Some paraphrased quotes from the Blair Conference this week. If you are at all thinking about Aehr, or are skeptical about it, you should read this post carefully, and certainly read the Blair transcript.
" Every manufacturer of silicon carbide chips is currently at least in talks with us by now.
AI push causes great need for more band width and also more compute in data analyzing centers. Silicon photonics and optical IO (OIO) can multiply the bandwidth by 10x to 1000x. Aehr sees this as a big new market in the future. They already have a new machine burning chips for silicon photonics. The process takes 3x as long and their machine costs three times as much, because it’s a much more complicated process (not just getting rid of infant mortality but smoothing out the output from the chips).
Here’s a definition that I googled for Optical IO:
OIO is a optical interconnect solution integrated in the same package as the compute chips (CPUs, GPUs, XPUs), and designed to enable seamless communication among them in a distributed compute system (across boards, racks and compute rows) at the bandwidth density, energy cost, and latency comparable to in-package electrical interconnects.
Low latency, high-bandwidth density and low energy make OIO uniquely suitable for compute fabrics (i.e., memory-semantic fabrics), which are emerging as the key drivers of new data center architectures tailored for machine learning.
Let me elaborate a bit more about the importance of OIO for advanced AI and data center design, since it is very important. In 2022, we saw dramatic breakthroughs in machine learning driven by foundational models like ChatGPT.
These models are trained continuously and require thousands of GPUs (both for compute power and memory footprint), making the hardware that supports them a permanent part of the new data center infrastructure… OIO is uniquely suited to enable this to happen in terms of power usage and cost-efficiency."
Saul here: did you notice : “Every manufacturer of silicon carbide chips is currently at least in talks with us by now”. So much for customer concentration. When a company that no one had ever heard of, and who most people still haven’t heard of, like Aehr, is up 54% in 4 weeks, there’s probably a good business reason.
And some paraphrased information from their new order, and my comments at the time.
Aehr announced it has received $13.7 million in orders from its lead silicon carbide test and burn-in customer for WaferPak full wafer Contactors, to meet their increased production capacity needs for silicon carbide power semiconductors for the electric vehicle market.
This customer is a leading Fortune 500 supplier of semiconductor devices with a significant customer base in the automotive semiconductor market.
“As we have noted in the past, FOX-XP system orders are required to increase general manufacturing capacity, while our proprietary WaferPak Contactors are unique to each device design.
As our customers win new wafer designs from their customers, Aehr secures orders for new WaferPak Contactors to fulfill these new wins. Over time, we expect to see our follow-on WaferPak business grow both in absolute dollars and as a percent of our overall revenue."
Saul : The razor & blade model is growing. This should be very good news for AEHR. The $13.7 million order will be delivered over the next 6 months. That would mean 30% growth on quarterly revenues compared to actual consensus estimates.