Microchip Technology Incorporated (MCHP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to see the difference Sharper, Faster, Smarter Industrial Vision with SLVS-EC on PolarFire FPGAs. My name is Alicia, and today, I'm joined with Apurva Peri, our principal engineer for FPGAs. Before we get started, please take note of the engagement tools at the bottom of your screen, which has various resources that you can take advantage of during today's session. Please pay special attention to the Q&A box where you can ask our subject matter expert questions you have at any point throughout today's session. Also, as a reminder, this session will be available for you to watch on demand. Apurva, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Alicia. Hey, everybody. I'm Apurva Peri and I drive industrial marketing efforts for the FPGAs over here at Microchip. And thank you very much for joining us today for our webinar on one of the most power-efficient SLVS-EC solutions in the market with FPGAs. So on the agenda today, I'm going to talk a little bit about what the demands of the market are and how we are addressing these concerns, followed by what power efficiency means and why it should matter to you and then I will move into the main topic for today, which is SLVS-EC. What our solution looks like, what resources we offer and how you can quickly prototype using our solution before I wrap it up with a quick conclusion and then I'll take questions. All right. So with the market moving towards an intelligent Edge, the imperatives for today are power efficiency, pervasive security and exceptional reliability. So your power envelope is essentially the most significant design constraint you'll face, whether you're designing a tiny Edge device or a data center targeting device with large amounts of network traffic. And similarly, security has become a fundamental component of pretty much any design. And we are seeing 2 big growth drivers. Firstly, more and more designs are operating in 0 fail conditions. And secondly, it doesn't matter whether you're designing for high bandwidth, high resolutions, low latencies. The only thing tougher than actually doing that is making them secure. And finally, exceptional reliability. If you really want to truly build a system, it might be a medical imaging equipment, it could be an autonomous robot, industrial robot, whatever it may be, it must be truly reliable, which means that meantime between failures should be tending to 0, negligible essentially. And we've been cognizant of this, and we've designed a product portfolio with our PolarFire and PolarFire SoC FPGAs, that specifically addresses these very demands. So [ aid ] is the most power-efficient FPGA in the market in its mid-range. So it offers 2x the power efficiencies compared to competition. Security, we offer a defense in-depth approach. We offer security that is woven into our fabric. So in hardware, in design and in data, we offer secure manufacturing, secure boot with our SoCs, NIST certificate, crypto core for an application that you might need, functional safety and so on. And reliability essentially has a lot of components. It has functional safety, it has determinism. We have -- we focus on all of these, but we also prioritize long-term product supply so you know that components are available in the long-term sale. So that said, I'm going to talk a little bit about power because the SLVS-EC solution we're going to talk about today is easily one of the most power-efficient solutions in the FPGA market today. And I want to sort of highlight what that means for you. Why is power important? How that translates to cost savings? And why it should matter to you? So using standard competitor tools, equivalent power bins, equivalent conditions, junction temperature, keeping everything equivalent and comparable using standard tools. This graph very clearly illustrates the power efficiency leadership that PolarFire brings to the table. So across industry standard designs, whether it is a wireless MIMO design, a military design, you can see that PolarFire consistently and very comfortably offers up to 50% lower power than competing SRAM FPGAs. So I say SRAM FPGAs because our fabric is built from nonvolatile process. So power efficiency is sort of built in ground up. And because of the non-volatility, it is active [ that power up no minimal in rush current ] and significantly lower leakage compared to SRAM FPGAs. That's what makes it so efficient, low on consumption and heat dissipation. And this is important because it adds up to cost. So power, basically, whether it's directly or indirectly adds to your system cost, design costs which sort of translates to cost to your customer as well. Like, for instance, firstly, SRAM FPGAs, unlike PolarFire, require complex power supplies. So you need circuitry to handle the inrush current to reverse shutdown current and so on and so forth, adds to system complexity, adds to the design cost, and then indirectly adds to the cost of your whole product. Similarly, cooling costs. Your power goes up, heat dissipation increases, thermal management becomes a problem. And then you will have to invest in something maybe as simple as a heat sink or something a little bit more advanced, like a heat pipe, either which way it is definitely going to add to your system costs and directly so. And then finally, housing. So the electronic housing the case, the choice really directly depends on the power and thermals of your electronics. So whether you're going to use a metal case, plastic case, how big that case is, what the area serve is, all of that -- all of those calculations come into play. I'll give you a simple example. Think of like a small industrial compact industrial camera. And the biggest constraint in such designs is really thermal management, heat dissipation. And that's exactly where the PolarFire excels, reliable performance with very effective thermal management, tight constrained, thermally constrained environments. And other than saving the big bucks, which sort of cost up, you can see an example. We've taken these numbers from published websites. Just as an example to give you a fair estimate, if you were to add up the cost of all those things we just talked about, it would be a little over $30 unit cost. And if you were to scale at volume, that's about a little over $9, which is big bucks in the long term. And other than saving these big bucks, there are other factors that would be considered as well. Why should you care? Of course, money is one thing. But if you are a medical imaging manufacturer developing MRIs, this will help you save on the cooling agent, typically helium, which is a very expensive element. Secondly, if you're using portable or movable devices like C-arms or X-rays and so on, it helps reduce the weight of such devices, makes them more maneuverable, less expensive, and all in all, just more effective to produce. But if you are in industrial automation space, again, just as an example, we took a European country into calculation. And saving just one watt in continuous operation will save you over EUR 2 in annual savings. So those are the kind of numbers that you're looking at, and that is precisely why you should care about saving power from ground up in your design. So that point being made, I'm going to move on to our SLVS-EC solution. Now SLVS-EC is a Sony-based solution. It is essentially scalable, low-voltage signaling with embedded clock. It enables very high-speed transmission up to 5 Gbps per lane, with this 2.0 standard over 8 lanes. So effectively about 40 Gbps over long distances. It supports multilane options, so that could be like a multi-stream, multi-sensors, multi-interface. It supports global shutter mode, which is significant in a lot of robotics and medical applications because you can capture fast moving objects with minimum distortion, no motion blur and stuff like that. And then finally, it is embedded clock. So what that means is that the design is easier. You don't have to match lengths. So it's just a simpler process. And because of all of these advantages and features, it sort of is servicing a growing market that needs sensors that enable higher pixel count, higher resolutions and so on. So those are industrial machine vision. Robotics, in warehouses, in factories, factory automation and also medical imaging, endoscopes, medical robotics, digital surgery, those types of things, which also require high resolution, high bandwidth imaging. So I talked about power, but I want to sort of reiterate. This table you see here is a graph of 8 lane transceiver design that is used in SLVS-EC across 3 data rates that correspond to the SLVS-EC standards for 1.2, 2.0 and then in the future 3.0. So that is 2.5 Gbps all the way to 10 Gbps. Keeping as many things constant and using standard competitor tools, you can see that very clearly, the small green bars that indicate PolarFire power consumption is basically more than up to 12x in power savings if you're using SLVS-EC with our transceiver based design. So our solution is comprehensive and complete. We have a dedicated FMC based hardware. We have a full featured IP that's available with our software to Libero. We have an application design, a demo design, if you may, that will serve as a good reference and help you put you prototype. And then finally, we have accompanying documentation, both for the IP and for the reference design as well. So the hardware itself is FMC based. It plugs into our PolarFire video kit. It's a VITA compliant FMC. It comes with the lens that you are looking at on this slide. And it also comes with the sensor, which is the IMX530 sensor. So this is easily available. It's available right now for purchase as well on our e-commerce website. The solution itself, this is how it looks. So you have -- when you plug the FMC into the video kit, the sensor will capture with you in real time and then transfer it over the transceiver to the IP that is running on the PolarFire. Now this IP essentially converts this data format into raw pixel format and stores this on to DDR. This is then read back from the DDR, then goes through basic video processing like alpha blending, bayer image enhancement and so on and so forth, before it is streamed onto a display using HDMI 2.0. Now HDMI 2.0 is also an internally developed IP that is available from Microchip. And the solution also comes with a graphical user interface. So you can, from a user perspective, change, modify, contrast, color and other type of features on the video. So the IP, like I mentioned, developed internally. It supports all 3 baud rates from 1 to 3 -- grade 3. So basically, it's compliant with the SLVS-EC 1.2 and 2.0 standards. It is free. The encrypted version is free, comes with the liberal license. And the RTL source code, the source code is priced at $10,000. So we do have a short demonstration video that we filmed in-house that sort of quickly -- short clip that quickly shows you how the whole setup works. So I'm going to play that now. Take a look. [Presentation]

So that's the video kit with the FMs plugged in. Once it's powered on, the SLVS-EC camera sensor is capturing real-time video that we're playing on a laptop right in front of it. And we've connected over HDMI to a larger TV. This was shot in our conference room. And you can see that it is playing in real time. So -- right. So I talked about power efficiency, how we are a popular choice for a lot of industry camera designs. And you don't have to take our word for it. We have an example that will sort of serve as evidence. This is a Japanese industrial machine vision camera manufacturer that has seen significant power reduction cost savings using PolarFire FPGAs in their cameras. And all of this information is available on their website as part of their marketing of raw material as well. And they've saved significant money just using PolarFire in their designs. And we have multiple designs that are working with them in the future as well. So SLVS-EC is actually part of our very large ecosystem offering of Smart Embedded Vision. So it's just -- this is a small part. As part of this ecosystem, we offer all the way from sensor. So SLVS-EC being one of them, maybe all the way through transport interfaces like CoaXPress or HDMI, SDI or any type of popular display interfaces. It includes compression and [indiscernible]. We have deep learning inferencing. The whole setup. It's comprehensive. It's broad and it's complete. And in order to support this portfolio, we also have full featured hardware application-specific. The -- so the base kits, the first one is the PolarFire video kit, which includes dual camera, 4K sensors over MIPI and then the PolarFire SoC video kit, which adds to it with Linux MIPI transmit and also to gigabit ethernet ports on the SoC. And we also have expansion cards to plug into this. Again, SLVS-EC is one such example. But we do have for SDI, CoaXPress, MIPI transmit and there's many others that are industry standard and relevant to a lot of industrial robotic and medical markets today. Like I said, there is a growing need within the industrial vision, robotic vision markets. And we cater to these markets more specifically. So other than our value propositions in power, security and reliability, we do have a very robust technology portfolio, SLVS-EC being part of the vision portfolio that we just talked about. But in addition, we have motion control. We have robotic operating system. We have open platform communications, over unified architecture, OPC UA, all of which are key components of what roboticists asking for. And we offer the whole breadth of solutions, IPs, hardware with our technology portfolio that is required for key robotic designs in today's market. Similarly, medical imaging. We have -- we support key technologies for a lot of current medical imaging equipment like ultrasounds or MRIs, endoscopes, SLVS-EC, again, a big component of that, but we do support SDI, from a partner CoaXPress, again, all popular key technologies that medical imaging manufacturers require. So this is the breadth of our portfolio. We have FPGAs, like small package, CPLD requirements that go up to 30,000 logic elements, all the way to our latest generation with PolarFire and PolarFire SoC, which supports a 5 core Linux capable RISC-V, 64-bit CPU, up to 460k logic elements and 12.7 Gbps in transceiver rates. So that is the breadth of our portfolio. And given our thermal efficiency, security and reliability, we're able to cater to markets like the [ title sense ] from the intelligent Edge to the very depths of space. That brings me to the end of our webinar today. A quick conclusion. Power is money, the more the power, the more your cost. And we with PolarFire FPGA offer 2x power efficiency up to 50% less than competing FPGAs. And it's definitely the way to go for more power efficient designs for your industrial, medical devices. We have an SLVS-EC solution that is comprehensive, comes with hardware IP solution. It is definitely catering to very large growing market for precise vision motion detection and industrial machine vision, and we have the portfolio that sort of caters to that. If you have any questions outside of this webinar, you want to know more about any of the things that I talked about today, the robotics or medical portfolios, feel free to write to [email protected]. That's all I have for today. Alicia, over to you. If there are any questions from anybody.

All right. Thanks, Apurva. We do have some questions that came through. So just jump right in. The first question we have is, will your road map include support for future versions of SLVS-EC, such as version 3.0 and beyond?

Yes. So currently, we support up to standard 2.0, so that's about 5 Gbps. We do have on the road map evaluation and plan for SLVS-EC 3.0. But that is still in nascent stages. So I do recommend that you stay tuned to our website for any updates that come up.

And then the next question we have is, what is the cost of the SLV as EC IP and solution?

Right. So the IP, I touched upon this, the encrypted IP is free with all of our liberal licenses. But if you're looking for the source code with the RTM, that comes at $10,000. Again, both of which are available on MicrochipDirect, which is Microchip's e-commerce platform.

Right. And then just a reminder to our audience, we do have a link to the MicrochipDirect on our page. So you can just go directly there from the widgets below. And we do have one more question available. Is this design loaded to PolarFire? Or can it also be used with PolarFire SoC?

Okay. So it's been optimized to be used on PolarFire FPGA, but it is completely compatible with PolarFire SoC. You should be able to port and use it as is. And if you find trouble or you have any questions, you can reach out to us through our technical support.

Great. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you again, Apurva for the great presentation, and thank you to our audience for attending our session. We ask that you please take action on your screen to view all the exciting webinar content we have coming up. Thank you, and see you again soon.

Thank you.