Teradyne, Inc. ($TER)

Welcome back to the session at the BofA Global Tech Conference. I'm Vivek Arya Karia from BFA semiconductor semi-cap equipment. -- research team. I'm really delighted and honored to have the team from Teradyne join us, Greg Smith, the President and CEO. And as always, I'll go through my questions, but please feel free to raise your hand if you would like to bring up something. Greg, really warm welcome. Really happy to see you at our conference.

Great to be here. Thank you.

Wonderful. Let's just start with kind of a state of the union. And if you could help us frame the addressable opportunity, right, for automated test equipment. And I say that because it seems the semiconductor industry has -- is close to achieving its $1 trillion kind of milestone much, much sooner than we thought wafer fab equipment demand is very strong. How do we connect the dots, right, from those 2 data points to what the opportunity is for you and how it's going to develop if the industry semi industry gets to, I don't know, say, $2 trillion in a few years?

$2 trillion. Okay. So there's -- if you look just over the last couple of years, you're definitely seeing an inflection in the test equipment buy rate. if you look back in history, the semiconductor buy rate has been hovering around or slightly below 1% of semiconductor revenue. And over the past couple of years, we've actually seen it begin to inflect. And that's pretty amazing given the fact that the fastest-growing part of the semiconductor market, sort of the 3 fastest-growing parts of the end semiconductor market are GPU which is a very high margin part; HBM, which is the highest margin part and a shortage of memory, which has resulted in a significant increase in revenue without a significant increase in the number of parts being tested. So like the setup for buy rates to actually go down was actually strong because the inflection in revenue was a lot higher than the inflection in unit volume. So it's pretty remarkable that we've seen this kind of an increase in the test intensity along with the increase in the revenue to sort of allow that buy rate to go up. Now the other way to look at the test equipment opportunity is as a slice of a pie of semiconductor capital equipment in total. And that's a market that back in the old days would be $100 billion. Now it's well on its way to $200 billion. And we've typically -- in a $100 billion semi cap environment, we would have gotten a TAM of $5 billion to $6 billion, like 5% or 6% of that total pie. As the wafer front end market is expanding, it's early days, but the percentage of that total market that ends up being test could actually get larger. If you think about the -- there have been some times in the semi cap space, where there have been a significant increase in capital intensity without a significant increase in wafer output. So the two best examples is the transition to EUV, it made that part of the chain a lot more expensive relative to where it was. The other was multilayer flash that like the number of layers in the flash device we're increasing radically the number of flash devices was not increasing at the same rate, and the capital intensity for some process steps was related to layer count. So those are two examples where you could see WFE spend not turning into test equipment TAM. But now the WFE spend is not really around these technology transitions, it's more incremental technologies, but a lot more wafer output, And more wafers means more test. So that's a driver. And the other is a greater percentage of all of the wafers being produced, the die being produced are actually being packaged into multiple die end products. So for example, if you are building a DRAM to go into HBM, the test intensity for that is much higher because of the stacking and the quality requirements downstream. The same thing in terms of an AI accelerator. If you are going to have 2 big compute die plus 6 HBM stacks plus a [ Coles ] interposer; the cost of having a failure downstream is so high that you're willing to invest to get to a higher level of test quality upstream. So that's the whole shift left. So because of advanced packaging and because of the wafer output, I think we're in a position to see the test market rising at least proportionately with the whole WFE space.

Okay. And WFE this year is expected to be about 140 million, 145-ish billion. And the large WFE companies have not given a forecast. But if, let's say, semi industry does get to $2 trillion, right, we could be talking about $250 billion, $300 billion, right type. So if all we knew was WFP would be $250 million or $300 billion by the end of the decade, what does that tell you? What -- how large they market?

I feel like one of those movie trailers or like in a world where there's $250 billion of front-end investment. So like right now, in $140 billion the -- like if you're talking about 2025, the overall test equipment TAM was about $9 billion.

Versus 110.

Versus 110. For 2025 was $110 billion Yes. So we're talking about like 8-ish percent. So -- and so if you're talking about $250 billion, you'd be talking about easily a $20 billion ATE TAM. So the ATE TAM would go up by 150% from where it is.

Versus the 12% to 14%, right, although I think that...

So like the -- like our -- the model that we -- so what you're referencing is our long-term model. And for that model, rather than projecting a growth rate and giving a model for, say, 3 years from now, we admitted that we don't have great visibility about how fast the TAM is actually going to grow because like we were talking about before we came on stage, like you go to sleep at night, you wake up in the morning and there's a new headline about higher [ in OpEx ] or higher wafer front end. So we don't have great visibility about how fast the overall semiconductor market is going to grow. And therefore, we don't have great intelligence about just how fast the TAM will grow. But what we have some high confidence about is -- if there is a semiconductor ATE TAM of $12 billion to $14 billion, that Teradyne would be a $6 billion company. So like roughly double in size from 2025 in that market. And that would represent both of participating in this growing market, but also increasing share in that market as well. So we believe that we're positioned over the next few years to be able to grow with that market and gain share. so essentially outgrow the pace of the ATE TAM.

Got it. What is your share now for, let's say, 2025? And -- because in a 12 to 14 just shy of like 50%, right?

No, no. So this is an important math. So if you look at Teradyne, Teradyne has 3 businesses: Semiconductor, our semiconductor test business represents about 80% of our revenue. There's 10% in robotics, 10% in product test. And now in addition to that, there's also a portion of our semiconductor test business which does system-level test, which doesn't actually accrue to the semiconductor ATE TAM, all right? So the percentage, the share in the ATE space in 2025 was 30-ish percent. And so our expectation in a $12 billion to $14 billion market that we would have 36% of that $12 billion to $14 billion, so 35% to 38% in that range. And the other parts of the company would essentially grow proportionally with that core. So it's not 50% of 12% to 14%. It's more like 36%.

Okay. So what helps drive that share gain? Are you -- is it your investment in specific end markets? Is it that you already have design wins in certain categories that help you drive that share gain?

So the -- like 36% share is nowhere near the high watermark for our share. So we had significantly higher share than that back in the mobile boom in like 2021. And from 2021 out to 2025, there was very little competitive shift in terms of which customers did business with which ATE company. The thing that changed from that high share point to 2025 was the segment growth in the market. And so the part of the market that grew the fastest was DRAM and compute and especially AI compute GPUs. And those were two parts of the market where Teradyne's core share, segment share was lower than our share in other parts of the market that were not growing as strongly. So there was this colossal shift in the market towards these two segments. And what's happened since then is Teradyne has actually gained share inside of compute, and we've gained share inside of DRAM and HBM. So we're in this situation right now where these are very big segments. We've increased our share in our position for additional share gain against compute and DRAM. And the other parts of our business, mobile, power and industrial and flash; are all positioned to have significant growth over the next few years. So we'll have some of the segment shift helping to pay us back that we lost over the past few years.

Got it. Makes sense. So we talk about the GPU, but it's interesting that the CPU has been a more active area of discussion at our conference so far. What's the Teradyne opportunity in CPU testing? And when you hear of these large TAMs, every day, there is a larger TAM than the day before; what does that tell you by way of -- how much of CPU testing has been internal so far? How much has been at your -- like what is your share today of CPU testing? And what we...

Let's actually -- let's start earlier in terms of the test TAM associated with CPU, right? So the easiest way to talk about this is the relative test intensity for an AI accelerator and a data center CPU okay? And right now, that's kind of 4 to 1, in that it takes 4x as much test for an accelerator as it does for a data center CPU. And right now, the ratio of accelerators to CPUs and data centers is probably greater than 4:1, like 4 or more accelerators to each CPU. So today, like where we are in 2025, say, that the amount of test TAM associated with accelerators is like 16:1 relative to CPUs. Now the CPU renaissance that we're talking about is going to change that 4:1 ratio to a 2:1 ratio or maybe even aggressively a 1:1 ratio somewhere in the future, right? But if you get to 2:1, that means that you have 8x as much TAM associated with accelerators as you do with the CPU. So like it's a big and important change in the market, and it is a segment that's going to be growing, but it's still not going to be the biggest thing in the Q1. Now let's talk about share and players. For x86, one of the X86 manufacturers is primarily on my competitor's platform. And the other x86 player had its own test solution that is sourced. We don't expect -- we don't see a near-term opportunity for us to penetrate the CPU player that uses my competitor's equipment. For the one that uses its own equipment, our understanding is that they are not investing in future generations of their internal tester. And so we think that there's going to be a fight in 2028 for who's going to win that account. So we're positioning to compete for that account for 2028 on. Now the other story in CPU is the balance between x86 and ARM. And when it comes to ARM, Teradyne is either qualified or in the qualification process for all major ARM CPUs. Okay. So our share gain opportunity in ARM-based data center CPUs is significant. So I guess I'm kind of hoping that ARM does really well because our exposure there is much higher.

Understood. So just to -- yes, please.

Maybe driving over time [indiscernible]...

Yes, yes. So we've talked about is that AI comes in waves. And the primary hardware associated with up through 2026 has been around building out general purpose data centers, data centers that can be used for training or for inference. And that was very important because the sort of the relative allocation of compute was pretty dynamic between research tasks and revenue tasks. Now that the large LLM players are scaling more aggressively in revenue and -- like look at Anthropic the revenue growth that they're showing there is a need to do inference at scale. And so that's behind the CPU renaissance, and it's also behind silicon specifically to support inference, and that would be like [ Rock and Cerberus ]. That's wave #2. And that's really kicking into high gear in 2026, and it's going to be a major factor out through 2030. The next wave after that is the edge-deployed AI. And there's three real categories of that. There's autonomous driving, there's mobile electronics, so phones, glasses, things that bring edge AI real-time AI to individual users; and then physical AI or robotics. And Teradyne is positioning itself as a destination platform for physical AI applications in robotics. We have a lead customer in this space in e-commerce. That is deploying a physical AI application for distribution center, both stowing stuff in a distribution center and also picking orders to make up kits that are being delivered. And that has really helped us understand what the right platform characteristics are to be able to succeed with other players in physical AI. So our kind of #1 priority right now is to win the labs. So the people that are kind of determining the physical AI future are people like skilled and generalists, intrinsic, Microsoft and NVIDIA. They are adapting the research that they've done in the cloud environment towards physical AI tasks. And what we're trying to do is make sure that we can provide a -- like not to borrow the pharmaceutical term, a safe and effective platform because from a safe perspective, even though the AI job runs on our platform, our platform actually has a safety layer that prevents the robot from operating beyond the safe parameters for the job. That's true for our AMRs and for our [ arms ]. And then effective, you need to be able to control the robot from another piece of software through an API. And so you need scalable compute, you need modular accessories and you need the operating system to both accept commands at a high frequency and provide feedback at a high frequency. So think of that as like the sensory and motor nervous system of the robot has to be able to be interface to these brains. So I guess you could say, our strategy is to bring the muscle and the generalists and intrinsics and NVIDIAs are going to be bringing the brains.

On the CPU cycle, acetate, I think you have mentioned that there, we think that TAM is about $500 million that we can test. Can you break it down further like this definition [indiscernible] $500 million? And where can you gain the share that you're confident in the past?

So right now, in 2026, there's probably going to be about $100 million of test equipment purchased for co-packaged optics. In addition to that, there's probably an equal amount equal amount of revenue associated with the device handling and optical alignment. So another $100 million or so of business that will go to players that are not Teradyne or [ Advent ] test. And all of that investment is going to produce a vanishingly small amount of co-packaged optics in 2026. So like a crazy high buy rate. So over the next few years, there's a bunch of exponentials that are going to happen. The number between now and 2028, the number of scale-out CPO connections is probably going to multiply by more than a factor of 100 from '26 to '28 because like it's growing from nothing. So a very high growth rate. The -- right now, each CPO connection represents minutes of test time. There's a very, very extensive test lists that are very characterization oriented. And so between now and 2028, the test intensity is going to be going -- like they're going to test less. And the test equipment is going to become much faster because it's going to be focused on the production parameters that are most important. So you've got this exponential growth on one side, and you've got a rapid increase in efficiency on the other side. So when you -- like it's always high error uncertainty when you're trying to match up things that are growing in an exponential rate. So what we've actually said is that by 2028, we think that the TAM associated with just the test equipment, so what's $100 million now; will be somewhere between $300 million and $700 million. You pick the midpoint and like if you want to -- like they say that if you're in marketing, like if a guy in marketing says that something is going to drop at that spot on the floor, something heavy, stand right there because you're going to be safe. because like we're never going to get it exactly right, but we can give you the band. And so it's going to be that 300 to 700. And the other thing that's interesting is that is really associated with just initial production of scale-out networking. What happens post '28 is when scale-up networking happens. And by the time you get to 2030, there's going to be like 3x as many CPO ports for scale up as there is for scale out. And so $500 million at that midpoint, that $300 million to $700 million, that is not where this TAM ends up. This TAM ends up bigger than $1 billion. And the scale-out stuff is high -- like we have a high exposure to that part of the market because of our share in networking. And my competitor has high exposure to scale up. And so both of us are going to be creating into this $1 billion market, and neither one of us is going to give up. And so what we'll be doing is we'll be competing on the effectiveness of our testers, the throughput, the accuracy and I've seen this play before. And what ends up happening is a highly competitive duopoly where we're splitting the share.

Is it most [indiscernible] wafer side that we sell caters to or actually other income?

So right now, there are 4 different test insertions -- there's a pick wafer on its own. There is a combined PIC in EIC wafer. There's a a singulated optical engine dilate test and then there's a test when the whole CPO unit is tied together. Right now, most of the TAM is in the first and second insertion. And they are unique test lists, and you can't do all of the tests that you need to do before the EIC and the PIC are put together. So it's like there's going to be movement of tests in that chain, but you can't arbitrarily do some of the later tests earlier. And our biggest share is in that second insertion.

Just on that point, there was also a hoteling equipment with device handling alignment, which you don't do here to assume that in the prototyping R&D, working out which product work is, is somebody that ECM equipment will get used more and maybe the basic equipment that more when we get into volume production of these units. Is that fair to say?

So I think that's fair. I mean one point that I'd like to make is that for the rest of the whole ATE industry, there is an open ecosystem, where test equipment vendors work with multiple device handling vendors, so like Teradyne works with [ Acrotech and Tel ] and Advent test and other players to help create test cells. The same thing we believe is going to happen in the co-packaged optics space that Teradyne is going to work with multiple handling vendors, and those handling vendors will work with both Teradyne and [ Advantest ]. Do I think that the TAM for handling equipment will -- I think it's probably going to grow it close to the same rate as test equipment that like at the end of the day, the number of CPO dilets that are going to be built is going to be growing dramatically and the specialized equipment that are required to deal with those at like -- not only insertion 1 and insertion 2, but handling those -- the optical engine dilets and getting the fiber bundles in for that third insertion and then the handler for a CPO device, that's like a world-class switch device it's going to be burning a kilowatt, tens of thousands of electrical connections and then you also have to meet to like optical connections on there. That's going to be an expensive piece of kit. So I think that this is going to be a part of the handling market that is likely to grow really significantly.

Follow-up on your comment and your competitor is taller I mean just given no one's quite doing...

No, no, no, no. What I was saying is that, like if you think about scale out, scale out is adding CPO to network switches. If you think about scale up, it's adding CPO to AI accelerators. And if you look at share in AI accelerators versus share in network switches, Teradyne is really high in network switches, my competitor is really high. But you're right, like the future is yet to be written in terms of CPO share for both of these markets.

All right. Wonderful. On the topic of that large customer, right, you received initial kind of production orders. What's the right to elect to think about your market share journey at that customer? What are the milestones? And then as part of the $12 billion to $14 billion, right opportunity that you laid out, what share does that imply?

Yes. So the way we've been talking about the merchant compute opportunity in this specific account is that there are 3 phases. The first phase is qualification. And that started midyear last year and it culminated with qualification of the UltraFLEX to be able to test a particular device. And that was -- the end of that process was two things happened. One, there was an order for a couple of dozen tools that we are going to be doing high volume production of this specific device. And the other was the -- them asking us to engage in additional follow-on projects for devices that are earlier in their life cycle. So we are now in a phase that I'm calling the fast follower phase. So every new part is going to first be brought up on my competitor's platform. And for particular devices, especially devices that they see high volume, they are going to be asking us to convert that test solution to be working on the Teradyne platform. So over time, we are going to convert more and more of these devices as they are coming to market, and that will allow us to incrementally gain share. While we are following, we believe that we have kind of a hard ceiling at about 30% share because like we're the second kid to the dinner table, right, that like the company that brings up the part in the first place is always going to get the initial part of the [indiscernible]. So that fast follower kind of has a natural high limit. After about 3 or 4 years the customer will likely have enough experience with our platform, and we will get into what I call a mature dual vendor strategy. And in a mature dual vendor strategy, they will generally be selecting a an NPI platform and then the other company would be the follower. And that would be like either Teradyne or the incumbent would be selected for new devices on the basis of platform capability, throughput, reliability. Like they're making decisions on the actual differentiation versus incumbency. And that's like 3 or 4 years in the future when we get to there. So inside of this $12 billion to $14 billion TAM, part of it is like how much merchant compute is in there. Part of that depends on how fast we get to $12 billion to $14 billion, that if we get to $12 billion to $14 billion next year, then we will still be at a very early stage in this process and we would have lower share. If it took us 2 years, we would be higher. If it took us 3 years to get to $12 billion to $14 billion, then we would be getting close to that 30% but it's going to be a gradual increase over the next 3 to 4 years to get to 30%.

Right. And just the last question. You do expect to maintain or expand your share in networking because that's been an area of strength?

So dual vendor is a customer strategy against their entire portfolio of parts it definitely presents a downside risk in networking and an upside risk in merchant compute. But given the size of the opportunity, we're kind of delighted to take the risk against networking in order to increase our share in that larger part of the account. We also believe that we have a platform that is more performing, that we actually have differentiation in production around reliability and throughput. And so we believe that we're going to be able to defend a high share in networking. Would we be able to defend 100% share? Probably not. But would we be able to defend a high share, we think so. SP-7

Got it. With that, thank you so much, Greg. Really appreciate your time.

Well, thank you all.