Quarter 1
Q4 2025 Earnings Call
Richard Shannon (Craig-Hallum): Scott, some really interesting statements regarding gate all around here. If I caught your comments correctly here, you said that you're expecting some, I forgot the exact language you used, but some sort of important next steps here in the next few quarters. Typically, you've been reticent to give somewhat definitive timeframes for getting to major milestones, and yet you are here. So maybe give us a sense of why you're saying this. Your confidence level is clearly quite high. So help us understand this level of confidence and why.
Scott (Executive): Yeah, I would say on the gate all around technology, do you mind if I just share the slide to answer your question, Richard? Okay, here's the slide. On the right hand side, you can see where MST is deposited around these source and drain structures. That is an incredibly hard thing to do. We've been talking with our gate all around customers about using MST to block the dopant diffusion like where these little red arrows go. In one of the biggest problems that people have is that the phosphorus dopants get into these channels here and the channels can only handle a couple of phosphorus atoms before they really start to grade very, very significantly which affects yield and performance and so forth. So all along, they've been saying, okay, that's interesting. We know MST can block phosphorus. But first of all, can you even deposit it in these tiny little structures that are, you know, they're two nanometers? And just to give you an idea, it takes about 100,000 nanometers to get to the width of a hair — that's how small these are.
And so we had to prove that and we spent a long time in the lab building devices like this to show that we can deposit MST with high quality there, and we have done that. The second thing is when we put that tiny layer of MST does it really still block the phosphorus in that very, very small space? Because they're using something else right now that isn't very effective at blocking it, but are we better than that other thing? And the answer to that question is yes, as well. We've recently just gotten the technology and the test data to prove that. And so, you know, it's early days, we've gotten that in the last month, we haven't been able to get out and talk to each of the gate all around customers yet. But with our partnership with our strategic partner, we really think we're going to talk to those guys, and they're going to immediately want to start testing this and trying it out. So I'd say that's why my confidence is much higher. We I would say we've rarely been as excited about some technology results inside the company as we are by what we have right now.
Richard Shannon (Craig-Hallum): Second question here is, you mentioned two things you have to prove you're better than alternative solutions. We haven't really heard you talk about what your potential customers are considering here. Anyway, you can describe what those are, whether they're internal developments or something looking from other research organizations and to what degree you have visibility into how well those are doing as well.
Scott (Executive): Yeah, so we're not really talking about some lineup of other technologies, but what the industry has tried using in the past is silicon arsenic. And silicon arsenic is effective at just putting a spacer between the phosphorus and the channel, but it doesn't really prevent the dopant diffusion very well at all. And so we've actually done a lot of testing of our MST technology against silicon arsenic and proven that we have vastly better diffusion blocking results. And the second thing is that the industry does not like to use arsenic in its manufacturing process, but it can help it. It's expensive to use and dangerous, and therefore offering a solution that removes that material is probably considered good by the industry.
Richard Shannon (Craig-Hallum): My last question before I've got to run here, Scott, is you talked about a number of inbound calls here in the power space, which I know it's a space that you've been pushing for for a while. And obviously STMicro was aiming towards that before its, we'll call it a setback. You characterized this in the RFSOI space a few years ago about having significant coverage, I think more than half of the market share of the space here. Any way to characterize how much of the power space you're covering with when you add up all these new companies that are coming to you? Any way you characterize that?
Scott (Executive): Yeah, it's a little bit harder. I think on the RFSOI, it's a pretty compact space, group of companies, and we feel very confident that we're working with the vast majority of them. On power, it's a much bigger market. It's a much more diverse customer base. So I wouldn't say we're working with most of the people. Of course, we talked a little bit about the work we've done on TrenchFed when we did do some work on TrenchFed. We reached out to the leaders in TrenchFed and some other folks that we know are interested in advancing their technology and started talking to them. And that worked well and the same thing with HVT. And so, yeah, I think we're expanding. And then, you know, a lot of the GAN work that we're doing is in power as well. So we're talking to a lot of companies working in the power space, but I can't really give you, I can't really say it's the vast majority in that case.
Richard Shannon (Craig-Hallum): I wasn't expecting the vast majority, but since the power space is very large, well, I thought if there was, I mean, if you even had 10 or 20%, that'd be pretty good coverage there. But appreciate that characterization. I've got to jump out of line, Scott. Thanks a lot.
Scott (Executive): Thank you, Richard.
Management:
We have some questions coming in on the Q&A line. I will start with one, Scott. Can you give an update on the progress for your vice president of sales, Wei Na?
Scott (Executive): Sure. Wade joined in October and he's been coming up to speed and generally very, very helpful. I'm super enthusiastic about having someone that's pushing the team as hard as he is on the sales side. He's not only driving our ethics very specifically with existing customers and helping us find some new ones. He's also targeting a bunch of relationships that he's had in the past that he's bringing in with us and that does allow him to, you know, for us to engage with customers from kind of a different angle and that's been very positive so I think so far so good.
Management: And a number of questions about wafer activity at the fab and as it relates to general activity level, how would you characterize that?
Scott (Executive): Yeah, so I think just starting earlier in the middle of 2025, we started to get a lot of customers coming in with wafer runs simultaneously, which is quite busy for us to get them into our fab and deposit the MST on a very high quality basis and they get it back out so they can start running the wafers. Today, we're still running things in our own fab, but for the most part, we've shipped out a lot of that stuff out to our customers. And now we're kind of in a waiting game. It takes six to nine months for customers to run their wafers once we've sent them back to them and then get the test results. And then we'll review those and we'll figure out the next steps from there. But we really feel confident that what we have done in these runs is good stuff. We use MST CAD simulation software to figure out what we expect the outcome of these runs to be and we're, you know, we're really hopeful that our TCAD has been accurate and if we get the results that we hope for that our customers will want to move forward into a productization effort.
Management: And generally speaking, I had a question here and I think we've covered it on prior calls, but can you describe why selling blank wafers makes it easier to go to market?
Scott (Executive): Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I just showed this graphic of a gate all around device, and that is a really, really hard device to integrate into. But you can imagine when, if we're trying to integrate into that device, the customer starts a starting wafer, they build up a whole bunch of structures. Then at some point they make a hole in those structures and they say okay put your MST in here and then we'll have to figure out how to fill around it and all of the different layers that surround it affect it, right? That's called integration engineering — it's very challenging. But for many of our applications when we talk about wafer-based products, that would be when the customer buys a wafer and they put MST on immediately, the blank wafer. And then they start processing all of the rest of that process on top of it. Therefore, we don't have to work through all those challenging integration issues that we would have for something where MST gets deposited in the middle. So today I talked about a couple of applications we're looking at for DRAM that would be wafer-based products where we're shipping them the wafer.
I mean, obviously, we won't be wafer manufacturers, but we would help them with a solution that would go right in the wafer. RFSOI are solutions that are wafer-based products, and also our gallium nitride, our GAN solutions are wafer-based products. So we've talked about it before. We're excited about those because they're easier to integrate, and therefore, we think faster time-to-revenue solutions.
Management: Here's another one. Can you please explain more about power saving in AI and how MST can help achieve that?
Scott (Executive): Yeah, so it's a lot of ways. I just showed you the gate all around transistor. So fundamentally in semiconductor manufacturing like that, if you can bring a performance improvement, you could also probably trade that off to get lower power if you chose to do so. So that's one way. Another way is with our power solutions, like on our BCD products or our trench fed products or our GaN products. Those are targeted for the type of electronics that will be developed that go into an AI data center to help lower the power in the racks. So I'll give you one industry dynamic that we're tracking in AI data centers. They have historically used the 12-volt power supply on the rack, but recently the industry is moving away from 12 volts and they're moving to 48 volts because 48 volts is four times more efficient. That's saving power when you're providing power to the racks for all of those servers. The 48-volt power supplies use a lot of trench-fed devices. That's the primary device that they use in there. And so we are trying to offer solutions for trench-fed so we can help to address that. The other thing is gallium nitride is obviously a very power-efficient device. Devices, those of you who have the small power supplies that go into your backpack or suitcase, like they weren't able to do before you understand that those are much more efficient. And that's why we're trying to engage in gallium nitride.
Management: Interesting. Thank you. Okay. Can you give us an update on your JDA one and JDA two?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. So, JDA1 and JDA2, JDA1, I have to be careful that I'm not kind of divulging too much about what they're working on, but, you know, we continue to be working with JDA1, and I'm hopeful that some of the technologies that I talked about today will kick them into high gear in a business unit to kind of move that forward towards a production development effort like we've been waiting for, honestly, for a little bit too long. JDA2 is one of the customers that is currently running wafers with us. And so I can't say too much about exactly where they are right now, but they're running wafers.
Management: Great. Great. And going back to the gate all around, is MST being evaluated at the customer's fab at this point?
Scott (Executive): Yeah, so we mentioned that we're working with one gate all around customer today who helped us. So when I showed that structure and I showed that we had to do deposits inside there, you really need to work with someone to get access to those wafers, to try out things on those structures. And the good news is we have been working with one of the gate all around potential customers to evaluate MST today. So yes, we are in one of them. I hope to be in all four of them.
Management: And when do you expect, you know, an evaluation to be completed of the wafers for gate all around?
Scott (Executive): Ah, okay for gate all around. It's very hard to say with some of the customers. We're planning our visit to show them all this data that we have. We believe that the data that we have is good enough that they may not even require us to do deposition inside their gate all around structure because we've proven that we can physically do it. And then what we'd be trying to do is to convince those customers to install MST in their fabs and have their R&D team take over and start implementing this. How fast that will happen is hard to say, but I will say the people that are working on gate all around are working very fast. And if they adopt, they're going to be pushing us as hard as we've ever been pushed by a customer in the past.
Management: Okay, great. And just one last question here is on how MST can help or improve quantum computing.
Scott (Executive): You know, it's interesting. That's something we're working on right now. I don't really, I can't really talk about the way that our MST technology will address quantum, but I can tell you that's something we're working very hard on right now. In the past we had a theory about MST's ability to improve the purity and availability at a cheaper price of silicon 28 which is a critical wafer type that's used for quantum wells, but we, yeah, that really just didn't pan out. So we're working on other technologies right now and I hope to be able to talk to you guys about that later this year.
Management: Thank you, and Scott, you can proceed with any closing comments.
Scott (Executive): All right. Well, I guess, thanks. I want to just thank you all for joining us to hear the progress being made here at Atomera. Continue to look for our news articles and blog posts, which are available along with investor alerts on our website, atomera.com. Should you have additional questions, please contact Mike Bishop, who will be happy to follow up. Thanks again for your support, and we look forward to our next update call. Thank you. This concludes the Atomera fourth quarter conference call.
Quarter 2
Q3 2025 Earnings Call
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum):
Our first question comes from Richard Shannon of Craig Helm. Richard, if you would kindly unmute and you may begin.
Scott (Executive): All right, great. Hopefully, am I muted here, Mike? You got it. Thanks. All right, excellent. Thanks, Scott. Frankfurt, let me ask a few questions here. Scott, maybe let's do a redux on STMicro. So I guess my first question here is, so it sounds like you did a new design on 300 millimeters that you validated in your simulations, but there would have been multiple cycles of learning to validate for ST. So is that trying to match your simulation to, you know, the real world and to their simulations to make sure that it worked and that cycle time was just too much, uh, to fit within their timeframe and getting to 300 millimeter. Is that the kind of the dynamic here that led them to their decision?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. So first of all, the work, the, uh, the new implementation we came up with, uh, would have worked on 200 millimeter or 300 millimeter. And actually, if you let me digress one second here, Richard, because I've gotten a number of questions that have come in where people were asking, you know, when did you know about this trade-off between the reliability and performance? Every time you do a development, it's about trade-offs. You're doing a trade-off on one thing. I mean, you get, that's why we always talk about cycles of learning. You get some big improvement in one area, it breaks something else. And then you have to go in and you have to work to fix the other thing and try to get to a point where it's all balanced out. So this trade-off work that we were doing is not at all unusual. It's what we do with every customer all the time. What is unusual is that because they made the transition from 200 to 300, we lost the ability to bring in that ultimate solution and get it done for them in time. Because the 300 delayed their development efforts and then they needed to get into production fast. And so they just didn't have time to run the validation runs to get our new thing proven out. I'm not sure that answered your whole question. Let me know.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): You know, I guess the point here is that it sounded like they were confident that this solved not only the performance, but the reliability issue that you discovered in 200 millimeter. And it was just the timeframe that was too tight for them to want to continue right now.
Scott (Executive): Yeah, that's right. Originally you asked about the simulation work. So we do simulation based on what we believe a customer's process needs manufacturing processes, but that's usually very secretive. They don't give anybody that information exactly. We can make our best approximation. And so we made a TCAD simulation that showed, yeah, we really got this great improvement. And we gave it to them in this summer. And then they spent the next two months running their own simulations. Their simulations are very exact to their own manufacturing process. And so what they did was they put in all the improvements we saw, we proposed, and they came back and they said, you know what, when we run our simulation, it also brings that level of improvement. So ultimately, I mean, the good news here is that they confirmed it. It makes us feel very confident to bring it out into the market as a new product. And it also makes us confident that at some point in time, we're hopeful we can re-engage with ST on that particular product and have them uh you know take it forward and make it put it into their uh process.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): All right, fair enough. Let me follow up on one other comment you made related to STMicro and then we'll move on to some other topics here. So what seems obvious and you just commented on is the ability to take some of the learnings from the process with ST and take it to other customers in the power space here. What have you been able to do so far? Can you use similar kind of structures that you've built with ST and use those with other power customers? Maybe just kind of give us a sense of the benefits you can see from the situation.
Scott (Executive): Yeah. Sorry. Exactly. So what we did with ST, there's a technique in architecture that the industry has known about for some time, but it hasn't been implementable. When someone builds it, it causes too many things to break, and nobody's ever been able to get it to work. But because of the way MST works, because of the way it prevents dopants from diffusing uncontrollably, we believed that we could get that process to work so this is not like something no one's ever heard of it's it's something that one of those theoretical things that no one has been able to get work working well and now we can get it to work well and so yeah it's we're not taking anything from like any proprietary st information this is like a standard tech design technique that we can suddenly make work because of mst and so yeah we can take that out to other customers and they kind of understand the concept immediately.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): All right, fair enough. Let's move on here. The last number of quarters, you've talked about transformative customers here. And unless I missed something, you didn't use naturally use that phrase here today in your prepared remarks. But I think you did mention a large demo run, which I think refers to one of them. And I think it's also contributing to some of the revenues this year. I will ask a question of Frank on the revenue side here in a second here, but maybe it's kind of detail where we're sitting with the transformative customers. And I do want to hit on one specific point that I had a question on actually asked Mike Bishop offline early today. And he said to ask this question of you, which is you've talked about two or maybe three of these customers i want to make sure how many we're talking about and which ones are still ongoing versus any ones that may be stalled so if you can if you can enumerate that first and then discuss uh what's going on with this large demonstration you talked about last quarter and i think you briefly mentioned today that would be great.
Scott (Executive): Okay yeah uh i know everybody is frustrated with the code words and i am too but we so in In January or February, we unfortunately had to announce that one customer that we had called transformative had discontinued our, we were negotiating a deal and they had backed out of the deal. And that customer, we continue to have good relations with them. We talk with them regularly, but we are not on an active engagement with that customer right now. In that same call, which I think was early, was in February, we mentioned two new transformative customers that were getting underway. And yes, we are working very actively with them. When we talked about a record number of wafers that we're processing, it includes those two customers that we called transformative back then. And so... Now, today, I mentioned these four different segments and how we're working with a lot of customers. And then I broke it down by revenue potential. The folks in the middle, folks that are doing gate all around, folks that are doing DRAM, the really big players who are doing power and other memory architectures, they are all massive. And they're all customers that I would call transformative and So we're working with more than just those two that I mentioned on the call.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): More than just the two that you would refer to as transformative? Is that what you're saying, Scott?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. To discontinue the term transformative, these two customers I spoke about as transformative in February are just very, very large revenue potential customers with very big processes that we hope to get going on. But we're also working with other customers who are also very large and have the potential to be transformative.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): Okay. Well, let's talk about the specific transformative customer you talked about last quarter that you're doing a large demo run here. What's the update on what's going there? And is that leading to at least some contribution to the revenues you're guiding to this quarter?
Scott (Executive): Yes. Maybe I'll let Frank answer that. But so one of the there's some trickiness about about when we book revenues. And so we have a lot of customers, the revenue that we're putting out this quarter is based on several customers. I can't answer whether that specific one is, is in Q3 or it will be in the guidance that Frank gave for Q4, but it's, but it's, you know, we're getting revenue from wafer runs with that customer.
Frank (Executive): Yeah, that's right. I mean, the revenue guidance actually covers multiple customers, three different customers, and it's spaced out over time. And while I don't like to... show negative gross margin, the timing issue gives a little bit more visibility in the sense that we do a bunch of the deposition work, which is when we incur the costs of our tools, the metrology, and the labor associated with it. And oftentimes, these can get matched up pretty quickly with the revenue because it's a small number of wafer runs. And that's been true in the past. But we've been talking now for a couple of calls that we've been working with a very large customer on the largest wafer run that we've ever done. And we also have other customers. So now what you're seeing is we do a lot of that work. We don't ship all of those wafers out. We don't necessarily do all the deposition because the nature of these engagements is it can be iterative. You may do some wafers for setup.
You run a series of tests, the customer validates those, you get some feedback, you then do another run with slightly different conditions, either, you know, on the MST or how the customer processes it with implants and things of that nature. So you can get, you know, a lot of activity in one quarter and then the wafers will ship out, you know, over time. And, you know, one of the challenges in sort of giving guidance is it isn't set in a schedule of we're going to ship, you know, 25 wafers this month and 25 wafers two months after that. Sometimes it really depends on what the customer learns in the process of evaluating that, setting up a new set of experiments, and then we ship out more. So yeah, there's multiple customers here, and these are important engagements in different application areas.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): Okay. All right, that's helpful, Frank. I'll probably follow up with you a little later on that one. Maybe two more questions, I will jump out of line here. First of all, Scott, in your prepared remarks here, and I'm sure we'll review these in detail when the transfer comes out here, but you talked about kind of segmenting your opportunity based on where in the stack your MST is applied here, and you're talking about on top of the wafer versus somewhere in the middle. Certainly, it's layers in the middle, or I think it's fairly understood, especially for me who's not a device guy per se, that that's very complicated, but vice versa, if you can apply just on the top, That seems to be a much simpler process, which also implies it might be an area whereby which you might expect to see or hope to see your first license here just from a time to market perspective. So two questions for you is, I think I miss the applications areas that that specifically applied for. And B, would you agree that that's a very... a somewhat likely or very likely situation by which you first reach, first, you know, manufacturing, licensing, commercial production?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. So first of all, yeah, you're right about being deposited on top of the wafer makes it much easier. The applications that we specifically spoke about that do that is RFSOI and gallium nitride and also In the future, we have some ideas on next generation DRAM that could use it. So one thing to understand very briefly is when we deposit MST in the bottom layer, it has to be on a process that doesn't use incredibly high heat for long periods of time. So if, if we deposited if it was on a MST starting wafer, and then someone put the wafer into an annealing step that was 1100 degrees for an hour, then that would really damage the MST itself, and it wouldn't work. So the only time we use MST on the starting on the start of a wafer is on manufacturing processes are going to be lower temperature. And there's a lot of those, like RFSOI is run at very low temperatures. The new gate all around lys processes, they're trying to run them at very low temperatures. So in theory, MST could be on the base, on the starting wafer for those. Gallium nitride, we put MST on bottom before it grows the gallium nitride on top of it.
That one isn't quite as low temperature, but it doesn't matter. The MST still works as a starting wafer. So I think... A layman might say, well, why don't you just do every process as a starting wafer if it's much easier and faster time to revenue? Well, it has to fit a certain dynamic, which has to do with this temperature range. You had a second half of your question and I've talked all this time and forgotten it. You hit the applications. I think you've answered most of it. So I think that's very helpful.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): Last question for me, I'll jump out of line. You talked about this large capital equipment partner. And I think today you mentioned about going on a roadshow here. Maybe just kind of give us a sense of how broad the engagements are with this company. I think in the past you've mentioned too, I don't know if that was the limit or there were more you just didn't mention, but how do we understand the scope and breadth of your interaction with customers through or with them?
Scott (Executive): Okay, so the stated aim of our partnership is in the gate all around market. And that was what we announced in our press release. However, I have to say that there's great value in this partner working with us in everything. And there's value in us working with them in everything. So we have talked to them a lot and done some work on DRAM as well. So basically, yeah, I would say our primary focus right now is gate all around and DRAM. And when we go out on the road, that's who we'll be really targeting most closely.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): OK, fair enough. That makes sense. I will jump on the line, guys. Thank you.
Management: OK, thanks, Richard. A number of questions have come in on the Q&A line, and I will aggregate them and ask some of the more common ones. So first one is about the gate all around projects and when, you know, there's a number of current projects underway that are expected to launch soon. And how many years do you expect the target process you are currently collaborating on to enter production?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. So first of all, working with a few different customers, so there might be a different answer for each customer. In general, The guys working on GATE all around, the great news is it's amazing working with them because they have armies of people working on this stuff, lots and lots of resources to test out your material. And the bad news on that is that they come back with a ton of requests for more information and more testing. But they're almost always working towards some kind of a launch that you would be built into. Some of them, I would say the majority are looking at a launch that's still a few years out. There's some of them that are actually looking at using MST to improve yield on processes that are in production today. I can't exactly say, well, if or how long it would take to get into production on those processes, but my guess is if they integrated MST, they would have to do some qualification work on it. But if it did indeed improve their yield, which I think is what the majority of them are looking at for the current timing processes, they would try to move it into production very quickly. As long as it didn't break anything in the specifications of their production wafers, they would have every incentive to get it into production as soon as possible to improve yield.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): All right. In the past, you've talked about JDA1 and the Fabless RF licensee. Have you been doing wafer runs for those? And what do those results look like?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. So the answer is yes, we are doing wafer runs with them. Unfortunately, we don't have the results yet. I can't really commit that I'll be able to give you results from each customer. But generally, what happens is when the results come out, that's the timing when we'll be able to start driving towards licenses and transitions to production. Generally speaking, we have a number of different customers with wafers underway right now. None of them are coming out in the next few months. I would say we might have some coming out at the end of the year, but more likely into the first quarter before we'd start seeing a lot of results from those runs.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): Okay. And one for Frank. So the InSize partnership for GAN testing, can you talk about the economics there of who's paying for the runs or for the testing? You shed a little light on that.
Frank (Executive): Yeah. I mean, at this stage, this is a... an arrangement with RFN says where we're each bearing our own costs and we'll, you know, hopefully achieve a result that would lead us to some, you know, further activity. But right now it's, you know, we're not paying them to run testing, nor are they, you know, paying us for wafers. So it's, you know, it's early stage. And I think our hope right now would be to generate good RF data because that's something notoriously difficult. RF testing is complex. It's not something that we can typically do ourselves. So a lot of the work on RF SOI that we can do is kind of physical characteristics of, you know, our film. But when you get into, you know, some of the testing of actual devices on, you know, kind of RF feed, different figures of merit, then those are more specialized tests. And so getting more insight into that is very helpful from a marketing standpoint. And, you know, our view is, you know, there's some question on, you know, work with soy tech and wafer based products. The more information that we have to market to, you know, the ultimate customers of RFSOI devices, you know, the better it is in terms of building a relationship with SoyTech, who's a wafer manufacturer. So, you know, the more end demand that they see, the closer the collaboration is with us. So I kind of see it as a means to an end there.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): Okay. And then, Scott, going back to a topic we've touched on in the past, but is there an update on JDA2?
Scott (Executive): JDA2 is running way first with us. And they're one of the ones that I talked about that we, you know, we'd hope to get some results at the beginning of the year and hopefully see if we can turn that into a license and then plan to go to production.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): Okay. And then with regard to the STM news, we had a number of questions on Disclosure Channel. And can you talk about, you know, why you chose to put the news out on a blog post?
Scott (Executive): Yeah. Um, yeah. And we, we, we went back and forth on that. So I just want to be clear, you know, we, we were in discussions with, uh, with ST all through, um, you know, August, September, and into October about, about implementing this new, uh, uh, version of new architecture we had. and moving forward on 300 millimeter. And we were waiting to find out from them what the plan was, when that work would start, when they planned that it would be tried to take it to production. And it was really just a week and a half ago that we had a call with them. And that's when they told us that they did not have a plan in place to use MST to do that new architecture. So immediately after that call, we got off the phone and we started talking about, okay, we have an earnings call in a week and a half, but it seems too long to wait for a week and a half before we notify investors. And so on the following Monday, we actually started speaking with ST to make sure that when we disclose this, we would be following their internal guidelines on what we could say and couldn't say. And then on Tuesday, we put out the blog post.
We could have put out a press release, but press releases tend to be, at least in our opinion, much more black and white about news that you're giving. In this case, we see it as a much more nuanced message. STU is telling us we don't have a plan to use you guys on this next run. Yeah, very bad news because I know all the investors want to know when the royalties will start flowing, and so do we. But they didn't say they'll never use us. And they also reassured us again and again that they are continuing work using our technology on other projects. on other process areas. So we felt that using a blog would allow us to give a little more nuance than a press release. And we know that the channels of communication that we have with a blog, we push it immediately out to all of our investors that are at least registered with us. And so we felt it was a good channel of communication in this particular case. And the most important thing to us was to get it out there as soon as we can within the restrictions of making sure we were working everything out with ST and so forth.
Richard Shannon (Craig Hallum): All right, thanks. And one more question here. Is there any chance of government funding now that Atomair has been working with Sandia for a while?
Scott (Executive): You know, I talked a little bit on this call, which I've never done much about in the past, about all of the different R&D efforts that we have underway. And you know, many of them are, as I mentioned, through academia, through outside commercial partners so that we don't have to burden our internal team with too much of it. But Sandia is very interested in many of those technologies, and they have government programs that are interested in implementing things that would use those. So, yes, there's a lot of interest through Sandia. And we also continue to work with the government and with the CHIPS Act, infrastructure such as it is to see what we can do to kind of deliver some of our technology in through that channel and get some near-term revenue that way as well.
Management: Okay. Thank you, Scott.
At this time, we'll turn the call to Scott for closing comments.
Scott (Executive): Oh, gee, thanks, Mike. Okay. Yeah, thanks for joining us and listening to our progress that we've been making here at Atomera. Next month, we'll be attending the Craig Hallam Alpha Select Conference in New York, and we look forward to seeing some of you there if you'll also be attending. Please continue to look for our news articles and blog posts, which are available along with investor alerts on our website, atomera.com. Should you have additional questions, please contact Mike Bishop, who'll be happy to follow up. Thanks again for your support, and we look forward to our next update call. Thank you. This concludes the conference call.