PDF Solutions Inc

NASDAQ:PDFS

Earnings Call Analysis

PDF Solutions Eyeing Double-Digit Growth in 2024

PDF Solutions, thriving in a challenging semiconductor market, increased its full-year revenue by 12% to $165.8 million in 2023. Despite an industry decline of 10%, the company's analytics revenue grew by 17%, outpacing a 24% fall in IYR revenues. The fourth quarter saw a modest year-over-year increase in revenue to $41.1 million and a solid gross margin of 72%. Looking ahead, PDF Solutions anticipates significant bookings growth and backlog build-up in 2024, with expectations of a flat first half and a strong second half growth target of 20% year-over-year, aiming for similar double-digit growth as last year.

Record Revenue Amidst Semiconductor Downturn

In a challenging year, where the semiconductor industry contracted by 10%, the company succeeded in growing its revenue by 12%, amounting to a record $165.8 million. The key drivers for this growth were strong Q4 bookings and significant strides in product development, including successful releases and enhancements. These achievements are remarkable, especially considering the headwinds faced in the form of decreased shipping from equipment customers and wafer fabs within the second half of the year.

Positive Projections with Strong Bookings

Despite a projected downturn in Q1 and cautious customer reports, the company forecasts a return to growth in the second half of the year, driven by long-term industry trends such as artificial intelligence, the electrification of the energy economy, and the diversification of manufacturing. With bookings expected to significantly exceed the previous year's, optimism remains high for continued double-digit growth, mirroring last year's performance.

Expanding Backlog Signals Confidence

As 2023 drew to a close, the backlog stood at $230 million, reinforcing hope for robust future revenues. The year's achievements were highlighted by a 12% growth in revenue and a 17% growth in analytics revenue, demonstrating the company’s capacity to gain amidst shrinking industry revenues.

Analytics Dominance and Margin Increases

Analytics emerged as the company's backbone, generating 92% of annual revenues, bolstered by substantial Exensio product deals and adoption of eProbe DFI systems. Despite Cimetrix product shipment challenges, the full-year analytics revenue for 2023 surpassed the total company revenue of the prior year. Gross margins improved to 73%, up 2% from 2022, showing an ability to thrive even with a decrease in 100% gross margin gainshare segments.

Earnings and Operations Indicate Robust Health

The company exhibited operational prowess, controlling expenditure growth and expanding operating margins to 17%, with an earnings per share (EPS) increase of more than 20%, from $0.60 to $0.73. In addition, the acquisition of Lantern Machinery analytics for the EV battery initiative signals a strategic move into new growth areas.

Solid Financial Position and Future Outlook

With cash and equivalents, along with short-term investments totaling $135.5 million and no debt, the company stands on solid financial footing. Looking to 2024, the company maintains a positive outlook for growth, expecting revenue for the first half to be flat year-over-year but setting the stage for significant growth in the latter half, driven by critical macro trends.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Operator]

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the PDF Solutions, Inc. Conference Call to discuss its financial results for the fourth quarter and year-end 2023 Conference Call ending Sunday, December 31, 2023. [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 at PDF's website at www.pdf.com.

Some of the statements that will be made in the course of this conference are forward-looking statements, 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 17 through 30 of PDF's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, and similar disclosures and 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 Adnan Raza, PDF's Chief Financial Officer.

Mr. Kibarian, please go ahead.

[John Kibarian, executive]

Thank you for joining us on today's call. If you've not already seen our earnings press release and management report for the fourth quarter and the full year, please go to the Investors section of our website where each has been posted.

Today, we'll start with a review of 2023 with a particular focus on Q4. I will provide our perspective on the semiconductor market and then conclude with our outlook on PDF Solutions prospects for the year and beyond. Adnan will then provide an overview of our financial results and his perspective on the business before we turn the call over for questions.

Looking back on 2023, the company made great strides in our goal of being the end-to-end analytics platform for the semiconductor and electronics industries. This progress is particularly visible at our Users Conference in October. First, attendance was fantastic with over 300 people registered from over 100 companies, which represents 2x the turnout of our last conference.

We had presentations from many of our customers and partners, including Intel, Analog Devices, Renesas, SAP, Advantest and others. Second, our developers and application engineers and product managers revealed our road maps and demonstrated our new products.

Customers described how they use our products and platform to revolutionize their technology development, manufacturing operations and product quality. Talks included their use of our Design-for-Inspection to accelerate bring up of new products and processes, guide analytics AI solution for product engineering to find yield issues faster, our test cell automation to enable a 25% reduction in operator overhead and our Sabine manufacturing hub to enable manufacturing digital transformation by connecting to the enterprise.

We also provided updated information for investors. Turnout from our investors and analysts was substantially above our previous meeting. Overall, we received positive feedback from Our community of the customers, partners, investors and analysts.

2023 was also a year for significant progress in our product development. Our eProbe DFI team was able to ship 2 machines this year, one to an existing customer, and in the fourth quarter, a machine for a manufacturing evaluation by a new customer. The eProbe model shipped in 2023 has 2x the throughput of the previous generation, and it was optimized to find yield issues at both the middle of line and the metallization layers.

Our Exensio and Sapience product teams work together to deliver our Sapience manufacturing hub and the analytics applications to link SAP's ERP system to the factory information. We signed a contract for the first customer for this solution in 2023.

Finally, we released our ML Ops product. Customers tell us that the complexity of test is increasing due in part to advanced packaging. They have a desire to apply AI ML to improve product quality, yield and operations. Building AI models is one thing, putting them online and then operating properly while producing millions of chips is another.

The challenge is to get data from the entire supply chain available at the right machine so the AI models can be applied in real time to the chips manufacturing and tests. PDF's ML Ops enables customers to solve this challenge in putting AI models on the production floor by orchestrating the movement of data, the management of models and the monitoring of the model's execution and production flow. Customer interest in our ML Ops has been fantastic. We are in pilot deployments with customers this quarter.

While interest in our ML ops has been great, the fact is, there are not enough engineers in the industry that are both familiar with AI and semiconductor manufacturing. Teaming with Intel and Carnegie Mellon University, we pioneered a new Masters course this past fall. The students were able to work with real-world data to develop new AI models using Exensio software. Feedback has been and we look forward to expand this cost offering in the future.

All of our marketing, product development and field applications effort resulted in positive growth in the business. For the year, we grew revenue 12% against a backdrop of the industry that contracted 10%. As I said earlier, Adnan will comment on the financials in depth.

While bookings in the first 3 quarters were muted, Q4 bookings were strong, and we again built backlog. Bookings in Q4 were driven by Exensio as customers deployed our process control manufacturing analytics and test solutions.

The strong bookings helped our revenue performance despite weakness in gain share in run time licenses due to equipment customers and wafer fabs shipping less product than we originally expected for the second half of the year.

Finally, in the quarter, we booked our first contract as part of the DoD Mi Commons program. The Southern California universities and defense contractors wanted to leverage Exensio to connect advanced labs with contractor's fabs to smooth the transfer of new technologies to products. We are proud to be included in this program and work is already underway.

In summary, with progress we made in 2023 and PDF is driving the reinvigoration of the IC manufacturing and technology development by bringing AI and ML to the factory floor.

Turning to our view of 2024. Many of our fabless foundry and equipment customers are reporting relatively weak first half of 2024, and in many cases, customers are reporting Q1 will be down. They generally expect now that the second half of the year will return to growth. While some customers are experiencing near-term weakness, the long-term trends driven by increased intelligence -- increasingly intelligent semiconductor products that make AI possible, the electrification of the energy economy and the geographic diversification of manufacturing are only accelerating.

Our outlook for the year reflects both the short-term weakness in the IC industry, and the longer-term macro trends that can have significant growth. Overall, we expect bookings for the year to be up significantly versus last year, and we expect to build backlog meaningfully. Our revenue model for the year suggests the first half of the year will be roughly flat when compared to the last year and growth returning to 20% on a year-over-year basis in the second half of the year.

Overall, we expect double-digit growth for the year similar to last. When we look to the progress we made in 2023, and consider the opportunities we see in front of us in 2024, we truly appreciate the effort of our employees, contractors, customers and partners that have positioned the company for the future.

Now, I'll turn the call over to Adnan for more details and comments on our results. Adnan?

[Adnan Raza, executive]

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to review the financial results of the full year and the fourth quarter of 2023. As John said, we posted our earnings release and a management report in the Investor Relations section of our website. Our Form 10-K with final results will be filed with the SEC by the end of February after the annual audit is complete. Please note that all the financial results we discuss in today's call will be on a non-GAAP basis, and a reconciliation to GAAP financials is provided in the materials on our website.

Like John, I'm also pleased that we ended the fourth quarter of 2023 by growing our backlog versus the third quarter of '23. Our backlog at the end of the year was $230 million. For the full year 2023, we generated record revenue of $165.8 million versus $148.5 million in 2022, a 12% year-over-year increase.

Two items are worth highlighting here. First, our analytics revenue grew 17% for the full year 23% on a year-over-year basis. Second, we delivered the 12% total company revenue growth rate for the full year against the backdrop of a 24% decline in IYR revenues. And as John pointed out, an industry that contracted 10%.

For the fourth quarter of '23, our total revenue was $41.1 million, up slightly on a year-over-year basis with analytics revenue growing 9% and IYR revenue declining 55%. For the fourth quarter, our gross margin was 72%, and we reported EPS of $0.15 per share.

Turning back to the full year '23 results. I will now provide detailed comments. On a full year basis, our gross margin was 73%, and we reported EPS of $0.73. For the full year, analytics revenue increased 17% to $152.1 million versus the prior year, despite the fact that Cimetrix connectivity runtime licenses which generate revenue and customers ship their equipment were down double-digit percentage due to decline in end market equipment shipments. We are making solid progress on our mission to become the leading analytics software provider for the global semiconductor supply chain.

Analytics has solidified as the dominant component of our overall business and is now 92% of total revenues for the full year. Important contributions to analytics revenue came from Exensio product deals we signed during the year, particularly some large double-digit million dollar deals signed in the fourth quarter, adding to our recurring revenues.

Analytics revenue also saw contributions from continued adoption of our eProbe DFI systems by key customers. We are pleased that a second leading-edge customer now has our eProbe DFI machine at their facility for manufacturing evaluation.

With respect to Cimetrix products, we continue to see weakness in equipment shipments affecting the contribution to revenue, which declined on a year-over-year basis for the full year. We stay engaged with our equipment software customers to watch for signs of growth in tool shipments.

Just as we highlighted last year on our earnings call with the full year 2022 results, it is worth noting for this year 2023 as well at our full year analytics revenue for 2023 was more than the total company revenue for the prior year 2022. This is yet another year in a row for this noteworthy achievement.

For the full year 2023, IYR revenue comprised 8% of total revenues at $13.8 million and was down 24% on a year-over-year basis, driven by completion of some fixed fee engagement projects and reduction in revenues from gainshare primarily from reduced production volumes at key gainshare customers.

Gross margin for the full year '23 increased to 73%, up from 71% for 2022, shocking another year of expanding gross margins. Despite the fact that gainshare, which is 100% gross margin decreased, we were able to grow gross margins in part due to better optimized spending on cloud infrastructure as we improve the business scale.

Turning to operating expenses. We also control the growth of our expenses to expand the operating margins to 17% for the full year '23 compared to 15% for the full year 2022. During the year, we managed our resources to better distribute use between R&D and presales activities while funding the growth of our sales team to engage in the opportunities we are seeing in our pipeline. For the year 2023, we reported EPS of $0.73 a share, a meaningful growth of more than 20% compared to the $0.60 per share we reported for the prior year 2022.

During the year, we generated positive operating cash flow of $14.6 million, of which we spent $11.3 million on CapEx for data collection systems for our leading-edge business. $1.8 million on the acquisition of Lantern Machinery analytics for our EV battery initiative and about $0.7 million on share buybacks. We are pleased with another year of positive operating capital generation, consistent with our history.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the year '23 with cash and equivalents and short-term investments of $135.5 million compared to $139.2 million at the end of 2022, and we continue to carry no debt. We're proud of the performance of '23 against the macro environment and remain committed to the long-term targets we set at our Analyst Day in October last year of 20% year-over-year total company revenue growth rate, 75% gross margin and 20% operating margin.

Now turning to our financial outlook. For 2024, we look forward to another growth year. As John said, and stated in our earnings release, our outlook for the year reflects both the short-term weakness in the semiconductor industry and the strength of our pipeline, bolstered by the macro trends of distributed manufacturing, energy electrification, and AI, which can drive significant growth. As a result, we expect revenue for the first half of 2024 to be flat over the comparable period of the prior year, and for revenue for the second half of the year to grow by 20% over the comparable period of the prior year.

With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator to commence the question-and-answer session. Operator?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Blair Abernethy from Rosenblatt Securities.

[Blair Abernethy, analyst]

John, my first question is just around DFI. It's great you've shipped to a second customer. I just wonder if you can give us some -- just some color around that? And was the -- have you started to recognize any revenue from that at this point? And sort of what does the pipeline look like for DFI as you kind of look forward into 2024?

[John Kibarian, executive]

Sure. So yes, we ship in the fourth quarter, this is for -- I said [indiscernible] manufacturing evaluation. We did the technical evaluation of what the machine is capable of seeing by having the customer ship wafers to us here, quite a number of wafers came to our facility here in California, but this is a customer in East Asia.

So we had to ship the machine over there. And the purpose there is to demonstrate that it's able to really be used in the production facility that it maintains the uptimes that it has the repeatability as you scan wafers, and wafers, and wafers, day after day. And our Users Conference this past fall, our early adopter customer was able to show what they were able to do using the machine at our Users Conference. So we have good confidence that we will be able to demonstrate success and then convert that into revenue upon achievement of the milestones that we've set out for this evaluation.

In terms of the outlook for this year, we do anticipate adding additional customers in this year as well as expanding within existing customers in this year, a customer this year. We expect to be able to ship just a couple of machines, but we'll be able to -- we've already ordered capital for quite a bit more -- so we're able to start shipping as we get to the end of this year and early next year at a more accelerated rate than we're shipping, let's say, this year. But we expect to end this year with quite a few machines contributing to revenue. So you say that today, this last year, 2 machines contributed revenue. We expect over 2x that number by the end of this year.

[Blair Abernethy, analyst]

Okay. Great. And I'm just wondering, maybe you can help us with your guidance, the thoughts and rationale, I guess, in your guidance to the -- I mean, I can understand with the IYR business and equipment shipments still being pretty tepid for the first half. But what gives you sort of confidence that you can go from effectively flat first half to a pretty substantial second half growth?

[John Kibarian, executive]

Yes. So it's a great question, Blair. It's the bookings activity that we have ongoing, some of which completed in Q4, as Adnan said, a couple of very large contracts that have signed in fourth quarter, which saw the bookings in the fourth quarter were large. And then this quarter and next quarter, we have quite a bit of activity going on.

We expect to build on that bookings momentum in Q4 and the first half of this year to be substantially over the second half of last year from a booking standpoint. And then given the ratable nature of the business, as you get through the year, that just drives incremental growth. So we book in Q1, it will drive very little revenue growth -- very little revenue in Q1. It will drive incrementally more in Q2 and then a lot more as you get in the second half of the year. And similar to the bookings we do in Q2.

The reason for [indiscernible] are more internal or like our specific business situation with customers that it is the macro involvement. There are activities that we see -- that we're in deep discussions with customers that we feel pretty confident about. The gainshare in the runtime licenses [indiscernible] more like the overall weather outside of us.

[Blair Abernethy, analyst]

So I get it. So it's more in your control more what you have business as opposed to waiting for the market to come back to you on the equipment side or on the Cimetrix.

[John Kibarian, executive]

Correct. Right. We're not forecasting. We are forecasting equipment getting better as we get towards the second half of the year modestly. We're not forecasting a ton of growth in gainshare. We are really forecasting a ton of growth in Analytics primarily around the selling activities, some of which happened in Q4 and more of that happens as we get in the second half of this year -- sorry, the first half of this year, Q1 and Q2, in particular.

[Blair Abernethy, analyst]

Okay. Okay. Great. And just one last question, if I can. Just -- it sounds like you've made progress on the partnership side with SAP, would there be any other significant partnership you'd highlight, John?

[John Kibarian, executive]

I think what we did -- in my prepared remarks to talk about the new product release on SAP. Of course, we've had a number of products that we've done in conjunction with Advantest that are generating revenue and continue to generate momentum. Some of the pilots we have on ML Ops also interfaced with that -- with the Advantest infrastructure in their Edge box.

So we do expect those two partners to be driving additional bookings as we go throughout this year. When we look at our other partners beyond that, we are in active work with them on additional customers. And we do expect that more of our partners will start driving bookings with us as we drive the go to market with a number of pilots with customers.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of William Jellison of D.A. Davidson & Co.

[Will Jellison, analyst]

I'll ask two and then get back in queue. The first one is I'm wondering if you can share any more color on the Analytics revenue per customer metric. Any updated metrics on that front or just overall observations. And then within that, the level of module uptake you see within your existing customer base as well?

[Adnan Raza, executive]

Yes, absolutely. And look, every quarter, we post this metric as we did the last quarter as well. And we're calculating that number finalizing it to post for the Analyst Day itself. But over the last few quarters, we've seen the trend of that number going up, and we would expect that this quarter, that would be the case as well.

In terms of continued -- in terms of adoption with additional customers, it's nice to see that customers are using our products on a larger scale as referenced by the comments that we made in the call about the 2 large customers with the large deals that we talked about, the double-digit million dollar deal. So state for that metric as we post our deck in the next few days about the investor about the details on some of those metrics.

[Will Jellison, analyst]

Absolutely. Okay. And then the second question was to your investment in sales and marketing. I remember getting the impression from your Analyst Day last October that a lot of the incremental gross profit that PDF is going to get as it approaches that 75% margin target was going to get reinvested into a more concerted effort in sales and marketing. And I was just wondering on the level of intensity PDF is presently investing there to capture those opportunities and whether or not we should expect that to step up even further as it pursues more of those opportunities?

[Adnan Raza, executive]

Yes. Look, I mean, through this year, and frankly, early on in the year, we've talked about increased spend that we would plan to do in the sales and marketing side. And [ candidly ], if you -- I know we reported as a combined number within the SG&A bucket, but I'll tell you, G&A is not where we with some of that growth, it's really been the S&M side. We have hired some new people, especially given some of the M&A and the dislocation in the market that we saw to grab some of the good salespeople and add them to our portfolio.

And back to the question where you ask that you add the 2 together and you say, okay, great, you spend on S&M. What are the early proof points. I think the tone on the call that you're hearing from us is along those lines. You're catching us at a good time. This is the time of the year we also prepare our annual operating plan and present to the Board. And the early views of that, we do a top-down view. And then as we presented to the Board, we end up looking at every deal with the timing for the year, and that's how we're able to give you this guidance that we are sharing today.

So yes, we've increased the spend in S&M is starting to show early results in the strength of the pipeline and hopefully, the 2 deals in Q4 that we did chock up some of that benefit already and hopefully more to come.

[John Kibarian, executive]

Yes. I think just -- I think maybe you asked a little bit around, okay, what does that mean for this year? I think when you look at a quarterly basis, we cap it up every quarter. But now as we get into this year, we will make modest incremental investments, but a lot of the reason why sales and marketing expenses this year will be higher than last year, as you have a full year's accounting of the increase that happened throughout 2023.

So we don't expect that we're going to incrementalize -- incrementally increase it at a much more rapid rate. In fact, arguably, it will be at a more muted rate. But because you've a full year's expense, on an annualized basis, it will be a higher number than it was last year, right? But on a quarterly basis, not a lot higher than Q4, it just modestly go up over Q4. I think that might have been what you were kind of looking for.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Gus Richard from Northland.

[Auguste Richard, analyst]

Yes. The 2 large deals that you've signed in the quarter, were those sort of enterprise-wide fab test, assembly or were they more point products? And could you give any color on is it like Analog Industrial or leading Edge, what kind of customers?

[John Kibarian, executive]

Sure. So I can answer that. Both of them are front-end fab related. Both of them are process control related with advanced analytics capability in one case and more basic capabilities than the other. One, they're both enterprise-wide in that they're going to cross all of their facilities worldwide. And both as a result, relatively large.

These are customers that are -- have been customers before and now are deploying more broadly, in one case, with more advanced capabilities on top of the base capabilities. And so yes, these are -- we've been talking throughout the year that there's a number of large contracts that we've been working on. These were two of them. There are others that we are continuing to work on.

This is kind of getting back to Will's questions around the investment in sales and marketing that some of the early fruits, we expect substantial step up again in this first half of the year as we closed a number of other larger deals in this first part of the year that are all kind of related to these investments, building even larger than what we did in those two, and those were pretty substantial for us.

[Auguste Richard, analyst]

Okay. And then just -- can you give us a sense of like the size of your pipeline, you closed a couple of deals? Are there 5, 10? How many more of these enterprise-wide deals are you currently working on?

[John Kibarian, executive]

Yes. I mean, top of my head, I don't know if I could give a really great answer, Gus. I mean, as always is the case for us on a dollar value basis, we live by the 80-20 rule. So -- there's maybe even 90-10, there are probably 10% of the deals that represent a sizable 80-plus percent of the dollar value because these enterprise things tend to be quite large.

There are some -- that we're working on right now that are, as I said, substantially bigger than those first 2 that are going to drive a meaningful piece of our bookings this year. And then there's a number that are similar size to those. A handful of them, I don't know off the top of my head, but there's fair number.

Collectively overall, as I said in my prepared remarks, we do have a lot of confidence about the bookings this year. It's the level of activity with customers is quite meaningful, given those 3 drivers that I spoke about, electrification of the energy economy that's really just driving high-voltage silicon battery technologies. The advanced process nodes really geared towards AI, that includes advanced packaging.

So a ton of activity we have going out for the ML Ops piece there and then all the DFI and leading-edge capabilities all around just advanced semiconductors driven by AI. And then the geographic diversification, customers really want to get to these more enterprise-wide control schemes because of the nature of their manufacturing, 2 in Q4 kind of somewhat representative of that, but we see a number of those. So overall, it's probably -- I don't know in the 10 range, but there's probably 2 or 3 that drive a sizable fraction of that. And those 10 probably are more than 80% of the bookings value for the year.

[Auguste Richard, analyst]

Got it. Okay. That was very helpful. And then just flipping to DFI. It sounds like you've got pretty decent visibility through this year in terms of what you're building. Over the last 90 days, have you -- I know there's some long lead time items for DFI, have you had to sort of go back to your vendors and order more material for potentially deliveries in 2025?

[John Kibarian, executive]

It's a great point, Gus. Yes, if you look at our spend on capital, you'll see it step up in 2024 versus 2023, and 2023 had a modest increase versus 2022, if my number -- memory is correct. And that step up is because of ordering for things we -- machines we expect to ship in 2025, more than what we expect to ship in 2024 per say, it does impact '24 a little bit. And yes, we've been going back to our vendors to try to tighten up availability and delivery times.

We would like to get, and we feel like we're getting close to the point where we're really going to be looking at how we can pull those in for -- because of the customer interest. So yes, we are -- you'll see the spend go up this year. It's anticipation of 2025.

We're setting ourselves up to be able to ship significantly more in 2025 than what we're shipping in 2024. And we are going back and even discussing what the vendors on if we needed to pull in even more for that, how would we be able to -- more than what we're already planning, how we'd be able to affect that. That would probably not affect our capital spend in 2024 very much, but it could affect our capital spend in the first part of 2025, and then shipments, that would impact the second half of 2025. We think we have the first half of 2025 mostly okay.

[Auguste Richard, analyst]

Got it. Got it. That's super helpful. And then you mentioned in your prepared remarks that you expected to add additional customers this year, any color, is that memory, advanced logic? Is there any -- is it 1 or 2? Any color there is helpful.

[John Kibarian, executive]

Yes. So we continue to see opportunities in advanced logic and we do expect advanced logic incrementally to contribute this year above what it contributed last year. We've also -- we've been in the industry for quite a while. And so we -- as you know, PDF has worked on yield ramps all around the world on -- with virtually everybody I was chatting with. An executive at one of the companies that's just getting into what would be more advanced than a trailing edge, but now 2 nanometer.

But as you think about everything from 12-nanometer 28, and we've started to see interest in those areas where people said, hey, we had this, it could really accelerate our bringing up of new products and one other guys joke with me, hey, John, we worked on URAMs with you at my past company and these notes and this would have really helped.

So we think that the aperture is broader than just the leading edge. As you know, we were very focused on just what can you do in the leading edge in some way because it's a talisman about where you're going for the industry. But now we're going to double back and look at some of those other opportunities. And we're also starting to get some early looks in the memory space where we're starting to have some early dialogue.

So part of our goal this year is to make sure we've got enough capacity in our own lab to be able to do demos and evals for customers, much like we did for that Asian fab in 2023 that enabled us to ship at the end of the year. We'd like to be able to do that this year for some additional customers in the trailing edge, quasi trailing edge and memory while we continue to penetrate them on the leading edge logic.

[Auguste Richard, analyst]

Okay. And I promise this is my last question. When you talk to these not leading edge, but more advanced geometry logic guys, DFI would be helpful for them because it would accelerate their learning over like the Parametric Test you used to use? Or is it a cost savings because you wouldn't scrap as many wafers as you go through the development process.

[John Kibarian, executive]

It's a great question, Gus. It's for bringing up the node and controlling it. If you just look at -- PDF has had yield models based on product design layouts forever, we typically was on a test vehicle to extract kind of the intrinsic failure rates of metal shorts and opens, contact -- open and [ contacted a short ], those models would always show you that half of the yield loss you would see because it opens between layers, shorts and opens between layers. But you can't see them optically.

So the customer would run a test vehicle or short flows to see the single layer shorts and opens in the between layer shorts and opens. But then if you want to know, well, what does it really do on product? Well, our test vehicle couldn't give you not because it's a test vehicle. And the inspection tools can just tell you what's happening at layer. They can't really tell you, do you have a failure in a billion or 0.1 failures in a billion or 10 failures in a billion on the contact and via layer? And the eProbe is the only thing that can only do that, can measure tens of billions and tell you, okay, what you [ reaffiliate ] across all the layup clouds on a real product. And that really -- that was the part the guy says like, oh God, John, when we went from your test vehicle to product, we got caught by some issues, it took us months to solve it because we had no way to look at it, [ Depot ] gives you a way to look at that.

And that's why the kind of -- as people see that this is real, you can measure 10 billion contacts and Vias, right? That's change of the game, right? And so even for 12-nanometer or 28-nanometer, that actually matters quite a bit. And we've always noted in our models, it's half year yield loss. Just hard to see in line.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] At this time, there are no more questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the program. Thank you for joining us on today's call.