Aehr Test Systems (NASDAQ: AEHR), a worldwide supplier of semiconductor test and reliability qualification equipment, today announced it has received a $1.3 million order from a current customer for two FOX-NP systems, adding to their existing fleet to provide additional test capacity for new product engineering characterization and qualification of photonics devices. The FOX-NP Systems are expected to ship within the next few months.
Gayn Erickson, President and CEO of Aehr Test Systems, commented, “This customer is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and is using Aehr as their plan of record for all wafer level burn-in and stabilization of their silicon photonics wafers today. These new FOX-NP systems are configured with two test blades to allow two wafers to be tested in parallel using our proprietary WaferPak Contactors, and each system allows the customer to test either two of the same wafers or two different wafers with different test plans. This customer is expected to purchase sets of Aehr WaferPaks for these systems at a later date. In addition, this customer continues to forecast significant growth in shipments for silicon photonics devices that we expect to drive the need for additional production burn-in capacity for multiple years into the future.
“Stabilization of optical transmitters embedded in silicon photonics as well as several other photonics devices is a critical manufacturing step where the devices are subjected to high temperatures and power to stabilize their output power. This has traditionally been done in package or module form and is a very costly step that is not prone to high parallelism or mass production. Aehr’s FOX-NP systems used for engineering, device qualification, and new product introduction as well as our FOX-XP™ multi-wafer production systems are able to burn-in and stabilize these devices while still in wafer form on 100mm to 300mm diameter wafers. The systems can test not only 100% of the devices on each wafer up to thousands of devices, but can do this on up to nine 2000 watt high power wafers or up to eighteen 1000 watt wafers at a time in a single FOX-XP system. This results in both savings from removing failed devices before they are packaged or put into modules later in the process, and significant cost savings associated with stabilization of these devices at massive parallelism while still in wafer form.
“We continue to be very optimistic about the silicon photonics and photonics sensors markets and believe they will be significant growth drivers for Aehr. Yole Research forecasts the silicon photonics market to grow at a 49% cumulative average growth rate (CAGR) from 2021 through 2026. The rapid growth of integrated optical devices in data centers and data center interconnect infrastructure, mobile devices, automotive applications, and now wearable biosensor markets is driving substantially higher requirements for initial quality and long-term reliability, and they are increasing with every new product generation. We believe these new applications are driving an entirely new level of quality and reliability expectation for these systems and pose a significant long-term growth opportunity for Aehr.
“In addition to the growth opportunities of silicon photonics in fiberoptic transceivers, companies are now making public mention of adding optical transmission and reception to semiconductors beyond just the silicon used for combined silicon, laser transmitters and optical detection receivers for discrete fiber optic transceiver modules. Companies like Intel and Nvidia are talking about integrating fiber optic transceivers into their core and graphics processor units (CPUs and GPUs). Long term, we see integrated silicon photonics devices being integrated directly into other semiconductors directly or using multi-die or 3D packaging technologies that will further increase the total available market and demand for our FOX wafer level and singulated die products.”
The FOX-XP system, available with multiple WaferPak Contactors (full wafer test) or multiple DiePak™ Carriers (singulated die/module test) configurations, is capable of functional test and burn-in/cycling of integrated devices such as silicon carbide power devices, silicon photonics as well as other optical devices, 2D and 3D sensors, flash memories, Gallium Nitride (GaN), magnetic sensors, microcontrollers, and other leading-edge ICs in either wafer form factor, before they are assembled into single or multi-die stacked packages, or in singulated die or module form factor.
