PDF SOLUTIONS INC (PDFS) Business
This page reproduces the company's own Item 1 Business text from the linked SEC filing. It is filer text, not grepcent analysis, scoring, or investment advice.
Informational only - not investment advice. See Disclaimer.
Item 1. Business
We provide comprehensive data solutions designed to empower organizations across the semiconductor and electronics ecosystems to improve the yield and quality of their products and operational efficiency for increased profitability. We derive revenues from two categories, Platform and Volume-based fees. Our offerings that contribute to Platform revenue are licenses for software (other than Cimetrix® runtime licenses) and related software maintenance and technical support services; software-as-a-service (“SaaS”); engineering services; fixed fees associated with Characterization Vehicle® systems; and licenses and purchase contracts for DirectScan™ systems (formerly known as “DFI systems”). Volume-based revenue is derived from Cimetrix runtime licenses, secureWISE® data, and variable/royalty fees associated with CV® systems (sometimes referred to as Gainshare). We are headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and operate worldwide with additional offices in the United States of America, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Business Overview
For decades, due to the challenge of timely managing very large amounts of data, manufacturing analytics often functioned as an overlay in the semiconductor industry: though powerful, it was disconnected from direct execution. We are reframing analytics as infrastructure: a shared data backbone that spans characterization, process development, high-volume manufacturing, test, and assembly. We believe that this distinction is critical as data volumes explode and process interactions become increasingly nonlinear. By seeking to standardize how data is ingested, contextualized, and analyzed across domains, the PDF Solutions Platform is designed to reduce reliance on custom integrations and tribal knowledge. The result is intended to be not simply better visibility, but a common analytical language that enables faster root-cause analysis, more consistent decision-making, and shared accountability across teams and partners. Additionally, we believe that valuable, trusted, production-ready applications of AI in an industrial context need to be anchored on that type of robust, scalable, and secure data platform. Our aim is for the PDF Solutions Platform to enable the scaling of AI across the semiconductor ecosystem.
Our customers include Fortune 500 companies that use our products and services with the objective of achieving various goals depending on whether they are integrated device manufacturers (“IDMs”), fabless semiconductor companies, foundries, equipment manufacturers, electronics manufacturing suppliers (“EMS”), original device manufacturers (“ODMs”), outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (“OSATs”), or system houses. For example, our foundry customers generate and analyze key manufacturing data using our solutions, which are designed to shorten the time necessary for technology development and provide their fabless customers with a higher yielding process with improved electrical performance, which are both critical metrics for market success. Higher yields in less time can also mean less total raw materials and process runs, which can help lower customers’ total cost and minimize environmental impact. Foundries also use our products to remotely monitor and control equipment running in disparate locations, which is designed to reduce overhead associated with in person services and result in better equipment uptime and productivity. Foundries, as well as equipment manufacturers, use our connectivity products to implement evolving industry standards which require stability and quality for their operations or equipment, respectively. Equipment manufacturers can also use our products to remotely monitor and support and maintain their equipment located in foundries and OSATs. By way of a further example, our IDM and fabless customers use our solutions to align their data, as well as unique, differentiated data that we help them generate, by means of our industry-standards-based semantic model. Such aligned data can then be analyzed with our machine learning (“ML”) and artificial intelligence (“AI”) algorithms, which are designed to predict downstream manufacturing issues and result in shorter time for designs to meet performance requirements with fewer iterations and faster time-to-market. As a final example, our foundry and OSAT customers use the AI and ML applications of our software to help optimize for process control, assembly, and/or testing.
Our mission is to provide innovative solutions to create, access, and organize data to enable analysis and control for semiconductor and electronics companies to achieve better time-to-market, yields, quality, and operational efficiencies. Our strategy to achieve this mission, which is based on an overall repositioning of analytics in the global manufacturing context, is anchored on four integrated pillars:
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| ● | Differentiated Data & Process Characterization. Our DirectScan system combines voltage contrast e-beam inspection with design layout analysis to help identify systematic failures inline before they occur. Our eProbe tool performs inline inspection designed to test over 60 trillion vias per year per tool and catch defects in increasingly three-dimensional structures. We have taken advantage of advances in agentic AI to also help make the tens of thousands of experiments and billions of measurements per wafer of our advanced CV test chips more accessible, including by enabling customers to interpret complex datasets and generate insights quickly on demand. |
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| ● | AI-Ready Data Platform. Recognizing that current analytics architectures hit fundamental limits around 20,000 parameters, while newer semiconductor devices and chiplet products routinely generate millions, in 2024, we began work to completely reimagine our analytics platform to be able to handle the extremely large data volume typical of the semiconductor industry. The new architecture introduces a scalable, parallel, interactive analytics layer between traditional business intelligence tools and data storage. The end result is being designed to deliver significant improvements in analytics loading and improvements for critical analyses. Our philosophy for the applicability of AI in semiconductor manufacturing centers on “human governance with AI execution,” with an aim to establish rules and guardrails that allow AI to automate up to 90% of analysis while seeking to render visualizations in seconds and mine 100% of data 100% of the time. |
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| ● | Collaboration and Supply Chain Orchestration. We are tackling the orchestration challenge at two levels. Internal orchestrations through our Sapience Manufacturing Hub solution are designed to enable seamless integration across manufacturing execution system (MES), enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), and electronic design automation (EDA) tools and eliminate the data wrangling that consumes data scientists’ time. External orchestrations are designed to automate quality assurance, enable real-time work-in-progress tracking, and facilitate data feed-forward applications that allow test parameters from one insertion to optimize subsequent operations. |
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| ● | Global Secure Connectivity Platform. In 2020, we expanded our portfolio with Cimetrix products via acquisition, which products are a leading software for connectivity and control of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and in 2025, nearly 8,000 pieces of semiconductor manufacturing equipment shipped with Cimetrix products enabled. In 2025, we again expanded our portfolio with secureWISE products and network via another acquisition. Our secureWISE network connected over 300 manufacturing locations and over 100 equipment OEMs as of December 31, 2025, and is designed to provide end-to-end encryption and follow many of the guiding principles of zero trust architecture and a number of additional region-specific security requirements and industry-specific SEMI standards, and manage the exchange of terabytes of data with reliable uptime across eight regions, and is within the scope of our information security management system, which is ISO 27001:2022 certified. |
Industry Background
The semiconductor industry has always been a very capital-intensive industry, which, historically, resulted in a high concentration of manufacturing capacity in a few large localities to best benefit from economies of scale. In recent years, however, some countries' interest in local semiconductor production has led to several large investments in new manufacturing facilities, resulting in a geographically dispersed global semiconductor supply chain. advanced multichip packaging aimed at creating new sources of performance scalability is also impacting the overall semiconductor industry supply chain, including that designs will need to incorporate IP from different sources while the assembly of these multiple components will be done across a network of suppliers, manufacturing, assembly, testing companies that is more complex than for monolithic devices.
Technology and Intellectual Property Protection
Our success is largely dependent upon our proprietary software. We believe the creative skills and technological ability of our personnel, product enhancements, and new product development are necessary to maintain our position as a leading provider of comprehensive data solutions to the semiconductor industry. We rely primarily on trade secret rights, copyright laws, and nondisclosure and other contractual agreements to protect our software.
In addition, our success is dependent on various inventions we have made and we seek to protect certain of our IP under patent laws. As of December 31, 2025, we held 209 U.S. patents, with expiration dates on unexpired patents ranging from 2027 through 2043. We intend to prepare additional patent applications when we feel it is beneficial. Some of the technology we protect by patent includes elements of our CV and DirectScan systems and inventions related to AI/ML.
We protect our trademarks with registration of marks, including Characterization Vehicle, Cimetrix, CV, eProbe, Exensio, pdFasTest, PDF Solutions, secureWISE, and stylized logos therefor. We have common law rights to additional trademarks, including ALPS, DirectScan, Fire, and Sapience.
We further seek to protect our IP by entering into confidentiality and inventions assignment agreements with our employees and confidentiality and license agreements with our customers and the various parties we partner with to resell, distribute, and, in some cases, integrate our products. Further, we work to limit access to and distribution of our software, documentation and other proprietary information.
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Third parties could in any case develop competing technologies that include similar functionality or features, or otherwise are substantially equivalent or superior to our technologies. In addition, effective patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret protection may be unavailable or limited in certain foreign countries where we operate. Our business could suffer significantly if we fail to protect our proprietary technology.
In addition, through yield, performance, and reliability improvement services over more than 20 years, we have accumulated a large library of physical IP in the form of test structures. As part of our CV systems, our engineers create designs of experiments (“DOEs”) and layouts for targeted fail modes. We have also developed electrical measurement hardware tools and proprietary extraction, design, and analysis software. In addition, our technology embodies many production-proven and patented algorithms. Further, our IP includes proven methodologies that our implementation teams use as guidelines to drive our customers’ use of our technology. We strive to continually enhance our core technologies through the codification of knowledge that we gain in the use of our products and delivery of services.
Products and Services
Products
The PDF Solutions Platform is comprised of a large number of software and hardware products grouped into six primary brands. Each brand corresponds to a specific way of acquiring, transforming, transferring, or analyzing data from the design, manufacturing, or equipment related to making semiconductors.
| Exensio® | Sapience™ | DirectScan™ | CV® | Cimetrix® | secureWISE® |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data analytics and AI | Information and process integration | 3D e-beam inspection | Parametric characterization and yield improvement | Equipment integration | Secure, remote connectivity |
Exensio Software. Our Exensio software products address the big data manufacturing challenge of today’s advanced process nodes and highly integrated products, by providing a common environment throughout the supply chain for different data types, including inline and end-of-line metrology, yield, parametric, performance, manufacturing consumables, tool-level sensor data, test floor data, logistical data, as well as custom data types. Exensio products are designed to enable real-time rapid diagnosis and understanding of key manufacturing and test metrics during both inline and end-of-line wafer processing, helping customers reduce product variability and cost simultaneously. By integrating silos of data and applying AI and ML, Exensio products are designed to resolve the limitations of local optimization and provide better visibility across the entire production process, and to reduce the time it takes to make critical decisions that can drive higher product yield, quality and reliability. Our collaborations with strategic partners are intended to also integrate data from those partners’ products to make it available in Exensio, and also to develop new applications to inter-operate with those products and enhance the value to mutual customers. Exensio software is available as either an on-premise license or SaaS and can be configured to the customer’s business model, whether an IDM, a fabless, a foundry, or an OSAT. Common features, functionality, and purpose across the key modules are as follows:
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| ● | Manufacturing Analytics – This module provides end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing analytics for yield, performance, quality, and efficiency. It uses our proprietary database schema to store collected data from multiple sources and is designed to align these data elements in a common, unified environment with a consistent view. For example, product engineers use it to identify and analyze production yield, performance, reliability and other issues. Elements of this module are designed to handle very large and complex data sets that are commonplace in the semiconductor industry. To support the multi-dimensional product requirements of our customers, the powerful, interactive visualization and analysis capabilities in this product are highly flexible and user-configurable. |
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| ● | Process Control – This module provides failure detection and classification (“FDC”) capabilities for monitoring, alarming, and control of manufacturing tool sets. These capabilities include proprietary data collection and analysis of tool sensor trace data and summary indicators designed to rapidly identify sources of process variations and manufacturing excursions. It is designed to enable reduced process variability and excursions at the tool level through sensor data collection and analysis. When used together with Exensio Manufacturing Analytics and related modules, the accretive data mining and correlation capabilities are designed to enable identification of tool level sources of yield loss and process variation and enable predictive and proactive optimization decisions for process control, process adjustments, preventive maintenance scheduling, tool corrective actions, wafer dispatching, and wafer level and final test to impact end of line product yield, performance, and reliability. |
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| ● | Test Operations – This module provides comprehensive data collection and analysis capabilities for data generated during manufacturing test operations designed to optimize test operations management overall, including improving test productivity, performing part average test, supporting test floor operations, and implementing adaptive test. Exensio Test Operations is also designed to provide predictive insights based on proprietary analytics during test, assembly and packaging to help maximize the efficiency of test operations, productivity improvements, and yield reclamation. |
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| ● | Assembly Operations – This module provides the capability to link assembly and packaging data with other product lifecycle data, including fabrication and characterization data, across the product life cycle. Data sources could include manufacturing, wafer acceptance test, wafer sort, test and assembly, final test, and field use. The proprietary data linkage enabled by Assembly Operations is also designed to enable device manufacturers to maintain full traceability of their finished products back to the source wafer without the need for Electronic Chip IDs (“ECIDs”). This capability continues to become a requirement for safety-critical market segments such as automotive and military-aerospace. |
Sapience Software. Our Sapience software shares a common purpose: capturing and aligning manufacturing data to enable business processes driven by actionable insights. Our Sapience software is designed as a distributed platform to address the challenge of modern manufacturing environments that often combine equipment from different generations, and connect diverse manufacturing equipment through multiple connectivity standards. It is architected to create a high-performance data pipeline that enables streaming analytics, ML applications, and AI solutions requiring direct production equipment data. our Sapience software is designed to enable essential infrastructure for enterprise applications requiring equipment data streams to help empower application developers to innovate rapidly.
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| ● | Sapience Data Platform – This software product is a powerful, cloud-native platform designed to unify fragmented data from diverse equipment and protocols across the factory floor, to help enable communication, actionable insights, and enhanced productivity. Our Sapience Data Platform is designed to support a wide range of factory communication protocols and Its advanced messaging and streaming capabilities are intended to enable smooth, real-time data sharing across equipment and systems. Designed with open architecture, it powers our other applications and also empowers third-party developers and customers to create tailored applications for unique operational needs. Our Sapience Data Platform is designed to enable scalability for both small labs and large-scale factories and scale up or down based on demand and handle failures. |
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| ● | Sapience Manufacturing Hub enterprise – This software product is designed to be used to gather clean data from the factory floor and aggregate it by product, order, lot, and other relevant factors, so that costs and other data can be accounted for at the enterprise level. Our Sapience Manufacturing Hub Enterprise software is designed to scale and provide a single, common connectivity platform between enterprise applications, such as MES, ERP, and our Exensio software. It is a configurable enterprise application integration (EAI) platform that is designed to be used to connect data sources, applications, devices, or tools across locations and operating platforms to transfer data or information between manufacturing, external services, databases, and applications to enable the digital transformation of manufacturing processes, systems, and services. Our Sapience Manufacturing Hub Enterprise software enables advanced applications that benefit from more real-time and detailed insight into manufacturing, such as our Sapience Operational Product Costing module, which is designed to provide more accurate insights into the gap between plan costs and actual costs and enable actions to improve profitability. Sapience Operational Product Costing integrates with SAP S4/HANA and is intended to also integrate with other ERP or legacy costing applications in the future. |
DirectScan System. This system combines our proprietary eProbe hardware and various proprietary software to fundamentally reimagine e-beam systems to help identify systematic failures inline before they occur. Conventional e-beam inspectors operate by rastering across regions of interest, capturing complete images, then performing die-to-die comparisons to identify defective pixels. Our eProbe tool instead functions as a contactless electrical tester. It is designed to jump from one device under test (“DUT”) to another, measuring voltage contrast at specific pads of interest, while skipping dielectric regions entirely. Our DirectScan system is provided to customers under a license/lease arrangement or as a hardware sale. The DirectScan system contains the following components.
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| ● | Proprietary Software – Our Fire™ software module is designed to analyze IC product layout features to help determine which parts of the product layout to inspect. Our Exensio Characterization module has been designed to analyze the billions of measurements collected using the eProbe tool. As part of the system offering, we generally use the Characterization module to provide analysis services to our customers, which typically includes a summary of our findings and recommendations. |
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| ● | eProbe Non-Contact E-Beam Tool – Our eProbe e-beam tools are designed for contactless measurement of product layout. The fourth generation tool, the 450, includes advances in beam vector targeting and higher signal-to-noise (SNR) for enhanced defect sensitivity, higher throughput, enhanced tool matching, and better inspection control for more stable performance necessary for deployment in high-volume manufacturing (HVM). Our eProbe tools are designed to use our secureWISE network for us to provide secure remote equipment support and maintenance to customers. |
Characterization Vehicle System (also branded as our CV System). Our CV system is a combination of CV test chips, hardware to test such products, software to analyze the test results, and related services. This system is designed to accelerate the efficiency of yield learning by shortening the learning cycle, learning more per cycle, and reducing the number of silicon wafers required in manufacturing processes. This system includes physical IP in the form of test structures and DOEs that are tuned to our customers’ product and/or process specifics, tester hardware, data analysis, and training. The primary software and hardware products included in the CV system are as follows:
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| ● | CV Test Chips – Our proprietary test chips are designed by our engineers using our proprietary Fire software. These test chips are run through a customer’s manufacturing process, with intentional process modifications, to provide differentiated data to explore the effects of potential process improvements given natural manufacturing variations. Our custom-designed CV test chips are built for our test hardware and analysis software and include DOEs tuned to each customer’s process. Types of CV test chips include: |
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| ■ | Our full-reticle and shared-reticle CV test chips are designed to provide a fast-learning cycle and are fully integrated with third-party failure analysis and inspection tools for a diagnosis to understand root causes. Our full-reticle CV test chips use a shortened process flow to provide a faster learning cycle for specific process modules. |
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| ■ | Our Scribe CV test chips are inserted directly on customers’ product wafers to collect data about critical layers. |
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| ■ | Our DirectProbe™ CV test chips are designed to enable ultra-fast yield learning for new product designs by allowing our customers to measure components of actual product layout and identify yield issues. |
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| ● | pdFasTest® Electrical Tester – Our proprietary electrical test hardware is optimized to quickly test our CV test chips, enabling fast defect and parametric characterization of manufacturing processes. As part of the system offering, we provide test programs for each CV test chip that are tuned to the customer’s process. This automated system provides parallel functional testing, thus minimizing the time required to perform millions of electrical measurements to test our CV test chips. We provide services to analyze the differentiated data output of this tester using the Exensio Characterization software to provide actionable insights to our customers. |
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| ● | Exensio Characterization software – This module, which is designed to integrate with the rest of the Exensio software, collects the data generated from our CV test products, generating models of the performance effects of process variations on these design building blocks. As part of the system offering, we also offer analysis services, if the customer elects not to do such analysis itself. |
Cimetrix Software. Our Cimetrix software enables equipment manufacturers in the semiconductor and electronics industries to provide standard interfaces on their products for efficient equipment communication, control, and data collection. This software is designed to deliver the foundational control and connectivity infrastructure that we believe the next generation of smart factories demands. Our Cimetrix software is designed to enable equipment manufacturers to accelerate time-to-market, comply with global standards, and unlock new levels of performance in the evolving landscape of advanced manufacturing. Numerous industry standards have been established for equipment connectivity and control, including the SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International) defined SECS (SEMI Equipment Communication Standard), GEM (Generic Equipment Model), GEM300, and EDA (equipment data acquisition) standards. Our Cimetrix software is designed to support these industry standards to enable equipment manufacturers to implement robust, turnkey support for these connectivity and control standards without needing to invest engineering resources to develop their own interfaces to these standards. Manufacturing equipment enabled with Cimetrix-supported interfaces allow for faster and more efficient implementation of smart manufacturing initiatives that depend on the collection and analysis of manufacturing and product data taking into account industry standards. We sell Cimetrix software via perpetual licenses, typically sold as part of a software development kit (“SDK”) that helps equipment manufacturers implement them quickly. We charge a one-time fee per equipment product type for the SDK license and a one-time fee for each piece of equipment shipped that includes the Cimetrix runtime license. We categorize our Cimetrix software into three equipment categories: factory connectivity, factory connectivity testing, and equipment control.
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| ● | Equipment Factory Connectivity – Our Cimetrix products for equipment factory connectivity primarily include the following: |
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| ■ | Cimetrix CIMConnect™ is a SEMI SECS/GEM interface to the factory host for automated control and data collection. The Cimetrix CIMConnect module supports multiple-host interfaces simultaneously, which allows customers to support legacy, custom, and GEM interfaces. Cimetrix CIMConnect is used in semiconductor wafer fabrication, semiconductor back-end (test, assembly, and packaging), PV, HB-LED, disk drive, flat panel displays, printed circuit boards and other electronics manufacturing. In addition to enabling the implementation of the SEMI SECS/GEM standards E4, E5, E30, E37, E172, and E173, Cimetrix CIMConnect also supports SEMI PV2 (PVECI), A3 (PCBECI), and HB4 (HB-LED ECI) standards. |
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| ■ | Cimetrix CIM300™ is a GEM interface for 300mm equipment using SEMI standards, including E39, E40, E87, E90, E94, E116, E148, and E157. These SEMI standards allow for the full automation required in manufacturing 300mm wafers. Cimetrix CIM300 manages the interdependencies between the standards and simplifies complex scenarios for easy implementation of the standards. These GEM300 standards are required for full automation in manufacturing of 300mm wafers. Cimetrix CIM300 works with Cimetrix CIMConnect to implement the GEM300 and the original GEM suite of standards. |
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| ■ | Cimetrix CIMPortal™ Plus is an interface for EDA, also known as Interface A. The EDA standards are E120, E125, E132, E134, E138, E147, and E164. Cimetrix CIMPortal Plus implements the EDA standards in a flexible architecture that collects data from multiple sources and routes the data to multiple clients simultaneously. Factories can use the data gathered through EDA interfaces for FDC, run-to-run advanced process control, equipment health monitoring, chamber/tool matching, predictive maintenance, virtual metrology, diagnostics, and many other equipment-related analytical applications. |
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| ● | Equipment Factory Connectivity Testing – We provide the following Cimetrix software for testing the interfaces developed using our equipment factory connectivity products: Cimetrix EquipmentTest™, for testing and validating compliance with the GEM and GEM300 standards, Cimetrix EDATester™, for testing and validating compliance with the EDA/Interface A standards, and performance testing of the interface, and Cimetrix ECCE Plus™ for quick testing of the EDA/Interface A interface. |
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| ● | Equipment Control – Our Cimetrix products for equipment control are designed to provide for supervisory control, material handling, operator interface, platform control, and factory automation requirements, to help equipment manufacturers meet the requirements of fabrication facilities. Developers can leverage framework components through configuration and extension or customize the framework when different requirements exist. Our Cimetrix software is architected to allow data generated at various points on the equipment to be quickly and easily accessed by other modules or external applications. In 2025, we released the next generation of our Cimetrix CIMControlFramework™, to support both windows and Linux, and updated the name to be Cimetrix EquipmentControlFramework™. Our Cimetrix equipment control software integrates our Cimetrix CIMConnect, Cimetrix CIM300, and Cimetrix CIMPortal Plus components to support the SEMI GEM, GEM300, and EDA/Interface A standards. |
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secureWISE System. This system is a remote equipment monitoring and access system designed to provide greater visibility into equipment uptime and utilization to improve health and functionality. Our secureWISE system is architected to deliver secure, end-to-end remote connectivity to equipment over private networks to provide operator visibility into data to drive predictive analytics. Developed in the early 2000s, secureWISE was designed specifically to manage supplier remote connectivity for the semiconductor industry and was built to address the needs of both equipment suppliers and semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Our secureWISE system functions on a “single pane of glass” concept, meaning that potentially dozens of separate connections from different equipment suppliers are replaced with just one connection through secureWISE. This dramatically simplifies network management and security oversight. Similarly, equipment manufacturers benefit by establishing just one connection to secureWISE rather than maintaining separate connections to each client fab. Our secureWISE system consists of proprietary software, dedicated hardware, and a managed network.
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| ● | secureWISE Software – Our secureWISE software consists of modules that are on-equipment, SaaS, and on-premise on servers that combine to provide access to such equipment’s performance information and, at customers’ options, remote control of such equipment. Our secureWISE Business Management Portal (BMP) software is designed to provide customer-specific dashboards with views of authorized user activity related to their equipment. |
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| ● | secureWISE Servers – We deploy server-side software at each manufacturing facility with equipment to be managed by either shipping server appliances that we own that are pre-installed and configured shipped, or providing a complete virtual machine image (“VMI”) of our server software package for digital download and installation by the customer on server hardware owned by them. In either case, we refer to these dedicated servers as secureWISE servers. Our secureWISE servers connect to our secureWISE network through an IPsec virtual private network (“VPN”) tunnel and act as a triple-A (authentication, authorization, and audit) server by verifying user identities, controlling access permissions, and maintaining comprehensive logs of user activities, including timestamps for actions like file transfers. Our secureWISE servers are designed to include numerous security safeguards, including antivirus protection that scans file transfers, whether equipment logs being downloaded for analysis or software updates being deployed to equipment, before transmission, and automatically quarantines any files where malicious code is detected. We maintain our secureWISE servers, providing regular updates to the operating system, application software, and antivirus definitions, with virus definitions typically updated daily. |
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| ● | secureWISE Network – Our secureWISE network is a self-managed global private network connecting equipment suppliers and fabs through strategically positioned hubs in key industry locations. This closed network operates primarily through IPsec VPN tunnels, creating an encrypted pathway that works to reduce the external threat surface. Only secureWISE subscribers are permitted to access our secureWISE network, filtering out unwanted traffic that might otherwise reach production environments. Data in transit flowing through our secureWISE network enjoys a layered dual-encryption protection: IPsec safeguarding at the network level and TLS (HTTPS) securing communication between endpoints. Customers pay us fees for tools that are connected to the network and the amount of data transferred over it. |
Services
Our services are almost always sold together with, or to support, our products. Our experienced professionals have a combination of expertise in our software, hardware, and CV IP products and deep industry knowledge and experience, which enable them to design an appropriate solution, and then deploy and configure it, to address different customer user cases. Our global team of experienced engineers and other technical professionals assist customer organizations in solving their most complex manufacturing and test challenges. Our services can be categorized into the following groups.
Software-as-a-Service. Where a customer wants to take advantage of the lower cost of ownership, centralized data storage, and outsourced physical and software resources, we provide services to make various modules of our software available to our customers via the Internet, using third-party providers, which is generally referred to as SaaS or cloud computing. These services, which we refer to as hosted management services, include set-up and configuration of the cloud environment, system health monitoring, data integration maintenance, integration monitoring, system updates, security, management of the upload/download of our customers’ data stored in the cloud, and license administration. Because our SaaS applications are accessed from a remote server rather than installed on individual machines, it is easier for us to maintain. For example, when we update the remote software, customers’ interfaces are updated. SaaS generally accommodates rapid increases in customers’ usage, while also being designed to provide rapid and largely continuous availability to customers. Our SaaS services can be combined with our other services depending on the customers’ needs, for example, data cleaning and monitoring services.
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Software and Hardware Installation and Configuration, System/Data Integration, and Value Realization. Where a customer opts for on-premise deployment of our software or systems, we offer services to assist with installation, configuration, and integration with customers’ existing networks and data sources. Our system integration services can also include data cleaning and monitoring services. One requirement of big data analytics is to have clean, harmonized data to analyze. This service offering outsources the data wrangling and management effort to free the customer to focus their efforts on analysis, enabling a greater return on investment to the company than data management. We also provide services to create CV test chips, pdFastTest and eProbe test programs, analysis templates, and other professional services to help customers achieve specific outcomes using our products. Our CV design services are designed to characterize key product and/or process elements into CV test structures. We provide these services, typically together with all elements of our CV system, to foundry customers in connection with new process technology development and/or yield ramp. In Characterization engagements, which sometimes include our DirectScan system, our services generally also include the analysis of the electrical test results generated by our systems and summary findings and recommendations to the customer. We provide application engineering services to design and build recipes for our tool, which involves configuring the tool for the type of product wafer, die size and location, target inspection sites within die, which can include specific DUTs to inspect and their location, as well as the parameters to flag a DUT as an outlier. Our service professionals bring together experience from semiconductor manufacturing and test operations, big data analytics, and AI/ML algorithms to help customers with designing and implementing unique Characterization Vehicle test chips, supporting new product introductions by rapidly identifying root causes of yield detractors, or integrating and aligning manufacturing data from different sources to drive predictive analytics to improve product yield and quality. Our value realization services aim to deliver on the promise of Industry 4.0 by integrating the data generated from sensor-based machines, and connecting them to a big data analytics and machine learning environment that can visualize entire production lines and help take actions that can improve business results.
Technical Support and Maintenance for Hardware and Software. We provide standard software maintenance and support (“M&S”) services for our software products, as well technical support and maintenance/repair services for our hardware systems. M&S services include reasonable telephone and email access to our service team who can assist with software error corrections, and product updates on a periodic basis. Our service team covers worldwide customers with three time zones: Pacific, European central, and Taipei standard. For our eProbe tool, such services include technical support services to customers to operate the tool and maintenance and repair or replacement parts on the tool during the warranty period and any contractual service period. These services are primarily provided at the facility where the tool is installed. After the initial warranty period, the availability of engineering support and parts cost depends on the service package level a customer purchases.
Customers
Our existing customers include foundries, IDMs, fabless semiconductor design companies, OSATs, equipment manufacturers, EMS, and ODMs, including those that embed and distribute our software modules in their equipment. Our semiconductor customers’ targeted product segments vary significantly, including microprocessors, memory, graphics, image sensor solutions, and communications. We believe that the adoption of our solutions by such companies for usage in a wide range of products supports the application of our solutions to the broader semiconductor market. We often have multiple contracts with a single customer or customer group, with no interdependent performance obligations. In general, our customer contracts are non-cancellable.
Three customers accounted for an aggregate of 53% of our revenues for 2025, two customers accounted for an aggregate of 31% of our revenues for 2024, and one customer accounted for 35% of our revenues for 2023. No other customers accounted for 10% or more of our revenues in 2025, 2024 and 2023. See the discussion in “Risk Factors” under Item 1A for more information about risks associated with customer concentration and contractual provisions. See Note 13, “Customer and Geographic Information” of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included under Part II, Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data for additional geographic information.
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Sales and Marketing
Our sales strategy is primarily to pursue targeted accounts through a combination of our direct sales force, our service teams, and strategic alliances. After we are engaged by a customer and early in the services process, our engineers seek to establish relationships in the organization and gain an understanding of our customers’ business issues. Our direct sales and service teams combine their efforts to deepen our customer relationships by expanding our penetration across customers’ products, processes, and technologies. This working relationship with each customer has the added benefit of helping us to identify new product areas and technologies in which we should next focus our research and development efforts. From time-to-time, we use sales representatives/agents in various locations to augment direct sales in certain territories.
We are focused on continuing to establish strategic alliances with process licensors, vendors in the electronic design automation software, capital equipment for IC production, and test silicon IP and mask-making software segments to create and take advantage of sales channel and co-marketing opportunities. Additionally, we are focused on continuing to form relationships with key value chain participants, including foundries and OSATs, to provide services and value across the manufacturing supply chain.
Research and Development
Our research and development focuses on developing and introducing new proprietary technologies or enhanced capabilities for our comprehensive platform, including our software and hardware, and new applications targeted to inter-operate with strategic partner products. We use a rapid-prototyping paradigm in the context of customer engagements to achieve these goals. We have made, and expect to continue to make, substantial investments in research and development. The complexity of our technologies requires expertise in standards, physical IC design and layout, transistor design and semiconductor physics, semiconductor process integration, numerical algorithms, e-beam technology, hardware, statistics, networking, security, and software development. We are focused on continuing to advance our market and technological leadership. We conduct in-house training for our engineers in certain technical areas. Our training also extends to focusing on ways to enhance customer service skills. Although it fluctuates, we can have up to one quarter of our research and development engineers assigned to one or more projects, partnered with solution services engineers, in a deliberate strategy to provide direct feedback between technology development and customer needs. We also utilize a variety of skilled independent contractors for specialized development.
Governmental Regulations
We are subject to a variety of federal, state, local and foreign laws and regulations relating to our business and operations, including those related to trade controls, anti-corruption, anti-bribery, data privacy, data protection, use of AI, antitrust, competition, employment, income taxes, and the environment. For additional information regarding risks related to laws and regulations, including existing restrictions imposed by BIS, as well as international operations, see Item 1A, “Risk Factors.”
Trade
A large percentage of our software products are not of U.S. origin and not generally subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) when not located in the U.S. Our standard operations include development, distribution processes, software download sites, and professional service centers and processes located in various geographies around the world to better serve our customers. We are subject to laws and regulations of the United States and other jurisdictions as applicable to operations, products, services, and access by certain foreign nationals in the United States and other locations, including the EAR, other export controls, tariffs, trade protection measures, sanctions, U.S. outbound investment controls with respect to certain countries, and other trade regulations.
The Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) of the U.S. Department of Commerce has placed certain entities on and frequently adds entities to the “Entity List,” which restricts supply of items to or in connection with the named entities and impacts our ability to transact business with certain customers. BIS recently extended controls to renewal licenses for certain lawfully delivered products that would have changed status under new regulations and designations, causing us to decline certain renewals. In Fall 2025, BIS extended Entity List restrictions to non-listed foreign companies owned 50% or more by parties subject to the Entity List restrictions. This would extend restrictions to a significant number of companies with respect to items that are subject to the EAR. BIS has suspended this rule until November 2026.
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Trade regulations limiting or banning sales into certain countries or to certain companies, including economic and financial sanctions and trade embargoes administered and enforced by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), have impacted our ability to transact business in certain countries and with certain customers. Future trade regulations may also impact our ability to transact business with certain customers and in certain countries and may restrict certain non-U.S. person employees from performing their duties for us without first obtaining appropriate authorization, if their duties involve an export, reexport, or transfer of export-controlled technology.
Anti-corruption and anti-bribery
We are subject to laws and regulations in the United States and other jurisdictions as applicable concerning anti-corruption and anti-bribery, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the U.K. Bribery Act, which prohibit corrupt payments to governmental officials and bribes to other persons.
Data privacy and data protection
We are subject to laws and regulations in the United States and other jurisdictions governing data privacy and data protection. This includes laws in locations where we have operations and customers, such as Japan, China, and the EU/UK, which regulate our collection, handling, and use of personal information. These laws and regulations to which we are subject are complex and may change or develop over time, sometimes with limited or no advance notice. Developments or other changes in laws or regulations or how they are interpreted or enforced have had, and may continue to have, a negative impact on our business and increase our compliance-related expenditures.
Artificial intelligence
The AI, including machine learning and automated decision-making technologies (“AI Technologies”), that we use in our operations or for software development or build into our software products is subject to various state, federal, and international laws and regulations, which continue to evolve. Existing legal regimes (e.g., relating to data privacy) continue to regulate certain aspects of AI Technologies, and new laws regulating AI Technologies continue to be enacted around the world. As of 2025, U.S. federal and state approaches remain fragmented, with varying definitions, scopes, and enforcement mechanisms. While several measures have focused initially on consumer‑facing or public‑sector applications, their underlying concepts—such as accountability, transparency, and human oversight—may have broader implications across commercial and industrial uses of AI. In the EU, the focus during 2025 shifted from legislative adoption to implementation. Other jurisdictions continue to advance AI‑specific regulatory frameworks with varying approaches: from prescriptive, enforceable controls in China, to framework‑level statutes in Japan and Taiwan (with Japan emphasizing voluntary, guidance‑led compliance and Taiwan establishing statutory principles for future measures), alongside more formal statutory oversight emerging in South Korea. In sum, these developments together contribute to a fragmented and evolving global regulatory landscape for artificial intelligence that may impact our ability to use, develop, and commercialize AI Technologies in the future.
Competition
We believe that our solutions compare favorably with respect to competition because we have demonstrated results and reputation, strong core technology, ability to create innovative technology, and ability to implement solutions for new technology and product generations. Further, we believe IC companies benefit from our combination of big data management infrastructure, AI/ML-based analytics engines, and products that generate and collect differentiated data that enrich the analytics process.
We face competition regarding different elements of our products and services portfolio from the following sources and companies:
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| ● | indirect competition from internal groups at IC companies that may choose to develop their own test chips or software analytics solutions internally typically by using various commercially-available, general-purpose software, including for example, Tableau from Salesforce, Inc., Spotfire from Cloud Software Group, Snowflake, Inc., Databricks, Inc.; and, |
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| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| ● | direct competition from providers of: |
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| o | yield management and/or prediction systems, such as KLA Corporation (“KLA”), Onto Innovation, Inc. (“Onto”), and Synopsys, Inc. (“Synopsys”); |
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| o | semiconductor manufacturing software, such as Applied Materials, Inc (“Applied Materials”), Synopsys, Invantest, Inc., Emerson Electric Co., Onto, and Siemens AG; |
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| o | inline inspection, metrology and electrical test equipment providers, such as ASML Holding N.V., Applied Materials, KLA, and Keysight Technologies, Inc.; and, |
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 |
|---|---|---|
| o | connectivity software or integration products/services supporting factory equipment connectivity or control needs of customers, such as PEER Group, Inc., Kontron AIS, GmbH, Yokogawa Electric Corp., Advantest Corporation, Kornic Automation Co. Ltd., and Tracces by Capgemini SE. |
See the discussions in “Risk Factors” under Item 1A for more information about risks associated with our competition.
Human Capital Management
We believe that our future success will depend, in part, on our continued ability to hire and retain qualified management, sales, and technical employees. Consequently, we seek to engage in sound ethical and organizational governance, and promote business ethics and integrity. At the Board of Directors level, our Compensation and Human Capital Management Committee is tasked with oversight of the development, implementation and effectiveness of our policies and strategies relating to human capital management, including strategies regarding recruiting, selection, career development and progression, and employment practices.
As of December 31, 2025, we had 600 employees worldwide, including 180 field application engineers, 225 in research and development, 135 in sales and marketing, and 60 in general and administrative functions. Of these employees, 364 are located in the United States and Canada, 197 in Asia, and 39 in Europe. None of our employees are represented by a labor union. Our employees in France and Italy are subject to collective bargaining agreements in those countries.
Information about our Executive Officers
The following table and notes set forth information about our current executive officers as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10‑K.
| Name | Age | Position | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| John K. Kibarian, Ph.D. | 61 | President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director | ||
| Adnan Raza | 53 | Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer | ||
| Kimon W. Michaels, Ph.D. | 59 | Executive Vice President, Products and Solutions and Director | ||
| Andrzej Strojwas, Ph.D. | 73 | Chief Technology Officer |
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John K. Kibarian, Ph.D., one of our founders, has served as President since November 1991 and has served as our Chief Executive Officer since July 2000. Dr. Kibarian has served as a director on our Board of Directors since December 1992. Dr. Kibarian received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, an M.S. E.C.E. and a Ph.D. E.C.E. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Adnan Raza, joined in January 2020 as Executive Vice President, Finance, and was appointed Chief Financial Officer effective in March 2020. Prior to joining the Company, Mr. Raza served as an independent strategy consultant for private and public companies from July 2019 to January 2020. Prior to that, Mr. Raza served in various roles at Synaptics Inc., a developer of human interface technologies, including as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development from August 2017 to June 2019 and Vice President of Corporate Development from February 2015 to August 2017. Prior roles include technology investment banking at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and UBS Investment Bank, strategic advising at Blackreef Capital, engineering and marketing at Azanda Network Devices, and engineering at Lucent Technologies. Mr. Raza also served as a board member at FIDO Alliance, an alliance of leading technology companies to enhance user security and authentication. Mr. Raza holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Valparaiso University, an M. Eng. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an M.B.A. from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kimon W. Michaels, Ph.D., one of our founders, has served as Vice President, Products and Solutions since July 2010 and was designated as an Executive Vice President in February 2019. Dr. Michaels served as Vice President, Design for Manufacturability from June 2007 through June 2010. Prior to that, Dr. Michaels served as Vice President, Field Operations for Manufacturing Process Solutions from January 2006 through May 2007, and has served as a director on our Board of Directors since November 1995. From March 1993 through December 2005, he served in various vice presidential capacities. He also served as Chief Financial Officer of the Company from November 1995 to July 1998. Dr. Michaels received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, an M.S. E.C.E. and a Ph.D. E.C.E. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Andrzej Strojwas, Ph.D., served as a technical advisor to the Company from our founding until 2021 and as chief technologist from 1997 to 2021. He joined the Company as an employee in July 2021 as Vice President and Technical General Manager, and was appointed Chief Technology Officer effective December 2021. From October 1982 to July 2021, Dr. Strojwas was the Keithley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, Dr. Strojwas has held senior technical positions at Harris Semiconductor Co., AT&T Bell Labs, Texas Instruments, NEC, Hitachi, SEMATECH, and KLA. He holds an M.S. in Electronic Engineering from Warsaw Technical University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Available Information
We file or furnish various reports, such as registration statements, periodic and current reports, proxy statements and other materials with the SEC. Our Internet website address is www.pdf.com. You may obtain, free of charge on our website, copies of our Annual Reports on Form 10‑K, quarterly reports on Form 10‑Q, current reports on Form 8‑K, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. The Company’s website address provided is not intended to function as a hyperlink, and the information on the Company’s website is not, and should not be considered, part of this Annual Report on Form 10‑K and is not incorporated by reference herein.
The SEC maintains a website (http://www.sec.gov) that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers, such as us, that file electronically with the SEC.