PDF SOLUTIONS INC

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:

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.

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.