Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (LSCC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Lattice's 2023 Investor Day. I'm Rick Muscha, Head of Investor Relations, and we certainly appreciate everyone joining us here today, and it really is great to be here in person for the event. I'd also like to extend a welcome to those listening on the webcast as well. To the extent we do make some forward-looking statements in our presentation and our Q&A. These are all detailed on our safe harbor disclaimer statement as well as on our filings, our 10-Ks, 10-Qs and 8-Ks. We'll also be presenting some non-GAAP financial measures in the presentation, with a full GAAP reconciliation on our Investor Relations website following today's event. Then with regards to the agenda, Jim Anderson will start things off and provide an overview and discuss our strategy. Esam Elashmawi, our Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, will then discuss our products and core markets. And lastly, Sherri Luther will recap our financial performance to date and provide an updated financial model. Following today's presentations, I will be moderating a question-and-answer session. We'll be taking questions from both the in-person audience as well as those of you watching virtually. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Jim to start things off. So again, thank you for joining us, and welcome. Jim?

All right. Thank you, Rick. Thanks, everybody. Welcome. Thanks for being with us here today. It's great to be back at NASDAQ. It's actually been a couple of years since our last Investor Day, but it's actually been 4 years since our last in-person Investor Day. So it actually feels great to be back in person. And actually, 4 years ago, it was here at NASDAQ, so it's great to be back. And actually, a number of you, I think, were with us here 4 years ago. I think the crowd has gotten a little bigger over the past 4 years, but it's good to see everybody that was here 4 years ago. If you were here at that time, you might remember that I kicked off the Investor Day by talking about how Lattice kind of reminds me of the house that my wife and I live in with her family. I bought this house about 20 years ago, and the house is in a really great location. It's surrounded on 3 sides by redwood trees. And my wife and I both grew up in Minnesota, and so redwood trees are like -- they're a big deal to us. So we love the location. But the house itself, it needed a lot of remodeling. It had good architecture, good bones, but it had basically 1970s decoration. Really needed -- it was in desperate need of a remodel. And when I joined Lattice during that first year the house kind of -- Lattice kind of reminded me of that house. Lattice is in -- first of all, we're in a great neighborhood. If you look within the semiconductor industry, the FPGA part to the semiconductor industry, it's a great neighborhood. And then Lattice, we've certainly been remodeling. Lattice needed -- just kind of like that house, need a lot of remodeling, and we've been hard at work over the past years remodeling the Lattice House. We're definitely kind of moving out of that remodeling phase so -- and we are definitely deep into the next phase of the company, which is the growth and expansion phase of the company. So I'm happy to talk a little bit about that with you today. So first of all, the mission. So Lattice's mission is very straightforward. It's to be the absolute world's best and making power efficient, programmable solutions for our customers, actually over 9,000 customers. And we are very passionate about that. but that's also something that's really important to our 9,000-plus customers. That innovation is really important to their systems. Now I want to talk today a little bit about how we've done over the past couple of years in terms of how some of the progress we've made, but we'll spend most of the day talking about where we're headed from here. But if you remember from the Investor Day 2 years ago, we actually talked about 4 specific goals that we wanted to accomplish with the company. First goal was to continue to expand and build out our portfolio in small FPGAs. So a small FPGA that part of the FPGA market, Lattice has innovated in that part of the market for 40 years. That's our home base. We wanted to continue to build out our lead there. Second goal, really important, was we wanted to double our addressable market by expanding into the midrange part of the FPGA market, an adjacent part of the market. Third was around software. Now software is a very important part of our strategy. It's how we enable our customers to adopt our solutions. And then our fourth goal was to accelerate top line growth and accelerate profitability. So I want to take a couple of minutes here at the beginning, just talk about how we made progress on each one of those goals over the past years. So let's start with the first one on small FPGAs. So this really is the foundation of Lattice. We're 40 years old this year. We've innovated for 40 years around small, power-efficient FPGAs. We've continued to build out a really robust product offering here. Our newest product line is Nexus. And Nexus, over the past 2 years, we've doubled the size of the Nexus portfolio since we last talked 2 years ago. We brought up 3 new device families, each one of those very, very innovative. We're really pleased with the Nexus ramp and customer adoption. So we're going to continue to make sure we have our foot on the gas and continuing to bring out a very robust, exciting product line for our customers in small FPGA. Now the second goal was to expand now into midrange FPGAs, which is -- which would double the addressable market for Lattice. This -- definitely, we made progress on this. We launched our Avant platform in December of this past year, Avant is purpose-built for midrange applications. And Avant, more than just doubling our addressable market, significantly expands the capabilities of the company from a product standpoint, significantly more capacity, more performance. So this is a big step forward for the company and something we're really excited about. And now software, this is a key way that we enable our customers to adopt Lattice solutions and get to market quickly. We've continued to innovate and drive forward on the existing solution stacks that we already had in the market. But again, since we last talked a couple of years ago, we've continued to build out this portfolio of software solutions to X. The 2 most recent additions, Lattice Automate for factory automation and robotics, big growth area that we're seeing in 5G ORAN solution stack for wireless infrastructure. So we've continued to build out that software portfolio. Now the fourth goal and maybe the most important to this particular crowd was to continue to accelerate our top line growth but also our bottom line profitability. Here, I'm really pleased with the progress team's made over the past couple of years, really robust growth over the past couple of years. And that growth coming from exactly where we expected it to and where we talked about even 4 years ago, coming from our core markets of communications and computing and industrial and automotive. Actually, in those markets in comps and computing, we've now grown 4 years in a row, 4 consecutive years at double-digit growth rates. And in Industrial and Automotive, 3 consecutive years of double-digit growth. So that growth coming from our core market is right where we expected it to. Now beyond revenue, we've continued to make progress on some of the other financial metrics as well. Sherri will talk in detail about all our financials, but I wanted to give just a few highlights here at the beginning. So gross margin, this is something you heard us talk about since when I joined Lattice. At the beginning of 2019, we put in place a new gross margin expansion strategy. That's yielded a tremendous amount of benefit for the company today to just over the past 2 years, over 800 basis points of expansion in gross margin. over 1,300 basis points of expansion in operating income. And then we're really proud of the EPS. Over the last 2 years, 2.5x higher EPS over the past 2 years. So I think safe to say we've made some good progress on that fourth goal around the financials as well. Now we're pleased about the progress we've made over the past few years, but we are definitely much more excited about where we take the company from here. We're very excited about the current growth and expansion phase that we're in with the company right now. Now there's really 4 kind of key things that are behind that growth phase that we're in right now. Number one is we are absolutely positioned in the right end markets. We're positioned at the right end markets for the types of products Lattice builds. And these are big, growing, large addressable markets. Number two, we're in one of the biggest product expansions ever, we're significantly expanding out the product portfolio. And we are not just bringing out a lot of new products, are bringing out market-leading products, very differentiated products, and that is creating a tremendous amount of momentum across their entire customer base. So let's start with the markets. So our 4 core markets, communications, computing, industrial and automotive. These markets, if you look through the end of this decade and even beyond, these are absolutely the right markets for Lattice to be in. First of all, there -- in these markets, there are underlying secular growth trends that are driving consumption in general for the semiconductor market, but in particular, for the types of products and solutions that Lattice brings to those markets. And over the past years, we've totally repositioned the company into these 4 core markets. Actually, now over 90% of our revenue comes from these core 4 markets. And then when we project out about 5 years out to 2028, we believe our total addressable market is about $10 billion, with about half of that coming from industrial and automotive and about 40% of that coming from comps and compute. So big, large addressable markets for Lattice, and the right markets for Lattice to be in. Now Esam, when he comes up, he'll talk more in his section about some of the specific growth drivers within those markets, but I want to give you just a flavor of kind of where we see within those markets, some of the biggest growth drivers. One, certainly not a surprise, artificial intelligence. We're seeing AI growth at the edge of the network, where customers are increasingly adopting not just AI, but inference processing at the edge of the network, and Lattice solutions are a naturally good fit for that type of application. We're also seeing growth from generative AI. Lattice has built a really good position in servers over the past years. And as generative AI drives demand for the data center, it drives natural growth for Lattice. Industrial automation and robotics. This is -- we've seen tremendous growth in this over the past few years. I believe this is going to be a great growth driver for Lattice moving forward. Automotive electronics, still a relatively small part of our revenue today but one of our fastest-growing parts of our revenue. And then hardware platform security, we've brought some really unique innovative technology to servers for platform security. We believe that technology is very extensible to a number of other markets as well. So we're positioned in the right end markets, large growing addressable markets. Now if you asked us probably what are we most excited about, it would be this. It would be the portfolio expansion that we're going through right now, really rapid build-out of the product portfolio. So starting with small FPGAs, I already shared that we've doubled the size of the Nexus portfolio over the past couple of years. Very pleased to announce today for the first time here, we'll be bringing out our seventh product based on the Nexus platform, our seventh device family in Q3 of this year. And we absolutely have a full portfolio, full roadmap of the innovative products we're continuing to bring out to small FPGA. We are not going to let our foot off the gas on small FPGA. This is a place that Lattice has led for decades, and we're going to continue to lead the market in this segment. Now we're, of course, really excited about the midrange product launch that we did in December of this past year. So we launched the Avant platform, but we also launched the first device family in that series, the Avant-E. And the Avant-E is targeted for edge applications. We're seeing really good customer adoption, very strong design win pipeline. Very pleased to again announce first time here today, the next 2 device families in that lineup, the Avant-G and the Avant-X., and those will launch in the second half of this year. And by the end of this year, we'll have 3 very complete device families in the hands of our customers. We are very excited about all these products. But here again, we have a very robust roadmap of Avant devices beyond this year to continue to bring out a steady beat rate of new innovation in the mid-range market and bring all of those great, power-efficient characteristics that our customers love Lattice for and small FPGA in the midrange as well. Now software, very important. I'll talk a little bit more about this. But as I've shared to date, we've got some 5 different software solution stacks. Again, today, for the first time, we're announcing in Q3 of this year, we're going to launch the Lattice Drive software solution stack. This is specifically for our automation -- our automotive customers. This helps our customers in the automotive space get Lattice products designed in all sorts of different automotive electronics applications. And here again, of course, we've got more in the pipeline, more under development. But if you asked us what is the single thing that we're most excited about with Lattice moving forward, this is it. We are in the middle of the biggest product expansion that this company has ever done in its 40-year history. And we're excited about that, but our customers are very excited about that. And it's not just the number of products that we're bringing out, we're bringing out incredibly competitive products, very differentiated in the marketplace. This is data that we shared at the Avant launch in December, where we compared Avant to some of our other FPGA competitors, and this is all measured data. And we showed that Avant is up to 2.5x better power efficiency than our competition, and not just better power efficiency, but higher performance. And all of that in just amazingly small physical device size, actually up to 6x smaller physical package size. So it's not just the number of products that we're bringing out, but incredibly differentiated products. Now software, I've talked about this a couple of times. This is a very important part of how we enable our customers. So our strategy is to build out a portfolio of application-specific software solution stacks that our customers can adopt that help them get to market quickly. And we're measuring adoption rates that are now over 50%, which means that if you look at design wins over the last -- these are silicon design wins, over the last 12 to 18 months, over half the time our customers are adopting 1 of these 5, soon to be 6, solution stacks. And then when they do adopt the solution stacks with a number of customers who are finding examples where they're significantly accelerating their time to market, sometimes accelerating their time to market by up to 3 to 6 months. So they're not just getting to market faster. We're also getting to revenue faster, and we know our customers are valuing the software because they're paying for it. When we mentioned the ASPs of those design wins that include software attach versus not, those ASPs are significantly higher. And then very importantly, over the long term, we believe that the adoption of the software solutions' acts by our customers creates multigenerational long-term stickiness for the products. So with that rapid build-out of our silicon portfolio, combined with the software solution stacks, we're seeing the biggest design win momentum, customer momentum, customer engagement, whatever measure you want to use that we've ever seen in the company's history. And we're really excited about that. And we have been preparing for this over the past years. So first of all, we've doubled the size of our customer engineering support. So these are the customers that -- or these are the engineers -- Lattice engineers, that spend time with our customers to help them designing our products. So we've doubled the size of that support structure. We've also significantly increased the size of the Lattice ecosystem. So if you look at the ecosystem, so these are all the companies that have reference designs or other software that helps enable the solution. Our ecosystem has grown by 5x over the past years. And then very importantly, for our newest product, Avant, if you look at the target customers for Avant, 90% of those target customers are already customers of Lattice today. And if they're using any of our software, that software is leverageable on to the Avant platform as well. So we've done a tremendous amount of work to make the customer adoption of not just Avant, but all of our existing products as easy as possible. So what does that mean in terms of business moving forward, business expectations? When we look out over the next 3 to 4 years, we're raising our growth target -- raising our growth target to 15% to 20% per year. That's higher than the growth target we talked about 2 years ago at our Lattice -- our last Investor Day. We expect that growth to continue to come from those same markets that have been driving growth for us over the past years, communications and computing, industrial and automotive. Those are our core markets. That's where our growth is going to continue to come from. And it's a combination of both growing in places where we already have strong footprint, but also new greenfield growth opportunities. And Esam will walk you through some of the specific details of some of the specific areas that we see for growth in these markets. But the other way of looking at our new growth target is by product segment. And so I think the easiest way is to start with the small FPGA segment. Today, 100% of our revenue comes from small FPGAs. Now we expect that small FPGA revenue to continue to grow double digits over the coming years. Nexus is still early in its ramp. We expect Nexus to continue to ramp for multiple years moving forward. And even our pre-Nexus products continue to grow. And in a lot of cases, the software that I was just talking about has helped reinvigorate the pre-Nexus product. So that combination of Nexus and pre-Nexus, that overall portfolio, we expect that to continue to grow double digits moving forward. Then the way to think about Avant and our mid-range FPGAs is think about that as additional revenue that layers on top and further accelerates the growth rate. So Avant revenue is still expecting that, as we talked about a couple of years ago, expecting that to start at the end of this year, a little bit of revenue this year, but to be more significant in '24 and then ramp beyond '25 and beyond. And all of this is additive to the small FPGA revenue. Avant doesn't cannibalize Nexus or pre-Nexus devices in any way. Avant ASPs are 10 to 20x to higher than our small FPGAs today, and this additive revenue stream accelerates the revenue growth over time. Now beyond top line growth, we're also raising the bar on our other financial targets. So raising our gross margin targets to now low 70s. This is a significantly higher gross margin target that we talked about a couple of years ago. Our OpEx target, we're setting that at 30% of revenue. 30% is the right investment level for this business. It's a good balance between funding all of the great growth opportunity that's ahead of the company while still staying disciplined. And then operating income, we're raising our operating income target to over 40% to the low 40s. That's a big jump from what we talked about 2 years ago. And I think if you step back and you think about the combination of that revenue growth target with that profitability target, I think that really stands out in the semiconductor industry. Now I've been talking a lot about what we're -- either what we've done or what we're planning to do, but just as important is how we do that. So we're absolutely committed to the highest standards, holding ourselves to the highest standards in terms of how we do things. Definitely, a culture of innovation. This is really important at Lattice. Hopefully, you see that culture of innovation, show up in the differentiation of our products. A lot of our innovation is focused on power efficiency. It has been for decades. So power efficiency drives energy efficiency for our customers, and that certainly benefits the environment. Very important, how we treat our customers, our suppliers, our employees, all of our stakeholders. And they were always holding ourselves the highest standards in terms of honesty and integrity, especially on our corporate governance principles. So how we do things is equally important. Now before I hand it off to Esam just to summarize a little bit here. Once again, thanks for being with us here today. But we're pleased with the progress we've made to date and kind of the remodel of Lattice, but we're much more excited about where we're headed with the growth and expansion. The combination of being in the right markets for Lattice with the biggest product portfolio expansion we've ever done in our history. It's exciting for us and definitely exciting for our customers. And so with that, I'm going to ask Esam to come up and talk more about the products and the markets.

Thank you, Jim. It's good to see everyone. A lot of familiar faces as well. Prior to this, I was reminiscing a bit about the past, and I'm actually going to get to my 5-year anniversary at Lattice this September. And being in this industry for a few decades, I can tell you on a personal level that the energy that I feel and the excitement -- and not just me, you think about it, our employees, and our customers as well. I've never felt that before in my career, and I've been around doing this stuff for a few decades. But when you think about the innovative products that we're bringing out to the market, the customer intimacy, I think it's fairly evident what we've been able to accomplish thus far. But what's more exciting to me is what's to come. If you look at our market opportunity, it's just expanding. And we're finding really good ways with our customers how to leverage our flexible, power-efficient FPGA into new applications. Since the last time we were here in 2021, we've identified $2 billion of additional SAM. And those are in areas of artificial intelligence, within the data center as well as with factories as well. And when you combine that with what we had last time, when we had the $6 billion we identified last time, and you take just moderate mid-single digits to high single digits growth on that and combine that, that's $10 billion of opportunity. That's significant. That says we have lots of headroom to grow for our small- and mid-range FPGAs. And it's in our core markets of industrial, automotive and comps and compute. And when you break that $10 billion by small and midrange FPGAs, about 55% of it is with mid-range FPGAs and 45% of that is in small FPGAs. And later on, I'm going to walk you through some of the growth drivers and opportunities in each of our core segments. But before I do that, I think it's important to spend a little bit of time framing the FPGA landscape because that also points out where is the Lattice's focus. When you look at the FPGA landscape, you can break it up into 3 simple categories. There are small FPGAs, midrange FPGAs, and there's large FPGAs. And each of those categories has a distinct difference in ASPs, volumes and the types and number of applications they can address. When you look at the small FPGA category, the ASPs can vary anywhere from single dollar to tens of dollars. And when you contrast that with a large FPGA, that could be thousands of dollars per device. And as such, when you look at the volumes of shipments on an annual basis, significantly more volume shipped in small and midrange FPGAs than the large FPGAs. And that correlates directly with the number and types of applications you can address with small and mid-range FPGA as well. And Lattice's focus is really on the small and midrange. This is where we're innovating. This is where we're bringing out leadership products, both hardware and software to really help our customers themselves innovate and get their products into the market. So the focus is on small and mid-range FPGAs. Now this is a slide that Jim showed. And to me, this is also a really key slide. I can tell you, working in marketing and working with the field and engaging with the customers, this slide says it all. This is a slide that I really, really love. And the reason is it's a portfolio expansion. This is our largest portfolio that we've ever had in the history of the company. And what does a product portfolio expansion do? It drives customer intimacy. And that's what we want. We want more customer intimacy. As we drive customer intimacy, they're actually helping us define the products that are coming out. You all know we shared with you, they helped us to find Avant. We had over 100-plus customers that we engaged with that helped us to find Avant. So having a portfolio that has a roadmap and products that are coming out on the regular cadence drives customer intimacy that drives your product definition. What it also does, which is key, it helps us work with our customers and in that engagement, we're finding new ways to leverage our power efficient, flexible FPGAs. So it also drives SAM expansion, and what it also drives is new product revenue cycles as well because we're releasing new products out into the market. So this, to me, is the most important slide. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to walk you through what to expect for the remainder of this year. And the way I'm going to approach this is I'm going to start off with a small FPGA, tell you what to expect, and I'm going to go to the midrange and then we're going to touch on the software. So let's look at the small FPGA portfolio. We have a leadership position in small FPGAs. We committed to 2 additional small FPGA Nexus devices this year. We did the first one in April, the MachXO5-T. This is leveraging our MACH family, which is really leadership in control and Board management. But what we've done with this device is we've increased the capacity, but we've also added advanced interfaces that didn't exist in prior MACH devices. This is a really good example of what we talk about when we say we're adding more functionality into our customer systems that drive higher ASPs. This is a good example of that. And we're engaging with customers on this product, and we expect initial revenue B2B in the first part of next year. But also today for the very first time, we're introducing our CrossLink-U device. This is building on our leadership of embedded vision FPGAs. And what we're doing here is we're adding additional artificial intelligence capabilities. We're adding also new interfaces, and we're also adding new low-power capabilities that you're going to hear more about as we get closer to launch. So we're excited about this product. And as you can imagine, when we launch in Q3, we're already engaged with customers working with us on the CrossLink-U. What does all this mean? It means that we're still committed to the investment in small FPGAs and expect more to come. Now let's move to Avant. Avant, we launched in December of last year. And at the launch event, if you watched it, you would noticed there was a lot of customers that were part of that launch event, either participated in event itself or there with us. We're really excited about Avant as it's additive revenue. It doesn't cannibalize any of our small FPGA revenue. It was defined by our customers. Our companies can leverage the same software tools that we have today. And as expected with Avant-E, our edge optimized FPGA, we're engaged with customers today that are designing it in. And as Jim said, we expect initial revenue by the end of this year and to become more meaningful next year. But I'm also excited to talk today and introduce Avant-G and Avant-X. Avant-G is our general purpose FPGA targeting for midrange applications, and Avant-X is our advanced connectivity FPGA for also midrange applications, both of which you're going to hear a lot more of as we launch them at our developers conference in the second half of this year. Now let's talk about solutions. Solution stacks are really part of our core strategy. Not only does it drive more value for our silicon, but it also helps our customers get to market faster, and it helps us win multigenerational designs. Working closely with our customers in the automotive market, we're going to be introducing in Q3 Lattice Drive. And Lattice Drive helps our customers adopt Lattice FPGAs in automotive applications around ADAS sensors and bridging and processing as well as in infotainment bridging and processing and a multitude of vehicle monitoring types of applications. We're excited that we're going to be launching this in Q3, and we're excited to share that with you here today. Now let's talk about our core markets. We're positioned in growing markets. These markets have long-term secular growth drivers associated to each one of them, and our approach within Lattice is to identify Lattice specific growth drivers that go beyond just the market growth drivers. We're driving additional attach rates, and we're bringing in more functionality in each one of our core segments to drive higher value for our customers. And what I'm going to do is walk you through examples of those in each one of our core segments. Now if we look at the communications, 5G wireless. We've talked about this before. This remains for us a long-term growth driver for Lattice. We're well deployed across the top OEMs, and we have leadership when it comes to control functions, when it comes to security functions and some of the ORAN functions with our small FPGAs. With our midrange introduction of Avant and working closely with these customers on their definitions, we've opened up opportunities around data path as well as additional opportunities around ORAN. And we expect to double our potential dollars with Avant and our 5G wireless segments. It remains a long-term growth driver for us. But what I also want to talk about is data center networking. This is something that we've been engaged with over the last few years, and we've seen growth in this area, and we're actually seeing more opportunities as well. And a lot of what we've been doing in the 5G wireless is applicable to data center networking. Customers are starting to adopt Lattice solutions for control function security and even data path with Avant in our data center networking applications. So we're excited as this is a new area for Lattice to continue to grow. But the key question is why Lattice? Why are they choosing Lattice? Why are they adopting Lattice in these communication applications? Well, if you look at it, when I meet with the customers and we engage with them and you heard a bit of this at the Avant launch as well, power is really a challenge for them. They're constrained with the power in their system. They have thermal challenges, they're trying to differentiate, and they're also trying to drive performance as well. And when you provide them a flexible, programmable solution that not only delivers twice the bandwidth but also at 2.5x lower power, that makes a difference for our end customers. And having the flexibility of our FPGAs and getting into data path, providing flexible front haul securitization at that lower power helps them get to market much quicker. Our security solutions helps protect their systems, protects their IP. These are among the reasons why they're choosing Lattice in the Communications segment. Let's move on to servers. So this is a market segment that has seen a lot of change over the past few years. And if you go back to our first Investor Day back in 2019, we presented an opportunity in the server market, and we had 25% attach rate. And we said in every generation, our goal is to increase our attach rate and drive more functionality into this market. And at our last Investor Day, we presented that we had an attach rate now over 1. And we continue to drive higher tax rates in every generation and bring more functionality to our customers that drives an average ASP that's higher. And what we see with our customers in the server market is becoming more heterogeneous and more modular as well. For example, if you take a generative AI server and you open it up, what would you see inside today? You'd see a motherboard. You'd see multiple GPU plug-in cards. You'll see multiple network interface cards, storage cards and maybe more. It's becoming more modular. And each one of those cards and boards is an opportunity for Lattice, driving higher attach rate, driving more functionality. Even simple servers today. If you take a simple server today, there are architectures that modulize the motherboard, where the CPU is separated from the controller module. That drives more opportunities for Lattice to drive higher attach rates. And so when we look at the server market, what do we see today? We see opportunities where there's multiple sockets per board, but multiple boards per server now. So the opportunities are increasing. But why Lattice? Why are customers moving towards Lattice? Well, it starts off with the fact that we simplify their overall architecture because we are CPU-agnostic. Doesn't matter if the customer wants to choose an Intel CPU, an AMD, an ARM or some other CPU, we simplify their overall architecture because we're CPU-agnostic. If you look at the servers that are being deployed in data center, whether it be a standard servers or for artificial intelligence, that I'll tell you that power is really important. They're just consuming lots and lots of power, whilst any part that provides you 2.5x lower power is significant. And as these plug-in cards have different form factors, they're not all the same size, and they're trying to put more and more logic and complexity. The physical size of our device, offering them the performance and that low power, becomes very meaningful. And when we're 6x smaller, that makes a difference for them with all these different form factors they've got on these cards. Also, our security is key as well. We're in FPGA. We're adaptable. We have security engines within our device. We're securing the servers for today, but we're also ready for the security that's needed tomorrow with post-quantum crypto. So we provide them flexible solutions for security. These are among some of the reasons why they're choosing Lattice. Let's look at the client market. Really large system unit TAM here, 200 million to 300 million units. Even a moderate attach rate is significant. Especially when you're talking about ASPs that can range anywhere from low to mid-single digits, that's significant. And this market is starting to adopt Lattice FPGAs and new functionality, not just for security or image signal processing, but for artificial intelligence. And when we meet and I meet with the engineers at these OEMs and the executives and even the marketing teams, we meet with the marketing teams because we want to understand where are they headed, what do they want to go do, they talk about the key is to improve the user experience of the client devices with the customers or their end users. They want to improve your experience and how you use these laptops. And the best way to do that is through artificial intelligence, where you actually start to interact with your client device. And by putting artificial intelligence there, the device can know when you approach it, wake on demand, wake on approach. We can tell you when somebody is standing behind you at a coffee shop or an airport and looking at your screen. Hey, shoulder shipping, someone's looking over your shoulder. We can improve the collaboration as far as being in collaborations and meetings and making sure the individual is centered in the screen. If you're looking at a different screen, a different camera just like a studio, let's move to the right camera. We can do a lot of things with artificial intelligence to improve that user interface. Wellness, your posture, how much real screen time, not just how much your screen is on, but how much time are you actually looking at the screen. There's a lot we can do with Lattice and around artificial intelligence and improving that interaction of the user and the client device. And we've engaged with OEMs. There are platforms today in the market launch with Lattice silicon and software solutions and we're engaged with more OEMs on future deployments of client devices as well. But why Lattice again? Why are they choosing Lattice for this? Well, a lot of our attention sensing and collaboration and use models that we provide them not only improve the user experience, but it actually saves battery life, too. And that's key when they're trying to differentiate. We can save up to an hour of battery life, that's significant for their end users. That's a differentiation for them, and that's a better experience for the end user as well. The privacy features, the security that we can bring, and then our adaptability of our FPGAs, working with one of our customers, they actually coined this phrase for us called future-proof. And what does that mean? Well, a couple of years ago, we were working on a proof of concept with one of our customers for a system that got deployed. And while our AI engineers were working with their AI engineers, together, we discovered, "Hey, there's a better neural network that we can deploy in the FPGA to improve the efficiency and performance even more." And so we did that. We reprogrammed the FPGA and put that new algo in and got a lot more performance. And what the customer told us was, wow, if we weren't using an FPGA, if we were using an ASSP or some type of an ASIC, we would have to respun that silicon in order to get that new algorithm. That's the beauty of an FPGA for these types of algorithms. They do it very well, but they're also future-proof. And they can deploy these use cases or these new algos real-time in the field with their customers. That's the beauty of an FPGA. So that's among the reasons why customers are selecting Lattice hardware and software in the client market. Now let's look at the industrial market. This has been a good growth driver for us for a few years. There's a lot of change, a lot of things happening in industrial market, and it continues to be pretty exciting. We've seen an increased factory and warehouse autonomy. They're adding more intelligence to the robots and into industrial systems. They need to connect these devices, not just to the local network, but also to the cloud to do real-time analytics, low latency. I mean there's just a lot more data being collected in a factory than there was a decade ago. And engaging with our customers, we estimate there's at least 100-plus million robots and automation systems that are deployed on an annual basis. That's a large opportunity for us. And in each one of those, we see more motors, more sensors, more cameras, even more displays. And that's driving a need for even multiple FPGAs per system. So the opportunity is very large for us. But then again, why Lattice? Well, we do robotics and automation very well. If you take a simple robotic system, you think about how many different motors are on a robot, each one of those are socket opportunities for Lattice, and we're driving that with our customer intimacy. And each of these motors requires precision multi-axis, and FPGAs do that very, very well. In fact, they've outgrown some of the needs of the MCUs and now shifting more to FPGAs because of that. And it's not just the motors, they want to add intelligence. So everywhere there's a camera or a sensor, something has to be done. And our FPGAs are really good at adding intelligence to these systems, and that drives additional socket opportunities for us. And then they need to connect these to a network to do something, whether it's to control it or to collect analytics. Factory networking is something that we've done before very well, and we continue to do that for our customers. So this identifies really multiple opportunities even in a single system for Lattice. And being able to do these efficiently with low power, small form factor are key to our customers. So let's talk about the automotive market, also lots of opportunities for growth. This is one of our segments that's been growing the fastest. We've talked about that. And what we see and everybody talks about, there's just more electronic content added into a vehicle. When we engage with the OEMs, this is their way to differentiate. They also want a good passenger experience. They want safety as well. So that's driving more electronic content, and they want this content to be scalable across different models. They want to reduce their bill of materials. They want single devices that can be programmed for the needs of different models and be -- work across different models. That's good for FPGAs. And what we're seeing is increased deployment of displays, sensors, cameras in every vehicle. They want the vehicle to be smarter, which also means our opportunity is such that there's multiple FPGAs per vehicle. And those FPGAs from an ASP can vary anywhere from $1 to over $100 per device. But then again, why are they selecting Lattice? What's driving the growth? Well, here, let's take an example of an in-cabin experience. If you're in a car today, you're going to notice that there's more displays being deployed in any vehicle. There's displays for the dashboard, for the entertainment system, for the navigation system, even what was dung mirrors before are now e-mirrors in their displays. There's displays in the rear seats now. There's just more and more displays. And we do display connectivity really, really well, twice as fast than comparable devices. And our FPGAs, being flexible, it doesn't matter what the resolution of that screen is. Doesn't matter the size of that screen. Our FPGAs are adaptable to whatever resolution you need and whatever size screen you need. You don't need a custom part for each one of those. If you look at sensor aggregation, we do that very well. Architectures today -- as vehicles have more and more sensors, you have to do something with those sensors. Where do they go? Well, in old architectures, it was 1 or 2 sensors, could go to a CPU. But what if you have multiple sensors there? Well, how many inputs do you have into your processing unit? They didn't expand that. So architectures today have to aggregate the sensor somewhere, preprocess it or actually process it and do something with it. And that's where FPGAs come in. Our flexible interface is being programmable. We can bring in multiple sensors. We can preprocess that and help the new architectures that are being deployed. So we do that very well. So those are among examples of why they're selecting Lattice in the automotive market. Now we're positioned in growing markets, and these markets all have strong secular growth drivers that are long term. And what I just showed you was Lattice-specific growth drivers that set us apart, but I'm going to take you back to what I think is key to Lattice's growth. And that's the product portfolio expansion. That product portfolio expansion drives new market opportunities for us with our customers. They help us define the products that we're bringing out to market and they drive additional product revenues as well. That's the key. That's where it all starts. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to the next speaker, which, by the way, she will be approaching her 5-year anniversary a few months after me, but it's been a real joy working with her. She always reminds me discipline, Esam, discipline and discipline. She says, "If you want us to get better at something, make sure you're measuring it." And she also always reminds me that if our products are very differentiated in the market, make sure we're driving the value of our products in the market. And with that, I'd like to introduce Sherri Luther, our CFO.

Thank you, Esam. Welcome, everyone. We're very excited to be here at NASDAQ in person. If you recall back at our first Investor Day back in 2019, I talked to you about the opportunities that I saw when I first joined Lattice. Opportunities not only to grow top line revenue growth, but opportunities to strengthen our financial position of the company, strengthen our balance sheet, make disciplined investments for the long-term growth of our company. I talked to you about putting clear goals and metrics in place to drive accountability because I believe that what gets measured gets done. Goals around revenue growth, gross margin expansion; our focus on cash and cash generation; and the return of capital to our shareholders. As I look back on the nearly 5 years that I've been with Lattice, I am tremendously proud of the outstanding progress from a financial performance perspective that the company has made. The clear goals and metrics that we've put in place have allowed us to drive record financial results across all of the key metrics that you see here. Double-digit revenue growth, gross margin expansion of 810 basis points in only 2 years and record operating income, with our EPS growing at 4x the rate of our revenue growth, and our free cash flow growing faster than the rate of our revenue, than the rate of our EPS. So as I look ahead, I see so much opportunity ahead for the company, and I'm very excited about that opportunity. Let's start with revenue. Jim talked about raising our long-term revenue growth target to 15% to 20%. Esam talked about the underlying secular growth drivers in our core strategic market segments of comms and computing and industrial and automotive; the sustainable multiyear revenue streams with product life cycles that are very long, some as long as 10 to 15 years; also, the diversified revenue streams, not only in our markets, but in our customers and our applications. When you put all of this together, I see high-quality revenue, high-quality revenue with durable gross margins. Gross margin is an area where the company has made tremendous progress. In fact, we have increased our gross margin by 1,360 basis points since the end of 2018. The progress we've made here is very exciting to me, and so I want to take a few minutes to talk to you about this on this slide. Back in 2019, we laid the foundation for our gross margin expansion strategy that had 3 main areas: pricing optimization, product mix and product cost reductions. So let me take you through each of these areas a little bit. Pricing optimization. In 2019, when we looked at the way the company was pricing its products, we saw a lot of opportunity for a better correlation between pricing and volumes and customers and mix and applications. Look at our leadership product portfolio. With that leadership product portfolio that Jim talked about, 6 devices on our Nexus platform, and our Avant launch at the end of -- our platform at the end of 2022 in December. We put strategic analytics in place to ensure that we could price our products, products that add tremendous functionality to our customers. We're in this in 5 years now, 5 years -- entering our fifth year of our gross margin expansion strategy, in particular pricing optimization. It has become part of our DNA. It's the way that we think and the way that we do business. The second area, product mix. Jim talked about the strategic market shift towards our core market segment of comms and compute and industrial and automotive; multiyear revenue streams with higher capability and greater capacity. All of that drives mix improvement. The third area, product cost reductions. This is where we work closely with our suppliers to generate operational improvements in areas such as yield times and cycle times. We have also benefited from the strong multiyear relationships that we have with our suppliers. When you put all of this together, you have durable gross margins. From a gross margin perspective, we are going to continue to focus on that area. And as such, we are raising our gross margin target to the low 70s as we continue to focus on expanding our gross margin and getting value for our products. Another area that has become part of our DNA is our disciplined approach to investing. We have made significant investments in our long-term portfolio and our product road map. From an R&D perspective, as Jim mentioned, the investments that we have made in our product portfolio represent the most rapid expansion in the company's history. We are going to continue to invest in our product road map, both hardware and software. From an SG&A perspective, we have made a significant investment in demand creation and customer support, and we will continue to invest in these areas. We are establishing our new OpEx target of 30% as we continue to invest in a disciplined way for the long-term growth of our company. What does this mean from a profitability perspective? With our double-digit revenue growth and our continued gross margin expansion, we have driven record profitability. In fact, our EPS has grown at a faster rate than our revenue growth. With our higher revenue targets -- revenue growth targets of 15% to 20%, our higher gross margin target of the low 70s, while continuing to invest in a disciplined way, we are raising our operating target -- income target to the low 40s as we continue to drive strong profitability for the company. Now strong profitability drives strong cash generation. One of the great things about this business is its ability to generate cash. Our strong focus on record operating income and our disciplined approach to investing has driven strong free cash flow, with our free cash flow growing faster than the rate of our EPS. We are establishing a new target for free cash flow of greater than 30%. Our focus on cash and working capital metrics has also generated record cash generation, a strong balance sheet with a focus on working capital. We have also worked on strengthening our balance sheet through our -- deleveraging our balance sheet. When I stood here back in 2019 at our first Investor Day, our leverage ratio was 3x. With our strong cash generation, we have significantly paid down our debt. In fact, our credit rating has been upgraded 3x in the past 3 years. Last year, in Q3 of 2022, we amended our credit agreement and turned it into a revolver with favorable credit terms, increasing our liquidity with access to a $350 million revolver. With our low debt balance, our leverage ratio is well below 1. With a strong balance sheet, strong cash generation, we have executed on all aspects of our capital allocation strategy. From an organic perspective, we have invested significantly in our long-term product road map, the most rapid expansion in the company's history. We have also invested in demand creation and customer support for the long-term growth of the company. Organic investment is our #1 priority. From an inorganic perspective, we acquired Mirametrix in November of 2021 as part of our software solutions strategy. From a debt paydown perspective, I talked about the significant progress that we've made there with a leverage ratio of well below 1. And we have also returned capital to our shareholders through our share repurchase program, where at the end of 2020 when -- at the inception of that program, to date, we have bought back 3.6 million shares. That's reduced our dilution by over 2.5%. We will continue to execute on our capital allocation strategy for the long-term growth of our company. When you put all of this together, you see our new financial model, long-term model, where we have raised our revenue growth target to 15% to 20% on our leadership product portfolio, with underlying growth drivers in our core strategic market segments. We have increased our gross margin target to the low 70s as we continue to execute on our gross margin expansion strategy. From an OpEx perspective, we'll continue to invest in a disciplined way with a target of 30%. And we have raised our operating income target to the low 40s. And we have a new target for free cash flow margin on the strong results that the company has delivered to date of greater than 30% as we continue our focus on cash and cash generation. When you stand back and you look at this combination of revenue growth and operating income, this is a model that stands out in the industry. We will continue to execute towards this model for the long-term growth of the company, and we'll also execute on our key financial priorities, putting clear goals and metrics because, as I said, what gets measured gets done. And with that, I thank you. And I will turn it over to -- back to Jim Anderson, our CEO.

All right. Thank you, Sherri. Sherri always keeps us focused, definitely on the right metrics and keeps us disciplined, too. So thanks. Just a few summary comments here before we open it up for Q&A. So hopefully, you get a sense of why we're excited about the future of the company. I think when you look at, number one, the markets that we're positioned in. We are positioned in exactly the right markets for this company. Large growing markets, secular growth trends underneath them and a great match for the type of solutions that we're bringing to the market. But even more importantly than that, what we're really excited about is we're in the middle of the biggest product portfolio expansion that we've ever done in the company's 40-year history. That is incredibly exciting to us, but very exciting to our customers as well. And we look forward to continuing to drive just tremendous shareholder value creation moving forward. So with that, thanks again for being with us. And I'm going to hand it back to Rick, and we'll open it up for Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you, Jim. Yes. So we're going to begin the Q&A session. So I'll ask the team here to join me on stage. We have some nice, comfortable chairs for you guys. So there you go. And then we'll also have a couple of microphones floating through the audience so your questions can be heard on the webcast, of course. And then I'll just -- one more requirement. When you -- before you ask a question, just state your name and your company so that can be heard on the webcast as well. Okay. Well, Mark, you raised your hands fast. Nice job. There's going to be a mic coming here.

Great. Thanks for the great presentation today. Really appreciate it. I actually had 2 questions. Jim, if you -- if there's only one thing that we walk away with today, like what would you like us to walk away with just to make our writing of the note easier? That would be very kind of you. And the second thing is you guided for 15% to 20% growth. Last -- I guess, 2 years ago, you guided for low double-digit growth, you delivered 2x that. What was the upside surprise driven by in the hypothetical situation that you beat your targets this time? Where might we expect that to come from?

Thanks, Mark. On the first part of the question, if I had to pick 1 thing, and I think I already said it to the summary, it would have to be the product portfolio expansion. I mean we're -- I mean if you look across the company's 40-year history, it's just the company has never done a portfolio expansion this big. I mean just the rate of new products that we're bringing out to the market is so much faster than it was, say, 5, 6, 7 years ago. And that's really exciting to us. I mean I'm a product person, I love products, but we're a product company, too. We're only as good as our products. And so I think that's not just exciting for us, but it's exciting for our customers as well. Actually, Esam and I are headed to Europe next week, and we'll be with some of our largest, most strategic customers in the industrial and automotive segment next week. So we'll be spending time with them, talking about future strategic collaboration, et cetera. Those discussions didn't happen 5 years ago. When we first joined the company, that didn't happen. But now 5 years later, we're having great, multigenerational discussions with our customers. And the reason for that, it's just one reason, it is because of the product road map. It's because of the product road map that you see today that we shared and all of the other stuff that's in the development pipeline that still is not yet public, but our customers -- but we're working on with our customers. That's what is really exciting to us. So I guess the research note should be about the product portfolio. That's your first question. Hardware and software, yes. On the second piece, yes, we did significantly outperform our target that we gave 2 years ago. I would say kind of a combination of 2 things. Certainly, the end market itself was stronger than what we had thought, right? So there's definitely a factor in there of the whole semiconductor market grew at a faster pace than what I think anybody was anticipating. So part of it is that. But another part of it is Lattice-specific. And we were surprised over the last 2 years at the rate at which customers switched to our products. We saw a faster conversion from competitors' products to ours than we had anticipated. And in a lot of cases -- for instance, since I just mentioned industrial and automotive customers, like industrial customers switching much faster than what we had ever seen in the past. And I think part of that is the software solutions. I think those software capabilities that we've introduced have made it much easier for customers to either switch from a competitor's device to our device or to design us into applications where they haven't used an FPGA before, right? And so that surprised us. We've tried to start to factor more of that in moving forward, but those would be the 2 sources. Thanks, Mark.

As you know, Mark, our goal is to do your job for you. I think you know that, right?

John Vinh, KeyBanc Capital Markets. Thanks for the Analyst Day, guys. Very helpful. Now that you've had a little bit more time with Avant and are expecting to recognize revenues later this year, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about where some of this initial revenues is coming from in terms of applications and end markets. And are most of these revenues coming from new applications and new platforms that your customers are developing? Or are they coming from existing legacy platforms that your customers are using?

Esam, do you want to take that?

Yes. I'll take this. So for everyone, Avant, again, is our midrange FPGA. We're really excited about it. We talked about the fact that we are engaged with more than 100 customers on the definition of Avant. The first product that we launched at the -- last December during our launch event was our Avant-E, and that's really our edge optimized FPGA. So the initial revenue that we're going to see at the end of this year, coming more meaningful, we talked about, is really on our Avant-E. However, we have 2 additional devices that today for the very first time we talked about, which is Avant-G and Avant-X. So your question, where is the adoption of the first Avant applications? It's really around edge type applications, and we see that in our industrial segment as well as other segments as well, but that's where the initial revenue will come, from that Avant-E device.

Yes, I think we're coming over there, and then we'll come back over here.

David Williams from Benchmark. I really appreciate the Analyst Day today. It's been very, very helpful. But I guess, Sherri, I wanted to ask a question on the free cash flow. What's driving that confidence that you can continue to support that free cash flow? And then how do you think about that longer term, maybe mid to longer term? And what are the, I guess, drivers there?

Sure. Yes. Thanks, David, for the question. So the best thing -- the best way to drive free cash flow is really with our record operating income, so driving a strong operating income as well as our disciplined approach to investing. We have focused significantly on cash, our working capital metrics, putting clear goals and metrics in place to really drive accountability and drive those results, and so we're really pleased with the results there on free cash flow. Very excited that we are putting out a target for free cash flow. Our results have been very strong on cash generation as well as free cash flow. So really pleased with that. And we look ahead, certainly, our higher revenue targets and our higher operating income targets are going to drive that, but we'll continue to drive and our target is over 30%. So we'll continue to drive progress there.

So we have one from online. Jim, what is driving the higher ASPs and design wins with automotive software attach? Is it a higher price being paid for the same SKU? Or are those customers buying higher ASP SKUs because of the software?

Yes. And it's not specific just to automotive. Well, I want to clarify the first part of that question, is when I talked about the higher ASPs, we're seeing that across multiple markets and multiple applications. So what we're seeing on average is when a customer adopts 1 of those 5, soon-to-be 6, solution stacks, when we measure the ASP of that design win versus on average design wins that don't have a software attach, there's a significantly higher ASP. And I think it's -- and on the second part of the question, I would say that's mostly because of the software attach because I think when we measured that, we measured kind of like-for-like silicon, right? So yes, that would be -- we're trying to isolate just the benefit that we're seeing from software. So we measure it as -- or we believe it's purely the software benefit.

And the question -- the full question wasn't very clear to me, but I also want to point out that independent of the software, so think about this with or without software, we're also driving more functionalities and solving more challenging problems for our customers. And that's being done with more -- think of it as larger or more complex FPGAs. And we have a pricing optimization strategy that's really around value. So as we drive and solve these more complex challenges that our customers have, that's also driving usage of higher ASP devices as well.

Yes, that's a good point. So even if you set aside the benefits of software attach, our ASPs are still going up because we're seeing, over time, a shift in mix towards more capable, more functionality devices within our portfolio. So we're seeing a mix shift as well.

We're going to have 2 right over here next to each other. That's convenient, next to each other. Thank you.

I'll ask one and pass it on. If you could perhaps talk about the early update for Avant, I think you previously talked about, I think it was something like 90% of people already building on Nexus and migrating over using a lot of your software capabilities already. Maybe you can talk about how this is going? Is it on track? Or is it even better than you guys have expected thus far? And then of your long-term revenue guidance, what percent of that, is it 1/3, belongs to Avant?

Yes. Esam, why don't you answer the first one? I'll take the second one.

Sure. So from an Avant perspective, we've been engaging with customers even before the launch of Avant, and the way we look at the revenue and our forecast is we model it based on history and based on anything else that we can put into that particular model. So how are we doing on Avant today? We're actually doing really, really well on Avant. In fact, if you look at Avant from launch to date and you compare that to Nexus, which we're very pleased with Nexus ramp and traction in the market, Avant is actually exceeding the metrics where Nexus was for the same point in time after the launch. So as far as how are we doing on Avant, we're doing really, really well on Avant. And if you model it based on what we modeled before, actually doing slightly above that.

Yes. And I think the second question was around the contribution of Avant out in time to the company's total revenue. So we talked about a target of 15% to 20% growth over the coming 3 to 4 years. If you go out to that end part of the window, 3 to 4 years, we would expect Avant at that point to be contributing, say, 15% to 20% of the company's total revenue by that kind of 3- to 4-year window. And there was 1 chart to that I showed in my section that kind of shows you qualitatively how we're thinking about it. But quantitatively, that's kind of the gauge of where we're thinking it will be at. Yes.

It's Matt Ramsay from TD Cowen. I have 2 questions. The first one is on products and a longer-term one and then a little bit of a shorter-term question. So on the product side, I don't know if Jim or Esam up, competition, I wanted to explore that a little bit. So there's, I don't know, essentially been 4 FPGA companies for the last 30 years, and they're still 4. And I think that shows some level of barriers to entry in this market, but some of those have been going through different transitions as being acquired by larger companies. And as you move into the mid-tier with Avant, maybe you could give a little bit of summary of how you're seeing the competitive landscape change as you move into the mid-tier. Are those customers -- are those competitors reacting, microcontroller companies getting more supply after we were tight for a long period? I just kind of wanted you to explore like what do you see in competition? And then the nearer-term question, and I get all the -- the 3 other FPGA companies just had record quarters, you guys did as well. And some of those are talking about the market potentially softening a bit in the back half of the year. So maybe you could just walk us through what you're seeing in the nearer term cleanliness of the channel, cleanliness of inventory at customers, if you could explore that a little bit.