Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:LSCC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

James Anderson: Yes, thanks, Srini. And let me address it in the more broad sense across all of our products. And I can come back and touch on Avant specifically. But across all of our products, which would include Avant but not just — but also Nexus and even pre-Nexus products, if I look at the design wins and the design win pipeline, through the first 3 quarters of this year, we’re seeing another very, very healthy year of growth in our design wins this year. And that follows multiple years of significant growth. And so we’re quite pleased with the continued expansion of the design win pipeline. And of course, that pipeline converts to revenue over the coming quarters. So we’re pleased with that. And we’re actually pleased with that across not just Avant, but Nexus and, as I said, even pre-Nexus devices.

An important part of that design win growth is our software strategy. I mentioned this in the prepared remarks. But for over 5 years now, we’ve been investing in our software portfolio. We’ve been building out a set, a portfolio of application-specific solution stacks that are targeted for specific end use cases and applications that make it much very easy for customers to adopt our products and get to market quickly. They help our customers either switch from a competitor’s device to our device or customers that have maybe never used a Lattice device before or using a Lattice device in a new application. They help speed up that process. And so software, which has been one of the places that we’ve invested significantly over the past years, that certainly had a positive impact on the rate and pace of our design wins.

And that benefits the Nexus product, the pre-Nexus products. And because Avant leverages that same software base that we’ve been building over the past 5 years, it benefits Avant as well. And so we’re pleased with — back to one of the original parts of your question, we’re pleased with the rate and pace of Avant design win growth. And we’re looking forward to the revenue ramp starting as we expect at the very end of this year, but benefiting us in 2024 and ’25 and beyond.

Srinivas Pajjuri: Got it. And as a follow-up, Jim, you talked about auto and industrial kind of weakening in Asia and maybe spreading beyond Asia into Europe as well, I guess nobody has perfect visibility. But to the extent you can share with us what your customers are saying about how long these macro headwinds are going to continue and when some of this demand and I guess, crosscurrents will kind of bottom out. Any thoughts and any color on that would be really helpful.

James Anderson: Yes, thanks, Srini. Yes, I think our customers are struggling a little bit with how long that will be. I think their visibility is a bit cloudy right now. They’re the — when we talk with our customers, they’re seeing that demand softness as they’re really attributing that to — again, to a pullback in CapEx related to those higher interest rates, higher cost of capital. And as I shared earlier, we certainly saw that initially in the Asia geography towards the end of our Q3, expecting that to continue into Q4. And then we expect to see that softening extended into Europe as well. And we’ll give — at our next earnings call, we’ll give more thoughts on what we’re seeing in Q1 and next year at our next earnings call.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Matt Ramsay with TD Cowen.

Matthew Ramsay: Jim, I wanted to dig into the trends in Industrial and Auto in that segment. So a few questions there. So apologies for the multipart thing. But could you help us a little bit, first of all, to break down that segment between the Industrial and Auto business, just roughly percentages? Second part, are you seeing any drastic differences in lead time trends between the Industrial business and the Auto business, like which one’s holding up better, which one’s worse? And then lastly, if you could give us some visibility into specific customer or specific applications where you’re seeing this weakness. I mean the call so far has talked about things very generally. And I wanted to get a bit more specific, if you could, as to where you’re seeing things that are holding up and where you’re seeing things that have really weakened from an end application standpoint.

James Anderson: Yes. Thanks, Matt. I think that was three parts. I’ll do my best to hit each one of those. On the breakdown of Industrial and auto, just as a reminder, for Lattice, if you look at that segment, we are definitely more heavily weighted towards Industrial than Automotive. Automotive is a relatively small percentage. We don’t break out into subsegments but just qualitatively, that the majority of our revenue is Industrial. Auto is a smaller part of that segment but it has been, over the past quarters, the faster growing part of the segment. Industrial, I think we talked about a number of times, so I won’t kind of repeat the comments on industrial. Automotive more specifically, we do anticipate automotive, the automotive market overall to start to soften in, for instance, this quarter.