Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PDF Solutions Incorporated Conference Call to discuss its Financial Results for the Fourth Quarter and Full-Year ended Sunday, December 31, 2017. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, for which instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. If you have not yet received a copy of the corresponding press release, it has been posted to the PDF Web site at www.pdf.com. Some of the statements that will be made in the course of this conference are forward-looking, including statements regarding PDF's future financial results and performance, growth rates and demand for its solutions. PDF's actual results could differ materially. You should refer to the section entitled Risk Factors on Pages 10 through 17 of PDF's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016, and similar disclosures in subsequent SEC filings. The forward-looking statements and risks stated in this conference call are based on information available to PDF today. PDF assumes no obligation to update them. Now I'd like to introduce John Kibarian, PDF's President and Chief Executive Officer; and Greg Walker, PDF's Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Kibarian, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome everyone. If you have not already seen our earnings press release, please go to the Investors section of our website, where it is posted. The management report presentation for the quarter and full-year will be posted later today. Today we will discuss the fourth quarter of 2017, our performance across the entire year, our perceptions about the market we serve, and the implications for 2018. First, let's discuss the contracts closed in the fourth quarter and other significant events in the quarter. It was a busy quarter, particularly for the Exensio team. Contracts to highlight that closed in the quarter are, a process development engagement that utilizes our CV infrastructure to characterize 28-nanometer embedded non-volatile memories, a new enterprise-wide deployment of both Exensio-Yield and Exensio-Control at an existing memory client in China, a contract for a renewal and expanded deployment across multiple factories for Exensio-Control at a large Japanese IDM, and a large engagement -- an engagement for engineering services related to our new Exensio ALPS product at an existing customer of APLS CV infrastructure and Exensio. Some of you may remember that in the third quarter, last year, we acquired ALPS, a software tool that keeps track of chips as they are removed from wafers and inserted into packages. This kind of die-level traceability is increasingly important for situations like sensors which often have multiple chips placed in a complex package. This is our first contract that combines the service capability from our Exensio team with the technical capability. These ALPS-related services provide expanded opportunities for this customer to employ new control techniques across their manufacturing floor. In addition to the business just mentioned, we closed many other contracts for the Exensio platform and modules, including Exensio-Test and related services in the quarter. We had…

Thank you, John. As John mentioned, our management report with comments regarding the financial results of PDF for the quarter and the year what we posted on our website later today. Given that, I'm going to focus my verbal comments for the quarter, and the year on a few key highlights reflected in those results. First on revenue, total revenues at $26.8 million for the quarter were up $259,000 as compared to Q3 2017. Gainshare revenues at $7.8 million, increased by 478,000 from Q3, while solutions revenue at $19 million decreased by $218,000. Gainshare revenues improved during the quarter, primarily driven by revenue increases from one major customer at 28 nanometers. During the quarter, the decrease in solutions revenue was primarily related to lower hours worked across multiple IYR projects and customers and that's the integrated yield ramp business, which was substantially offset by increases in Exensio software revenues that were driven by strong Q4 bookings. For the year, solution revenues were $2.7 million lower than in 2016 as a result of weakness in our IYR business when compared to 2016 partially offset by growth in both Exensio and DFI sales. Gainshare revenues in 2017 were $2.9 million lower than in 2016 primarily driven by continued weakness at the 28 nanometer node across all of our customers partially offset by the continued ramp up of 14 nanometer revenues at one of our major customers. Turning to expenses on a GAAP basis, total expenses for the quarter were $25.9 million approximately a $150,000 lower than in the previous quarter. This decrease in expense was primarily due to non-recurring expenses recognized in Q3 related to cost reduction actions implemented during that quarter. This decrease was partially offset by higher SG&A expenses in the quarter due to variable compensation earned on strong Exensio…

Thank you, Mr. Walker. [Operator Instructions] And our first question is from Jon Tanwanteng with CJS Securities.

Good afternoon gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question.

Sure.

Just a quick update on the demand picture for both your Gen 1 and Gen 2 DFI machines, are you seeing additional interest in there for more series 150? And then just how do you see the series 250 playing out in terms of shipments and orders as you get that actually demonstrated on the floor [indiscernible]?

Sure. Jon, this is John. So we have a number of demos and pilots going on with existing customers as well as new customers with the systems. Some of those pilots are for applications -- majority of those are for pilots and applications the 150 can serve. And we still anticipate the 150 being useful in ramp and R&D. As we get through the year, we start shipping the 250s, we do believe that for production the 250 will be a much better solution. If you have a tremendous amount of R&D or ramp need for a customer that's running well over 100% utilization on the 150, the 250 is a better alternative. Because on a cost per unit measurement it's much lower. But for customers, we have some R&D customers that keep the machines only running at 50% or 60% utilized, being 10 times faster doesn't really buy you much if you're not a 100% utilized anyway. So for those customers we foresee that the 150 will continue to be a useful machine in the foreseeable future.

Got it. And then just relative to how you positioned yourselves in the investor day, call it a little bit over a year ago now. You had told us that the potential from Exensio and DFI could drive a doubling or even a tripling in your revenue power. How would you update that given the situation now with IYR slow engagement where it is?

Yes, I think great question, Jon. We actually still believe that opportunity is there. A couple of points I think on the IYR business. We've been working on this for quite a while. We know that our customers have made much bigger investments than we have. So they are as motivated or much more motivated than us to figure out how to improve their utilization, improve the amount of capacity in their factories. So we believe there is an opportunity there. We do still believe very heavily in the opportunity in China. However, if you look at the spend in China over the last year, well, our investment in China has been primarily with the local native Chinese companies. Most of the manufacturing that's come online in China has been at the multinationals, primarily in memory, right, Samsung and Hynix's [ph] memory investments in China which we do not participate in. So we still believe the China opportunity plays out the way that we thought it would, it will take -- it's taken longer than we would've liked. And we still see the significant opportunity on DFI that we saw, let's say, a year-and-a-quarter ago when we had that analyst day. I think the positive part has been we believe in a larger opportunity on Exensio than we saw even at that time. The more and more I spend time with SVPs in operations at fabless and system companies I keep on seeing more opportunity for us to expand Exensio. And I do believe that that is a more substantial opportunity than what we represented at the investors conference in November.

Okay, great. Thank you for the update. And just on the Gen 2 machine development. Are you up to the speed that you want to be in terms of being able to inspect structures and wafers for a unit of time? And when do you expect this to happen?

Yes, so are expecting to be, when we ship, at the performance that we've targeted for customers, just like the 150 where once it was in the field it sped up by a factor of 6X, there's a number of firmware upgrades that we anticipate on the 250 that will incrementally speedup its performance once it's out in the field again. Again, by a similar amount as what we saw on the 150. So, it'll ship at where we expected it to be, and it'll have a roadmap for basically getting faster than where we expect it to ship.

Got it, thanks. And then Greg, just a quick question on taxes, what was your cash tax rate in '17? I don't know if you mentioned before, but.

Yes, if you look at total cash taxes for '17, give me a second, they were actually -- let's see here. So in the quarter they were $64,000, and for the year it's a little complicated to calculate out, but they were actually about $1.2 million. When you look at that it had a lot of influences in the year. We had some windfall tax gains, both on the book tax rate and the cash taxes. So it was lower than we expected. Remember, we were expecting it to be about 22% to 25% I think of the pre-tax GAAP net income. When we look at 2018, the relationship that we've had in the past between GAAP and non-GAAP income is changing, so we actually for 2018 we think it will be 12% of non-GAAP pre-tax income. We are not going to bother trying to relate that as a percentage of the GAAP pre-tax. The book tax provision on the GAAP pre-tax is 18% down from what we were projecting to be 38% to 40%. Now we may see that come up a point or two as we get into the year and start to see some of the impacts and do some more measuring. It's not that we can complete everything with our tax advisors as once and so but we think 18% is a good starting point. So this is a significant drop as we move into the year and we start to approach book and cash tax starting to close that gap to where we are down to about a 6% differential right now.

Great. Thanks for the color. Last quick question, just the days outstanding and the receivables any outlook on that improving?

Yes, you know, if you remember last quarter, we improved it, but I said that that's a temporary thing because it is kind of like playing whack-a-mole with the customers overseas that you put your focus on one customer, get them caught up. But in the mean time, the other customer may get worse and that's exactly what we saw. We are placing more and more emphasis of resources both in the finance team and of the people allowed in the field responsibility for getting those numbers down, but I would not anticipate a great deal of change rapidly there. Well, we will try to keep pressure on such as it comes down year-over-year, but I wouldn't look forward to go down by 50 or 60 days all of a sudden. China just doesn't change that rapidly.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Your next question is from Tom Diffely with D. A. Davidson.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. This is Frank calling in for Tom. So my first question is to is mainly the DFI tool and so I was hoping you would give me some additional color in terms the timing of the release and how -- maybe that's how that's affecting, say, interest for the one safety [indiscernible]

Okay, yes. This is John. So as we said, we expect to be in the relationship by the end of Q2. We feel pretty comfortable about that. In terms of customers holding up purchases I think as some of our customers commented renewals and also new potential customers, they're curious about seeing demos on the 250, because we don't actually sell the machine, right. We provide the machine. We provide a certain capacity of measurements per hour. We will price to make it at the customers' option to increase -- for increased fees to increase the amount of measurement to measure per hour. I switch from one hardware platform to another. If they so choose, so we try to make individual machines and non-issue back-to-back for customer decision-making because as they need more capacity, for some customers we will make very much concentrating the 150 for 240. And we will use those 240, the odd 150s in other customer setting. By the way if you look at our yield ramp business, we've done the same with testers for years where we provide a certain capacity of tests and over the life of the contract we will take out some testers and put in other testers to give the customer a better mix of capacity and position and we will do the same in this case too. Like we are never turning over -- we were not planning on turning over title to test the machines themselves.

All right, [indiscernible] don't see customer you were having demos with, what's the interest like that other customers that do you think that you will be able to buy them all in a timely manner? Or how's this working out?

Yes, actually. I think the -- the long time the most significant interest we get is from the design community, design community is quite concerned about electrical performance on these advanced nodes as it relates to product performance and product reliability and as more of the designs that are going against a leading edge are very large chip sizes with applications and high performance computing and automotive, they become really concerned about parametric reliability and performance. That's why we held up to 250 a little bit because we knew that that's what the fabless community really cared about. So our marketing effort is much to the designers as it is to the fabs today and today we see very good interest at both but probably a little bit more interest with the product team than with the factories themselves.

Okay. Thank you so much.

But super-important by the way just because it allows you to go across multiple factories, so the work we do with a fabless company at foundry A immediately can be part of a discussion to foundry B or C because many of those larger fabless entities use multiple foundries.

Okay. That makes sense. Then switching over to the Exensio side, as it becomes a larger part of your business, won't you expect to see a more like a fully realized margin benefit if you will and I'm not sure if you have disclosed like the margins are like for Exensio but, can you give some additional color on that would be helpful.

Yes. At our Analyst Day we were expecting to return to our kind of our pre-investment levels of margins which means on a non-GAAP basis operating margins approaching 40%. We were hoping to be back at that I think it was in sometime in 19. I think we maybe more towards the end of '19 early '20 to actually achieve that and two of the ways we get there is by increasing participation and the revenue stream from DFI in Exensio. And we expect DFI and Exensio in the long run to have very similar margin profiles in that they would be at the gross margin line in the 75% to 85%, which will look very much like a technical software term license or an IP license. Right now, Exensio is approaching that because it is scaling up and is getting very close to that. We probably will obtain that by the time we exit '18 DFI because it's 7, 8 earlier stage and it's lifecycle is not there yet but on the one or two transactions that we had we see that we can there very easily, we just to have scale up and build up the organizations and so forth. So it will be the margin improvement and the bottom-line will be driven by DFI and Exensio.

Okay. That makes sense. And then, the last one the IYR business, just had [indiscernible] extending, any chance of the business something back at this point?

Yes, what we believe. As I said in my prepared remarks, we see like this embedded nonvolatile memory, we see many other applications where electrical characterization is important, important for development and important for control. As I said, we need to be a little bit more creative on delivery and on our business model, so what did I mean by that? But when you are bringing up a single node where it's being measured on one product and it's a two year R&D cycle, we can't just have a very large team with the vehicles and systems to help the customer get up that ramp quickly. Many of our customers for these embedded derivative program. They have four, five programs going simultaneously. We've been piloting throughout 2017, a lighter platform where we're using less support to help customers with a broader range of derivatives and we believe that overtime we will drive more benefit to them and to us and we may twist the business model in terms of what we get paid for and already have been doing that on some of these contracts. On the delivery portion versus what we make on the backend and how we charge for the backend where we look at too you know, how much risk we take on that backend fees. So we believe we will comeback but we will comeback looking different than it did when it was a new node every couple of years and there're three or four customers and you throw a huge slug of resources at that node. It will look very different than it does today at least, if I were going to handicap how it evolves. And there's some other elements looking out there. I mean, I don't think want to announce it's being done yet, but we are also looking at what else would the yield ramp make sense with the characterization vehicle technology makes sense to help the customers get over their challenge. A lot of the customers really value the vehicle data as a marketing tool to heir fabless customers, and we are looking at how we can help them do that in more efficient ways than we do today.

Okay, thank you very much.

And your next question is from Christian Schwab.

Hey, great, thanks for taking my question. I just want to understand that as a difference between the high single digits top line growth you expected now versus kind of the solid double digit previously is that all, is that a combination of the slowdown at 28-nanometer below at the Tier two customer base plus a push out of the DFI or is that just predominately IYR?

Yes, it's predominantly conservative this around the IYR business. What we've seen all year was the weakness in both the gain share revenues driven by the customer volumes but also whenever you see talk to these customers or read their press releases. They're cutting back on their capital expenditures and we think they're cutting back somewhat on their development programs which causes us to be pretty conservative on the near term outlook. So, as far as the rest of the business the Exensio and he DFI there's been no change in our outlook on those in fact as John said on the Exensio we actually have an expanded view of the opportunity there, but in the near term, it's really being cautious around the IYR business.

Okay. And then on the operating expenses, is that going to be held steady in '19 is there a chance that could go down given some of the reduction in R&D third party expense?

Right. Chris, this is John. I think it's little bit hard for us to forecast what we do with R&D expense in '19. I think if the universe of opportunities for DFI is leading as logic limited then we would reduce the and this is kind of off the cuff of my head but as I think about it we would reduce the overall R&D programs and focus on commercialization on leading as logic. We've been doing some early demonstration in other areas, non-leading edge and embedded non-volatile memory applications for DFI. If those panned out, we may have a different R&D profile. We got out into that time period, so little bit hard for us to say. Frankly, we are spending more there because we see a big opportunity and we've made some traction with DFI. So we should have accelerated top line growth before we make increased R&D spend and if we don't have a solid top line growth will have reduced R&D spend.

If you were going to sell a DFI box that the 150 of the 250 as a standalone box what would be the, should we assume would be the expected ASP?

I haven't really given at any thought Christian because it's not been something that we've been asked or thought about doing with the system because the box without the software and without the test vehicles it's not that useful. I don't really know what I mean, what we're trying to do I think is Greg said in his questions with the previous caller. Trying to make sure we're getting to good gross margins on the solution and I think if we get to the gross margins not as 75% it would be very reasonable for a hardware business and the reason why it's I think north of most hardware businesses in the capital equipment prototype margin is because the customers are valuing the software and IP that comes with the solution, so I think are peel off one part of it. It's hard to say what that piece of itself would be worth.

Okay. The reason I ask is some of the industry people that I talked to about kind of the challenges potentially facing you ramping that technology is that large scale purchasers don't like sharing money of success or paying kind of prorated for outcomes they would rather buy the box in the software and the test vehicles. And then figure out how to use their knowledge process and know how to use that tool or that box better than the competition similar to the way that they buy almost every other equipment box that they use and that's…

Yes, so couple things that I think people complicated the people I spoke to complicated a couple of things, so the separate how folks pay it's just an economic discussion if a customer came to us and said I don't want to pay ratably I want to pay for in a different way. I want to pay for it upfront I want to know if it's on number of years it's not in perpetuity that's just an economic discussion and we can sit on that discussion all the time. I think the part of that folks are complicated is what we've done in the ERM business and what we're doing in DFI. For our lead customers, we offer them a design what we call the design -- that's call it background for it, but basically designed development kit, so customers can design their own test structures they go in DFI as I that customer that we have in Asia they design their stone structures all the time those get put in the system, it's a software configuration. They run the analysis on what they do with it, so from a using standpoint it's no different than using any other piece of equipment in a factory or any other piece of software or even any of the time, so I don't want to share with PDF part of it or whatever you heard that's not actually something that they need to do or it's required to do with respect to the way customers work with us on DFI. So I'm choose to do that, so I do not our customer needs says what we'd like is we'd like to get, you guys to put down your content and then we'll put down our content to when we get the best of what PDF already provides and we differentiate on top of what we think you provide to. I suspect that for the leading customers as that is a very leading company out there in the world. That's how the law actually got out this capability. And the second part you bring up is just an economic discussion and frankly we're happy to sit down have that conversation with customers we can, it's all just a way of modeling out a good return for us and a good value to them.

Okay, perfect. Great. No other questions. Thank you.

And at this time, there are no more questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the program. Thank you for joining us today.