The mechanism of our WaferPak is that it can last thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of what we call an insertion. So each time it touches a wafer, that's a single insertion. The wear-out mechanisms having to do with the mechanical tips, if you will, the electrical tips are such that after so many thousands of times, you would like start to see some electrical degradation, but that's measured in tens of thousands, and we've done better. We've done testing up to 1 million cycles. Now in our application, which is a burn-in application, the subtlety about burn-in is that the key here is we're actually doing what's called a reliability test or infant mortality test, which is an accelerated life test. Fundamentally, all semiconductors have what's known as an infant mortality or an extrinsic failure mode. And what that means is when you first build it, even though it's good, the likelihood that it's going to fail in the first day is actually much higher than the likelihood it would fail a year later. And that decays with time. And as long as you're okay with that, consumer applications may be just fine, you don't need to do a burn-in. But if you're in a critical application where you need that, you actually need to do this burn-in, and we effectively make a device look like it's 1 year old, right? But it turns out, that takes some time, too. So relative to traditional test times, which are measured in seconds, burn-in times are measured in hours and sometimes days. And so it is not uncommon for people to be testing for many hours or a day or 2 or more for burn-in. And we've talked about the industry out there and throwing some different numbers, but reasonable numbers can be from 6 to 12 to 24, 48 hours for a burn-in like this. Imagine now, and to make it simple, it's a 24-hour burn-in, and it has 100,000 cycles until it actually starts to show electrical wear. That's a long time. And from my perspective, it basically never wears out. So someone asked me, actually had a couple of customers, is there any way you could make them cheaper and wear out twice as fast? And the answer is actually no. And the reason is the same mechanism that allows them to be precise and repeatable makes them last a really long time. So they don't actually want to trade off all the goodness, but they actually probably don't care if it happens to last 200 years. So in this case, they really don't wear out. What happens though is why it's sort of a consumable is it turns out the device doesn't last forever. And depending on the application, a device may only be manufactured for 3, 4, 5 years. And then it's replaced by a new device that's bigger, better, stronger, faster, maybe smaller and this is a case where bigger is not better, right? And when they do make that change, well then, in fact, the probe card or, in this case, our WaferPak changes. And with that change, you need to buy another one. And that perfectly good WaferPak is set aside. So the business model includes, if you will, a consumable element. So for every system you would purchase from Aehr, over time, we would also supply you with multiple sets of these WaferPaks, but they don't really wear out. All right. All right. There's one more question. I'm going to go ahead and do it. I'm going to end it here. Our focus really, and we have been very upfront about where our energies and our focus has been. We're having great success with respect to the mobile side, our sensor business, the automotive side, silicon photonics, which we really didn't touch on here, which is the application of photonics-based transceivers in the 5G and the data center market, which is just exploding with 40-plus percent CAGRs over the next decade. But one other area that we have been making investments in, and we've shared with people is in memory. And I have usually told people, and I'll say it again here, I wouldn't invest in Aehr Test because you think we're going to have some dominant share in memory, but we are working on it. And if you're investing in Aehr Test, you're investing in a company that is committed to continually work to get into memory market because at least this guy personally believes that the application of our wafer-level burn-in systems for flash memory and also DRAM makes sense. And ultimately, the financials will be there that I believe that all memory manufacturers will shift their burn-in, other than flash memory and DRAMs, to wafer over time. And we'd like to be there for that. But that's a different topic, and it's beyond the scope of this year's discussion, but I want to end it with that. And I hope everybody picked up a little bit from this meeting. I appreciate your time. We will go ahead and post this on the web -- to our website. If you didn't get a chance to get your questions answered, please find the IR website link on our website, make a contact, Ken or I or both would be happy to set up a call and talk with you. And with that, I appreciate it and thank you very much. Bye-bye.