Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:LSCC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Our next question is coming from Hans Mosesmann from Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is now live.

Hans Mosesmann: Thanks. Hey guys, congratulations. Good results in a tough market. Most of my questions have been answered. But I am curious, Jim, in the new design engagements where software is a big component of that, up until the design win, what is the competitive dynamic for those specific new sockets that you’re winning?

Jim Anderson: Yes. I think that in general, we feel like we’ve got a really good competitive position in general. I’ll come back to the software part of your comment, but I want to start with just the devices themselves. If you look at Nexus, extremely competitive versus other FPGAs that are out there, we’re able to deliver power efficiency that’s two to three times better than our competition, incredible physical size advantages where our devices are much, much smaller. So I think even at just the device level, we feel really well positioned competitively. And then similar for Avant, as we’re — we’ve launched the first device family based on Avant, we have two more device families we’re planning to launch this year and more to come in the future.

We also feel really well positioned competitively there. And so the devices themselves are competitive. But I think then when we add to that the software capabilities and portfolio that we’ve built out over the past four to five years, I think that makes a really compelling combination for our customers. Our software solution portfolio, there’s now five different application-specific software solution stacks for common customer applications. We’re seeing great adoption of those software solutions, as I mentioned, the attach rate of our software solutions is now over 50%. And what that software does is that, number one, that helps our customers design our products in very quickly, either helps them switch from a competitor’s device to our device quickly, but more importantly, helps them get to market easily and quickly.

And that helps drive their time to market but also helps improve our time to revenue. We also believe it creates much more long-term stickiness for our solutions. That software, once it’s integrated into their system-level software, that creates multigenerational stickiness for our entire solution, including the silicon. So we feel very good about the software and the level of competitiveness and stickiness that it creates. It’s certainly a big investment area for the company. We’ve been growing investment there for — we’re now in our fifth year of increased investment there, and we continue to be excited about the potential moving forward.

Hans Mosesmann: That’s great. Jim, but what I want to get to is, how does your competition compete against that? Specifically, what are they doing to compete against you recently? Or is there any competition down there in the small FPGA? That’s what I’m looking for, their behavior. Your customer behavior is like, “Hey, I got to use you. You’re the only guy that can really address this.” That’s what I’m trying to get.

Jim Anderson: Well, I think that what we’re doing in the marketplace is we believe it’s unique or specific to Lattice. And so I think that combination of silicon tightly coupled with the specific application solution stacks, we believe that, that’s a really competitive and compelling offering in cargo place. That’s something that’s really differentiated versus our competition. And I think we believe our customers recognize that and definitely appreciate that and we think that’s more announced by the adoption rates that we’re seeing for our software.

Hans Mosesmann: Great. Thank you very much.

Operator: Next question is coming from David Williams from Benchmark Company. Your line is now live.

David Williams: Hey. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the execution. Just quickly, maybe anything from a geographic mix perspective that surprised you during the quarter. Asia was down again quite a bit this quarter, but just wondering if you’re seeing anything in terms of a potential rebound there. And then maybe what drove the Americas and Europe improvement?