Scott A. Bibaud
Thanks, Mike. Right now, there are a number of macro factors in the semiconductor industry that are in favor of our product initiatives. For this reason, wafer activity at Atomera and customers is currently running at a much higher level than we typically experience, which reflects the number of irons Atomera has in the fire. On today's call, I'd like to give you a flavor of our activity and how new applications of MST are driving our business. Let me start with a review of our work with licensees. A few months ago, STMicro announced a new initiative to reshape their manufacturing footprint to 300-millimeter silicon production. It was not entirely clear to us how this would affect the Smart Power segment, Originally, the first BCD 110 process with MST was to launch using 200-millimeter wafers and later, the process would be ported to 300-millimeter. We just heard recently as part of the reshaping initiative that ST has changed plans and decided to go directly to 300-millimeter, which will delay the rollout of BCD 110 with MST. We do not have a revised schedule, but it's now clear that we will not enter process qualification in 2025. While the delay is disappointing, ST's ambitions for advanced BCD are definitely very aggressive, targeting a significantly higher 300-millimeter wafer capacity at full build-out than we initially expected. We are very excited by the revenue potential represented by those numbers. The move to 300-millimeter wafers is logical since they are fundamentally less expensive than 200-millimeter, which hopefully should assist adoption. As mentioned on our last call, ST has continued to support the adoption of MST in multiple other applications with more BUs expressing new interest this past quarter as well. We've reached a new high watermark on customer wafer runs at both our facility and our customers' fabs. Many of our licensees are in the process of doing demo runs with us that we hope would lead to production decisions. And during the last quarter, we were able to deliver to them new insights into incremental improvements they can get with MST. Let me provide a few updates on some important customers. At JDA1, meetings with a new senior level management team in conjunction with support from our capital equipment partner makes us believe that the wafers we are working on for them will drive a decision to use MST in a new application. Both JDA2 and our fabless licensee are in the process of doing wafer runs with us. We believe these will be critical in reaching a production decision once they've been able to test the final devices. At our foundry licensee, we are currently in a TCAD exercise to define our next steps as well. Two calls ago, I spoke about a couple of new potentially transformative customers we had started working with. Each of these customers is now running wafers with MST, one in a large-scale demo plan encompassing 2 business units and the other engaged on multiple wafer runs to test out different MST applications. Several other customers are in various stages of investigating MST for their products as well. As I said at the beginning of the call, our team is very busy right now, and this is a real positive for our future business. A substantial part of our activity is targeting the advanced gate-all-around and DRAM areas where our source strain diffusion blocking capabilities are particularly interesting, but by no means the only solution we are offering. In these new nodes, everyone is focused on yields and MST is a tool that can help improve yields. In the power area, our ability to simulate different architectures and integration techniques using TCAD and our own internally developed AI tools has allowed us to propose solutions to customers, which we do not believe are possible to implement without MST and have led to potential breakthrough levels of performance. Our work with Sandia and other partners on gallium nitride is making great progress. This past quarter, we've come to understand even better how MST can benefit GaN devices, causing us to expand our focus from exclusively GaN for power to also include GaN for RF. To accelerate this work during the last quarter, we announced a strategic collaboration with Incize, a well-recognized and respected RF test house. They will help us characterize this technology in terms that the market will appreciate, making it easier for designers to translate our process changes to RF electrical spec improvements. We believe RF will be an important growth area for GaN in the future, and several potential customers have already stepped forward expressing an interest in our work. Finally, in RF-SOI, we have expanded our offerings to also include the key devices for low-noise amplifiers or LNAs. I'd like to take a few minutes to give some background on why this LNA offering is so important. Historically, we've worked with RF-SOI customers primarily on RF power switches. Last year, many of those customers started asking if we could help improve LNAs in their mobile phone front-end products. LNAs are the technology used by cellular phones to receive and amplify small signals. There are a number of reasons why LNAs need further improvement at this time. Carrier aggregation was introduced in LTE Advanced to increase peak data rates and network capacity by combining multiple spectrum chunks or component carriers into a single data channel. Manufacturers have been aggregating up to 4 carriers. But in the future, we expect to see 6 carriers, which means that more LNAs must be turned on to receive these signals, significantly increasing power consumption. New frequency bands associated with the evolution of 5G and 6G cellular are also driving the need for more active LNAs. The net result is that to bring features that customers are demanding for new phones to market, a solution to lower LNA power consumption must be found. That's where MST comes in. We took existing MST RF-SOI transistor silicon test data and then use TCAD to reoptimize implants for the LNA devices. We determined that MST can significantly improve the performance of LNAs by lowering the circuit bias current and hence, the power consumption. We believe based on market reaction, we have started promoting this capability just at the right time. Recently, we presented our findings at an RF technical conference and has generated lots of inbound interest. Indeed, during the last few months, we've worked with several different RF-SOI manufacturers to start new wafer runs using our partner, Soitec special ultrathin RF-SOI wafers to prove out those LNA benefits. We'll be working hard to shore up this evidence with more data to entice customers to take it to market quickly. What is particularly exciting is that we can provide this LNA benefit in addition to the power switch benefit on RF front ends with a single deposition of MST on a wafer. So our customer can get 2 much needed solutions for the cost of 1, which should make it even more attractive. We expect that this type of high visibility solution with end customer pull should go to market more quickly than a general performance improvement. I'm always impressed by the amazingly high levels of creativity and innovation demonstrated by Atomera employees across many diverse fields. And today, I've spoken about some of the solutions we found for industry problems. You can also measure this innovation by the number of patents we file and have approved. This past quarter, our tally of issued and pending patents exceeded 400, which is quite a milestone for a company of our size. We are definitely punching above our weight. In the last month, we also joined the National Semiconductor Technology Center, which has a goal of extending U.S. leadership in semiconductor technology. There, we expect to provide important contributions but also benefit from the NSTC focus on reducing the time and cost to prototype new semiconductor technologies like the ones Atomera is bringing to market. We believe this organization will help create the ecosystem necessary to continue the advancement of Moore's Law. Finally, I'll just reiterate how many active engagements we have underway at Atomera and how we feel in the brink of several of them turning into commercial agreements. Team is working hard. Indeed, we are looking to hire several additional team members, but morale is high, and we're excited to see our innovations getting into production. When that happens, we continue to believe that Atomera will see increased adoption rates and shorter time to market as competitors race to catch up with those who are already using MST to get market advantage. We are working hard to make that day come as soon as possible. Now Frank will review our financials.