Aart de Geus
Analyst · Griffin Securities. Please go ahead.
Okay. Let me start. Of course, your question can lead to 0.5 hour dissertation, which I will not do. But the first thing to start with is that there's still a continuation of adoption of extremely advanced nodes, and with that comes a nonstop demand for all of our tools, all the ones reaching deep into the physics and certainly all the physical design tools to be up to speed with these nodes. And by the way, their development is less clearly defined in time, meaning that a new node comes out, and then within three months, there's another version of that node and another three months, another version. And so there's constant adaptation as people are really squeezing out the max. Now in parallel to that, maybe less relevant but still worthwhile to note is that some of the older nodes are also being put more to use as people figure out that was the new tools, they can squeeze out more value out of those nodes and not all the products need the most advanced capabilities. Having said that, on the advanced capabilities, if there are two or three trends I could highlight for the tools, one is this notion that the capacity of the tools needs to continue to increase, because on Moore's Law, the one factor that really has not slowed down is the notion of increased density. Still more transistors per chip and that adds a lot of value for what you can do. In order to do that, we need to make sure that our tools interact well with each other. And so the notion of Fusion is really profound because it attempts to have every tool understand somewhat what the other tools will do and essentially have better team play, so to speak. What comes on top of that is that now the application of AI is absolutely deeply anchored already in our business. And we have capabilities in every one of our tools that are impacted by improvements through AI and increasingly, we'll see capabilities between the tools. The last comment I'll make is in the verification space, where a trend that we had diagnosed early on continues at high speed, which is with the strengthening of the chips and the combinations of chips, and I'm looking here at things that are assembled in a 3D fashion of multiple chips talking to each other such as processors and memories and maybe sensors, the importance of being able to verify both the hardware and the software. At the same time continues to grow because whichever is the slowest or the worst of in quality will determine when something goes to market. And so that is the area where advanced stimulation techniques, emulation, prototyping play in. So those are sort of the forces that govern what we do. And I can bet that by next week, there will be yet another demand for something to keep going because there is no deceleration in sight.