Pdf Solutions Inc (PDFS) Q3 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

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Pdf Solutions Inc (PDFS 1.62%)
Q3 2021 Earnings Call
Nov 9, 2021, 5:00 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to PDF Solutions' Third Quarter 2021 Conference Call. At this time, all participants line are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session, for which instructions will be given at that time.

I would now like to hand the call over to Joseph Diaz of Lytham Partners. Please go ahead, sir.

Joseph Diaz -- Managing Partner

Thank you, operator, and thanks to all of you for joining us today on this call. We appreciate your time and your ongoing interest in PDF Solutions. As the operator indicated, my name is Joe Diaz. I'm with the Lytham Partners. We are the Investor Relations consulting firm for PDF.

If you do not yet have a copy of today's press release, it's available on the company's website at pdf.com.

Some of the statements made during this conference call will be forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding PDF's future financial results, performance, growth rates, and demand for its solutions. PDF's actual results could differ materially. The forward-looking statements and risks referred on this call are based on information available to PDF today. The company has no obligation to update them. You are advised to refer to the section titled Risk Factors on the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 and similar disclosures in subsequent SEC filings.

With that, I'd like to introduce John Kibarian, PDF Solutions' President and Chief Executive Officer. He will be followed by Adnan Raza, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. At the conclusion of management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions.

Let me now turn the call over to John Kibarian, President and CEO of PDF Solutions. John?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Thank you for joining us on today's call. If you've not already seen our earnings press release, management report and 10-Q for the quarter, please go to the Investors section of our website, where each has been posted. I will start the discussion by providing commentary on the third quarter. From there, I'll provide our impressions of the semiconductor industry and conclude with our expectations for PDF's business for the remainder of the year before handing the call over to Adnan for more detailed financial update.

Highlights for the third quarter demonstrate the progress that PDF team has made over the last few years. As we have discussed over many quarters, some significant legacy Gainshare contracts ended in the first half of this year. This meant that Q3 for us could have been a challenging quarter. That said, by the second quarter of this year, we had expressed confidence that given our strong bookings and ratable nature of our analytics business, we anticipated that Q3, despite the Gainshare headwind, would be up modestly in terms of revenue versus Q2.

Now with the third quarter behind us, we can report that the company achieved record revenue with meaningful quarter-over-quarter growth. Despite the significant drop in very high margin Gainshare revenue, we also saw improvements in our gross margins and net margins. This is due to achieving more scale on our analytics subscriptions. As a result, even with the headwind of decrease in Gainshare, we made progress toward our target gross margins.

Turning to bookings. The third quarter was particularly strong and exceeded even last year's third quarter bookings. As some of you remember, it was one year ago that we closed the Advantest partnership, and with it a $50 million contract. At the time, we reported that it was a remarkable quarter as the partnership are taking years of meaningful discussions to bring to fruition. We communicated then that we did not expect to meet or exceed the previous -- that performance level for a while. Exceeding the previous bookings milestone in just four quarters, speaks the demand of our products and services.

When we consider all of these factors, we believe that from a financial metrics perspective, this quarter has demonstrated that the company's transition to analytics will lead to improved growth and financial leverage as we bring the business to scale.

Now let me provide a little more detail about the bookings in the quarter. Our bookings in Q3 primarily came from analytics. We had a strong quarter in Exensio bookings, with the majority of Exensio bookings on a dollar basis, continuing to be from customers moving to the cloud. This included another eight-figure cloud bookings as an enterprise customer moved from on-premise to cloud deployment in order to leverage the benefits of Exensio's big data storage and end-to-end performance. This quarter also included a Tier 1 auto supplier that renewed its initial Exensio cloud deployment as it expands the use of silicon in the electrification of car drivetrains.

As semiconductors become more critical to automobile manufacturing, we are seeing manufacturers look to use Exensio's capabilities to improve visibility in their technology and supply chain. We also had a strong Exensio bookings from front-end fabs, deploying Exensio process control, as the demand for the additional fab capacity drove further deployments of Exensio.

Building with the demand for semiconductor capital equipment, we experienced another quarter of strong Cimetrix runtime license bookings, as equipment companies ordered Cimetrix connectivity and equipment control software licenses to ship with their products.

As I discussed earlier, Yield Ramp revenue was down significantly as legacy Gainshare contracts completed. While we are not emphasizing Integrated Yield Ramp contracts, we have started to see some increases in the volume reports from customers, including Chinese fabs, where we are seeing significant equipment installs. We anticipate modest improvements in Integrated Yield Ramp revenue going forward.

Lastly, as some of you may remember, we reported a quick start analytics contract that signed in Q2. We completed the follow-on multi-year contract in Q3. This contract includes use of our characterization systems for electrical test, a DFI e-beam system and Exensio systems including our DFM software. As a result, we began shipment of our PD fast test and ePub DFI measurement systems to their facility.

For customers innovating on the leading edge, speed comes from having huge relevant data sets to be able to see failures in the parts per billion level. We believe that our DFI and CV Systems provide the largest datasets which enables superior learning, using our Exensio analytics software.

Our DFM capabilities allow our customers to anticipate how improvements in manufacturing will impact future products, which is particularly important for foundries which must support a rich set of designs.

With the strong bookings spanning our Exensio Cimetrix connectivity characterization vehicles and DFI systems, the third quarter demonstrates that PDF's broad value and strategic relevance across various industries from high-voltage power IC manufacturing to the most advanced process technology development, from equipment companies to system manufacturers, PDF's manufacturing analytics platform is becoming ubiquitous in the IC industry.

Now let me turn to our perspective on the IC industry and expectations for the fourth quarter. The industry continues to operate at a high level for manufacturing in R&D. Maximizing existing operational effectiveness as well as developing new products and processes is critical to the industry in this setting. As a result, customer interest in our products and solutions remains strong.

We are pleased with the progress in the first three quarters of the year in making PDF Solutions the manufacturing analytics platform for the industry. This enables us to build recurring revenue streams to provide greater visibility and predictability to our financial results. Finally, I want to thank our employees for nimbly supporting our customers and continuing to innovate in the COVID-19 environment.

Now I will turn the call over to Adnan for a review of the financials, after which we will open the call up to your questions. Adnan?

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to speak with you again today and I hope all of you and your families are keeping safe.

We are pleased to review the financial results for the third quarter and to bring you up to date on the progress of the business. We posted our earnings release and management report on the Investor Relations section of our website. Our Form 10-Q has also been filed with the SEC today.

Please note that all of 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.

Financial results for the third quarter of 2021 continued the strong momentum of the first half of the year. Third quarter total revenues or total revenue was $29.6 million, up 28% from the comparable quarter last year and up 8% on a sequential basis from Q2 2021. Analytics revenue was up 90% to $27.2 million in Q3 2021 versus $14.3 million in the third quarter of last year and was up 39% sequentially from the prior quarter this year. While we do not expect this level of analytics growth in the next quarter, based on continued strong bookings we expect year-over-year revenue and backlog to continue to grow this year.

For the quarter, analytics represented 92% of total revenue. IYR revenue for the quarter was $2.4 million versus $8.8 million during last year's third quarter and represented approximately 8% of total revenue for the quarter, as some of the IYR contracts came to the end of their Gainshare period. We expect that IYR revenue will tick up marginally in coming quarters for the reasons John highlighted in his prepared remarks. The IYR component of our business is lumpy by its very nature and as we have previously stated, if customers want to engage in IYR in a meaningful way, that will benefit PDF shareholders we will certainly work with them.

Our transition to become the leading analytics software provider to the global semiconductor supply chain is continuing at a very consistent pace and we expect that to carry on going forward. Booking momentum remains strong. Our bookings for Q3 exceeded the extraordinarily successful bookings of Q3 of last year when Advantest became a customer. For the nine months through Q3 2021, our bookings have now exceeded the bookings for all of prior year 2020, which in of itself was a remarkable bookings growth year.

Backlog at the end of the third quarter totaled $181 million. On a sequential basis, that represents an increase of 30% from the $139 million in the prior quarter. Notably, compared to the third quarter of 2020, our backlog is up 60% on a year-over-year basis. Our strong bookings growth and sizable ending backlog sets a meaningful base for total revenue growth into 2022 and beyond.

Our cost of sales and operating expenses for the quarter were essentially flat on a sequential basis compared with the second quarter of 2021. While we have a strong focus on managing expenses, we will make the necessary investments to enhance our technological capabilities and competitive position. This quarter, we were able to expand gross margins to 66% and continue our progress toward the 70% gross margin goal we shared in our fall 2019 Analyst Day.

We were also able to deliver $2.4 million of operating income this quarter compared to the almost breakeven operating income last quarter. We are pleased with the positive $0.06 of non-GAAP EPS reported this quarter as a result of the strength in our revenues and management of expenses. We are also profitable on a non-GAAP net income basis for the nine months of 2021.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of approximately $141 million compared to $139 million for the prior quarter. And no debt. Cash flow from operations for the third quarter was positive $4 million. We have also generated $3.8 million of cash flow from operations on a year-to-date basis. We expect to end the year with another continued year of operating cash flow generation.

Our business continues to be strong across all sectors. We expect full-year 2021 total revenues to grow on a year-over-year basis, near the top end of previously communicated 20% to 25% range. We also expect full-year 2021 analytics revenue to grow on a year-over-year basis more than 50%. We feel that we are well positioned for 2022.

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

Questions and Answers:

Operator

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

Blair Abernethy -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst

Good evening, gentlemen. Nice quarter. Just wondered if you could talk a little bit about with the growth that you're seeing in the analytics business in the Exensio platform. Just what are you doing on the go-to-market side in terms of your plans for the balance of this year and looking into next year? Are you ramping up your sales rep capacity? Are you looking at partnerships? Just kind of want to get a sense of what you're doing to continue that momentum.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Sure. Thank you, Blair. So partnerships are very important, and the Advantest partnership has demonstrated that. We do see other partnerships out there that we've been working on for quite a while that we believe at some point over the next few quarters will come to fruition in different ways. As we move more and more users of Exensio onto the cloud, there's a lot we can do to make it easier for them to use Exensio with all the other systems and hardware that they need to operate in order to get produced chips.

So when it's an on-premise system, it's very difficult to do, because every customer deploys it different way. As they move to our cloud solution, it's much easier to kind of help them be more productive with the platform. So partnerships are very important. As well as your point around building out our channel and our ability to reach more customers, we have the benefit of having been in business for a long time and kind of grown Exensio over many years kind of organically, over 130 Exensio customers out there, substantially more of that now. And we're able to go back to them and move them -- we don't feel any of them are fully penetrated, move them from using parts of the platform to using a broader section of the platform.

First step again for that is to move them to the cloud, where we can then upgrade them with more modules and more capability quite comfortably. So those two areas, moving to the cloud and partnerships are the two biggest things we're doing, Blair, and then subsequently more investments in the channel and more applications on the platform.

Blair Abernethy -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Tyler Burmeister of Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.

Tyler Burmeister -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst

Hey, guys. This is Tyler on behalf of Christian. Thanks for letting us ask several questions. John, it's great to hear your quick start contract was complete in the quarter and you signed an additional multi-year contract with that customer, I think you said. I was just wondering any additional color you could give us there on maybe the size of that contract, the timing, near-term, long-term of it, any additional color there would be great. Thanks.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Sure, Tyler. Yes. We were happy to sign that contract as well. As you can imagine, based on the components of the technology, pretty much is many of the components appear, I think with exceptions to metrics [Phonetic], includes Exensio, eBeam capability, electrical test characterization vehicle, the Exensio DFM modules as well. So it's a very big set of technology and all-encompassing deployment. So as you can imagine contract-wise, it's one of the larger contracts we've done on a subscription basis.

It's multi-year, minimum of a couple of years with extensions. So it's a quite substantial in that regard as well. That gives a lot of time to really have the customer get value out of the systems and then deploy it more broadly. We of course, hope to build on this, with this customer as well as others, because we feel the platform is quite valuable. And with the investments now going on in the leading edge, we believe there is quite an opportunity for the solution.

Tyler Burmeister -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst

That's great to hear. And then this year, very strong year for your analytics business, going to grow over 50%. But you also seen some record bookings head into next year. Would it be fair to assume you're going to continue to be able to grow that analytics business ahead of what I think is 20% CAGR target into next year?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes, that's a great question. Tyler, we're doing a strategic plan now. As we get into 2022, we'll provide our perspective on growth rate. We had said at our Analyst Day that we thought analytics will grow 20% and the business would asymptotically approach 20%. As analytics with the majority of the business, now you can see Q3 analytics was 92% of the total business, and we're giving guidance that the growth for the overall company would exceed between 20% and 25% close to the higher end of that range. So obviously, we are kind of already a little bit beyond where we had previously expected the business to be. But we're going to go and look at how the remainder of the year works out and what we think the future looks. Obviously, the industry overall is very robust. That would give us some confidence, but we need to see the details of how things look before we kind of say anything more.

Tyler Burmeister -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst

Understood. That sounds great. That's all for us. Thanks, guys.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from Gus Richard of Northland. Your line is open.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Hey, John. Congratulations on the large contract and Exensio deal as well. Just wondering if I could dig into that contract a little bit. Can you give us any color on the sort of the split between DFI, CVs and Exensio in that contract?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes, I don't know how we would go about doing that. Gus, I mean the reality is a bundle of all those things. Obviously, from a cost standpoint, if you look at our cost to deploy, DFI would have the biggest cost of the machine and it's the most significant. But I think in terms of value, it's a more judgmental thing. I think what the customer's buying is an integrated solution that really helps them get technologies developed more robustly and more to a higher level of manufacturability quicker. So it's hard to say what's the piece that really makes the difference.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Okay. Let me try it this way. In the contract, how much of it is recurring, and how much of it was like an upfront placement of the DFI? Is it --

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

It's all recurring, Gus. It's a subscription paid out over multiple years.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

So all the pieces?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Correct.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

All the pieces. Okay. And is it reasonable to assume with similar in size the Advantest deal?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Of course, we're really not disclosing what -- I mean, obviously it's a significant deal, right? But the specific number we haven't disclosed.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Okay. And then in terms of the IYR business, it sounds like the Gainshare has hit sort of a bottom and should with volume increase moving forward. Are there any other contracts that you see rolling off in the near term that would be meaningful?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

No, we don't really at this time.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Okay. And then last one for me. Are there any fixed fee in the IYR left or is it just one Chinese foundry or is that it or are there more?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

No, that's a good point, Gus. If you remember in the second quarter of this year, we did sign a relatively large multi-year fixed-fee contract that goes out over four years, that is in that number as well.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Okay. I think it was a fairly substantial sequential decline in that business, and I'm just sort of was there a lot of fixed fee revenue in the second quarter?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

No, it was a couple of -- the number of contracts have actually expired to end at the end of Q2 on the Gainshare side. So Gainshare fell off pretty substantially. I mean, there was some drop-off in fixed fee revenue, not because contracts ended, but just percent completion ability to actually deploy vehicles and things to that account. So there is some small amount of revenue decline quarter-over-quarter on a fixed fee basis due to just deployment capabilities, primarily in China. But the majority of that decline was a number of not just one, but a number of Gainshare contracts coming to their end.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

And then the final one for me. Given the large contracts in the quarter, is there any incremental operating expenses required to support the new contracts that are starting to deploy?

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Yes, I mean, our expenses, we expect that we have brought them to the right level. I mean, going from now into Q4, we expect maybe a slight increase in some of those expenses, but hopefully our revenues also may be flat to slightly up. So we'll manage the expenses along with those revenues. But it's good to have this problem that we have, that we have more customers to meet demand for both on the analytics side as well as some of the continued engagements from the past on the IYR side that we just talked about.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

I think specifically your question comes from -- the capability required to meet that large contract is in place.

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Got it. All right. Well, somebody is -- you know me, I'm pushing my luck. Thanks so much.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from Gary Schnierow of RiverPark Funds. Your line is open.

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Hi, guys.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Hi, Gary.

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Just following-up on Gus's question. Absent that big quick start contract, your core Exensio business I'm assuming that still grew quarter-over-quarter?

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

In a way that we are very pleased about. We don't disclose the numbers, but on a percentage basis it's -- yes, it would annualize to a number of well ahead of our 20% that we've talked about.

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Great. And can you talk about your capex in the quarter? It looks like you stepped that up significantly. What that is and why you felt comfortable doing that?

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I mean, as John explained, we had the big contract, and as I think he was being asked about what are the different components of the contract, you obviously heard him talk about different machines we have as well. So some of the machines that we have in our lab as we start to get them ready for customer shipment, there will be some upgrades that we have to do on those machines and predominantly that's what drove the increase.

From time to time, we will also be upgrading these machines, as you know this number was more like around 500 for Q1 and Q2, but sort of markedly lower compared to last year, which was also lower. So every year, we have started to bring that number down. But as we get ready to ship machines or do some special projects for customers sometimes in our lab, we will from time to time be spending to upgrade the different hardware pieces of those machine.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

As we deployed DEX nodes across the OSAT environment, you'll see us have capex tick-ups for hardware that we place at the OSATs to, which I think this past quarter was a small piece of that number. But I believe in Q4, there'll be another piece associated with that.

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

That's right.

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Okay. So when you're saying about getting the equipment ready, it sounds like the capex step up is not necessary -- is not just for the Quick Start contract, but getting equipment ready in anticipation of other contracts or in hope of other contracts. Is that fair?

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Yes, there is equipment purchase primarily on the -- both on logical test and on EVM side, but for that contract, IYR contract, some other anticipated activities. And as I said, I'm not sure in Q3, I know that we've been making some purchase on that, I don't remember exactly the timing for computing to support DEX nodes to that specific OSAT. And those are -- they're all in that number, there's not one that I think just dominated.

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Okay. Let me ask in a different way. Is part of the capex to have additional eProbes machines?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

We have additional eProbes machines, Gary. But it may be to replace some components on those eProbes machines for new applications that we're developing. So in that sense, it could have involved, but it is not just for specifically for the machine shift for the quarter, probably that machine had very little capex associated with that all.

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Corey Tobin of William Blair. Your line is open.

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

Hey, guys. Congrats on a great quarter and thanks for taking my question. I just want to come back to the sequential increase in analytics revenue. I think there is real nice move up. Is this a new baseline we should think about? Like is the $27 million we saw this quarter the majority of it recurring and therefore we should expect to see to grow off at $27 million as we move ahead to Q4 and into 2022?

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Look, I mean, our focus has been to continue to transition the business toward analytics and that too in multiple prongs, not just the Exensio software, but also on the other pieces within analytics. So yes, we're starting to feel comfortable with this level of analytics revenue.

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

Meaning it's a -- we should build off from here? There [Speech Overlap] --

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

That's right. And look, I mean precisely to help you all think about how to model this is kind of why we put some of those thoughts around what we expect the total revenue to be doing for this whole year and near the 25% range that we had prior communicated, as well as the analytics business. So hopefully when you go back into the math, you'll see that we are saying that for one quarter left, the numbers will support at similar levels of analytics revenue or slightly up.

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

Got it. Okay, great. And then the contract value that you mentioned, the large contract, that's a TCV value, that's the total contract value or is it the annual contract value?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

I think we reported the total. We haven't reported the specific value of the total contract value. But both an annual basis and a multi-year basis, it's a very substantial contract in both ways as you look at it.

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

And I guess you referenced in the eight-figure bookings you talked about.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

On the eight-figure, that is total contract value for the Exensio cloud deployment.

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

That's a TCV number. Okay.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes.

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

Okay, great. Congrats again. Thank you.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Thank you.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from Orin Hirschman of AIGH Investment Part. Your line is open.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

Hi. Thank you. AIGH Investment Partners. And again, congratulations. I'll add to that that you releasing the breakthrough numbers here. In terms of that very large contract, is that total contract value reflected in the bookings this quarter or only part of it?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

The parts that are non-cancelable, so yes.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

Okay. And just in terms of general trend, if I ask to yield improvements and automation in general versus smaller line with becoming more critical and you becoming more critical for that. What's driving this? Because this is kind of turning explosive on you, which you have been hoping for, for the last few years. What are the drivers here?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes, thanks, Orin. Yes, as I said in my -- what's really cool about this right now is I think you kind of alluded in your question, it was where we were really relevant to the foundry that was doing the advanced nodes, and that got to be a very small number of customers and our relevance was only there. But if you look at this quarter, we had seven and eight figure contracts that were signed by companies that do their trailing of the trailing edge. High voltage stuff, microcontrollers and things like that. And then, yes, we still are very relevant to the leading-edge companies as evidenced by that large contract that we signed on the heels of the Quick Start.

So it's a broad base of demand now for analytics, because investment is going on, not just on the leading edge now, but also new derivatives on trailing edge nodes, new capacity on trailing edge nodes, more companies like that Tier 1 auto supplier who now -- silicon for the drivetrain is becoming supercritical, and therefore they want Exensio analytics. So it is a very broad base of business and this quarter I think it showed that.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

So sort of two follow-ups. Just unless that drivetrain application, you would never necessarily think that a company like that might think whoever the company is, it's not a normal foundry type of situation. You'd never think of them thinking like so deeply and thinking analytics for better yield. Is it more than that? Is it, without analytics, yield is poor? What is it? How would they even think of that?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes, because if you just look at the electrification of cars, then high voltage transistors is super important. They set quality, they set things like the possibility of the car catching a fire, they set liability and lifetime of that car. So manufacturing those components is really important. We've noticed in our customer base, chip companies getting into wafer making, right, you've seen that SD announce that they are making their own wafers. We see companies that did primarily -- on semi that are primarily 200 millimeter manufacturing, getting the 300 millimeter and we see companies like Denso and Bosch start building out fabs and getting into that silicon -- high-voltage silicon capability. Because so much of the value is there in the car and you may not use ADAS for a long time. There is mandates about when you're going to be using electric cars.

So we see that people in that market moving very, very fast and it's changing quite a bit. And Exensio analytics is a very valuable way to understand how to get to the highest level of quality, operational effectiveness and yield. So it is a viable capability for these companies and many of them were already customers of ours and they are expanding and some of them are kind of new customers for us like the auto suppliers who want to be in this Tier 1, also who want to be in the silicon business because it's how they control their destiny.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

Out of curiosity if you can say, are those two power names that you mentioned existing customers and/or new customers?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes. Probably we always talk about who we see as our customer. But suffice it to say, we've always sold first the top tier of every market we get into typically.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

A question on silicon carbide. Silicon carbide requires a lot more test obviously, very delicate to handle, super high voltages, difficult task.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

And much more rigorous testing that's being done.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Correct.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

Is there a module you have specifically for that, is that figuring into one of the drivers here on your power customers?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

That's a great insight. Yes, it is an area that we have capability on Exensio test and they have very complex burn-in, test post burn-in. And we have in Exensio, unique modules that are able to load that data and align it and analyze it. And that has been something we've been piloting with those customers to-date. It's not an important part of our revenue. But we believe it will more and more be an important part of our revenue because of exactly the hot points you highlighted in your question.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

Okay. Last comment. On one of the previous calls you've given out -- it wasn't even really important than the overall scheme of things with the following caveat, you've given out a number just to give an indication of what kind of data point analytics and data points are being pulled in every day by your customers, and I forget the number and it's an astounding number.

As you're transitioning almost from being associated with the semi-cap space, which isn't that the best place to be right now by the way and maybe for the next few years, but there is more here once in a while people are actually bringing you well to SaaS name finally. You probably processed more data points than many SaaS companies do at this point and certainly more mission-critical in a way. Is it possible to give out -- like giving out some metrics in some creative, nice way that people would be able to understand just what type of incredible processing that you are doing for these customers?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes, that's a great point. We are tracking now the amount of data poured into Exensio cloud for our core customers. And as your question kind of alluded to, we've had a number of customers move on an enterprise basis to Exensio. We expect that many of those customers will be up and running at -- it's a transition, takes months just even load all of their data because they want historical data to into the cloud system and off their on-premise system.

As we get out through 2022, we'll start communicating what the size of the Exensio cloud database is and yes, it will be in the multiple petabytes of data and process daily -- your insight is quite sharp, yes. It would -- the numbers on a daily basis are quite large. Now how that compares to overall modern stuff? I'm sure there's lots of things that are big. But in terms of mission-critical manufacturing data, it is a very big data set we process for customers data and a lot of that data comes from places that are outside their four walls, from their suppliers and foundry test and assembly, that all get loaded in. So it is a complex web that we're building out for the customer base.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

And if I may just one last question. I'm sorry, I'm taking so much time. But just in terms of being able to cross-utilize what you learn across customers, I believe that you are able to do that, I mean, pretty anonymously. If that is the case, is it some point where do you become almost like a must-have because they need -- they want and need that cross-analytics in order to get the best bang for the buck?

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Yes, must-have is always a super strong word. And I'm always -- there's always clever people out there. So that word always makes me nervous. But the point that you bring up there, we do always -- and customers want us retain the rights to use the data to make our algorithms better, because it benefits them as our algorithms can help them find insights better. And of course, the larger dataset that we sit on and we can let our algorithms run the more effective our algorithms can be for our customer base overall. And so we hope it increases importance for our customers and we like it to be the platform that is the most -- of analytics platform is the most effective one for the industry. But must is always a super strong word, so I'm nervous about that word. But your general thesis, yes, we would agree with that general thesis. Every time I meet with operations executive and I meet with them from the fabs, the IDMs and almost all the time, but maybe now mostly on Zoom, but still meet with lots of them, they want us to make sure that our algorithms can see quality issues more suddenly, settle quality issues sooner and more effectively for them, because they don't want. But obviously, they want to do. One of the guy said to me that last week, I don't want to be explaining to my customer and the other supply chain why we had this problem. This is something that's embarrassing when it happens. So your software has got to catch it. So they want us to hone our algorithms for exactly what you described Orin. And hopefully that will make us important to them.

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

Thank you. And your humility is appreciated.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] No questions at this time. And I would like to turn the call to John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions for closing remarks.

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Thank you for participating in our Q3 call. We look forward to talking with you again soon. Stay safe and have a great day. Goodbye, everyone.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]

Duration: 41 minutes

Call participants:

Joseph Diaz -- Managing Partner

John K. Kibarian -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and Co-Founder

Adnan Raza -- Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Blair Abernethy -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst

Tyler Burmeister -- Craig-Hallum -- Analyst

Gus Richard -- Northland -- Analyst

Gary Schnierow -- RiverPark Funds -- Analyst

Corey Tobin -- William Blair -- Analyst

Orin Hirschman -- AIGH Investment Part -- Analyst

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