Gayn Erickson
Chief Executive Officer
I think it really is. If you go back and there is a lot of detail in there. But on the FOX-1 and the FOX-15, that was, if you well, our first generation single wafer machine in the FOX-a and multi-wafer machine in the FOX 15. They actually shared a lot of similarity in hardware and software, but one was package to work with an individual wafer prober and a more traditional probe card or our WaferPaks. Whereas the FOX-15 used an off-line prober to do alignment of our WaferPak contactors that were then placed into our multi-wafer system to be able to share that prober amongst 15 wafers. As you now move forward with the FOX-P platform, it's intended to displace both the FOX-1 with the FOX 1P and the FOX-15 with the FOX XP. Now there are some applications and it's our expectation that customers will continue to purchase and use the FOX-15. Whereas with the FOX-1, we think that customers will all migrate to the 1P, right. But your comment about it being kind of a single platform and different flavors is spot on. In fact, if you come in and you look at the FOX engineering system, the FOX-P engineering, on the side it just says FOX-P and if you are 1P customer you are running it on that engineering system. If you are an XP customers, you would to be using the same tool, because it leverages the same hardware and software whether it's intended to go after a one wafer application or a multi-wafer. The big difference is not just as simple as a smaller config. The 1P allows us to have significantly more resources on a single wafer, but on the XP it can take a fewer number of resources but then it has multiple wafers, each with that independent set of resources. So the key of this is to really have a product strategy to have all of the pieces in place to be able to take the same platform and address multiple different customers and applications which allow us to scale as a small company to be able to address a much very large base. When you come to the factory, what you will see here is our manufacturing area is quite large. There have been times in Aehr Test history, where we were shipping as many as one system a day. We were one of the market leaders in DRAM burn-in. We are market leader in logic burn-in today at package level. So we know how to scale and to ramp and we are putting the infrastructure in place to be able to address these high volume applications. So I think trying to address specifically the difference between the FOX-P contactors and aligners, so the FOX-P is the system-level hardware. It supplies the electrical signals to and receive them from the devices that we are testing. Our WaferPak contactor, which is similar to a probe card in the semiconductor AT industry, makes the physical connection between the tester and the wafer, the devices that are in wafer form. So it makes a physical electrical contact between the two and it's a high performance application, but also rugged because it's being used repetitively for many, many years and hundreds of thousands of insertions. That contactor is unique per design. So each time a customer has a new design that they do, they would actually need a new set that's similar to today where they need a new set of probe cards. So that consumable element is something that will continue on. It's a key part of our business model that allows us to have sustainable revenue to support these customers long into the future, even if they happen to be buying capital more on capital expenditures cycles they would have these consumables on a more regular basis. And then our WaferPak aligner is the glue between the two that allows us to actually take a wafer, put it into, take our WaferPak contactor, put them together in a proprietary way and then we can take that contactor and insert it into our multi-wafer systems for testing. It's quite novel. There is nothing else that's out there like it. And it's actually quite a lot of fun when you bring customers in and they see these multi-wafer systems and people that have spent their, many times their entire careers in test like I have, see it for the first time and they just sort of smile and say, that's pretty awesome. So thanks for the question, Marty.