inTEST looks cheap as a semiconductor testing company growing 27% year over year at about 1.5x sales. That fits @citrini's screen for this stage of the cycle: semiconductor names that haven't tripled yet and still trade at the low end of their historical valuation range. x.com 

inTest's first-quarter beat makes its selloff look overdone. EPS topped expectations by 77.8% and revenue rose 27%, and with the market booming, demand should carry it, even as a post the author replies to notes orders are slowing. x.com  x.com  x.com 

Aehr Test Systems has validated its burn-in thesis as bookings convert to revenue and evaluation customers move into production, with AI processor power, silicon photonics and hybrid bonding raising the value of burn-in testing. Q4 bookings rose to $60.7M from $11.1M, effective backlog reached $100.6M, twice fiscal 2026 revenue, and fiscal 2027 guidance of $130M-$150M implies 160%-200% growth. The results lead optical production and could renew momentum in the optical theme. x.com  x.com  x.com  … Show more

As LLMs commoditize, chip programs will multiply, favoring vendors paid per attempt: CEVA, Aehr Test Systems, inTEST, PDF Solutions and GSI Technology. Stable, cost-driven inference makes hardwired custom chips worth building, and every program pays for IP, yield and test, success or not. CEVA earns per-unit IP royalties, Aehr and inTEST scale with SKU count, PDF Solutions owns cross-fab yield data, and GSI is a risky memory-wall option. Ongoing architecture churn would make this early. x.com  … Show more

Tower Semiconductor's silicon photonics ramp is running ahead of schedule, per Wedbush, pulling it into a better revenue and margin mix from AI datacenter optics. Q1 revenue beat, gross margin hit 26.8%, and about $290 million of prepayments back $1.3 billion of contracted 2027 SiPh revenue, which management calls a floor. Wedbush sees CPO share shift as a risk from 2028 at the earliest. It raised its target to $300 from $140 but stays Neutral, seeing the good news as increasingly priced in. … Show more

Aehr remains a concentrated, expensive way to own wafer-level photonics burn-in: its 10-K says silicon-photonics customers primarily drove that revenue growth, and FY2027 guidance of $130m-$150m could nearly triple FY2026 sales, yet shares value it at about 20x the guide. Teradyne's acquired photonic-chip test business is not material to its much larger sales; Aehr's top five customers provided 70% of FY2026 revenue, so orders matter more than the headline CPO opportunity. x.com 

Aehr Test Systems' deals will get bigger and more frequent. Aehr received a record $41M follow-on order from its lead hyperscale customer for package-level burn-in of custom AI ASICs, bringing second-half bookings above $92M, and the stock jumped about 18%. Tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of optical networking equipment, plus coming HBM and HBF, will be installed over the next decade, and landing HBM4 and HBF burn-in deals would bring hockey-stick optionality. x.com  x.com 

Xintec offers TSMC's co-packaged optics testing bottleneck at a huge discount. TSMC's COUPE volume production starts this year with wafer-level testing flagged as one of three critical scaling challenges, and TSMC plans to pursue CPO with its subsidiary Xintec, which is ramping wafer testing capacity for second-half 2026 growth. 90% trial yields on 310mm pilot lines suggest technical risk is falling faster than its roughly $2.18B market cap reflects. x.com 

Aehr Test Systems is monetizing the test layer of the AI optical interconnect buildout as silicon photonics burn-in reaches production scale. It guided FY2027 revenue to $130-150M, up 160-200% from $50M, after record bookings of $60.7M and a $100.6M effective backlog. Every 800G and 1.6T transceiver and optical I/O chip in AI data centers needs reliability screening, so transceiver growth feeds burn-in demand. Its lead silicon photonics customer keeps reordering and a second is ramping. x.com 

Demand for Applied Optoelectronics' transceivers is settled, so it is now a manufacturing story where execution is the only variable. Management says demand runs 20-40% above supply and informally guided about $330M of 800G/1.6T revenue in Q4, implying $480-500M total, about double Q3's guide. It expects to be the fourth qualified 1.6T supplier at a major hyperscaler with a >$200M order, and capacity rises to 650,000 units by end-2026. A Chinese transceiver ban would favor its US-made supply. … Show more