Microchip Technology Incorporated (MCHP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to Advancing Medical Imaging with Microchip FPGAs. My name is Brooke, and I am joined by Apurva Peri, our Principal Product Marketing Engineer. Before we get started, please take note of the engagement tools found at the top of your screen, which house all of the resources that you can take advantage of during session. [Operator Instructions] Additionally, be sure to take our survey and check out our webinar hub to see more of ours and Apurva's content. Apurva, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Brooke. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the webinar on Advancing Medical Imaging with Microchip FPGAs. I'm Apurva Peri, and I drive all industrial marketing efforts for FPGAs at Microchip, and thank you very much for being here today. So on the agenda for today, I'm going to talk a little bit about what the medical imaging landscape today looks like, what's changing, what the imperatives are and focus a little bit on the roles of power efficiency, security and reliability and how at Microchip our FPGAs are able to address specific concerns around these areas, followed by some deeper understanding of our medical technology portfolio, our solution stacks, what applications we've seen success at before I wrap up and summarize today. So let's get started. Just a little introduction before we actually begin, what is going on with the medical imaging market today, what's changing, why it's changing. So there are a few key contributors. Firstly, market expansion. So the chronic diseases are increasing. There is higher aging population. There are parts of the world, developing nations that have better access to health care. And all of these sort of are giving rise to more demand for medical imaging resources. And then, of course, there is the need for portable point-of-care service, so whether they be ultrasounds, x-rays, ECGs even, there is a need for them to be portable for faster, quicker similar diagnosis, even in remote areas. And then, of course, there's wearables for personal monitoring, customized health care access for individuals. And then to top it all off, as advancement in tech in general, so there is AI, there is 3D imaging, 4D imaging, all of which are aiming to predict disease, early detection of disease, especially in critical cases like cancer or cardiac care. So this is sort of to set the mood for today to understand what the key market drivers for medical imaging is. But really, irrespective of what the medical imaging market today is and what is it's evolving into, the medical system imperatives can be and are severe. For example, take compute. Algorithms keep evolving, become more complex, and there is a need to be updated for the best, most precise and accurate outcomes at all times with advanced features. Similarly, realtime decisions, decisions have to be made in the real time and reliably so. And there's really no scope, no tolerance for errors in these types of systems. Portability, shrinking sizes, portable, battery-operated, longer skin contact, more safety requirements. And really, it all comes down to reduced power consumption, better heat management, thermal dissipation becomes key in some of these applications. And then finally, security, security could be for patient privacy, data security, design security in general, so as to have enhanced health care for higher quality health care. So the themes that sort of float up here, I think, are power efficiency, security and reliability. And Microchip FPGAs are able to address these concerns very specifically for the medical imaging market. And I will touch a little bit about each of these in my subsequent slides. So we view standard competitor tools equivalent power bins. But this graph on your screen shows, very clearly, it illustrates the power advantage that the PolarFire family brings to table. Across a range of designs, different types than diverse designs, the PolarFire family, it consumes easily less than up to 50% power than competing SRAM FPGAs, and this is primarily because of the nonvolatile process that the fabric is made of. So the PolarFire family is up -- is live at power-up. There is minimal in rush current, very low leakages, and all of this together contributes to the super low power consumption as compared to competing SRAM-based FPGAs. And why this is important and why I'm showing you this is that there are hidden costs, and quite a bit of it, associated with high power consumption. First is in the SRAM-based competing ones, there is very complicated power circuitry that is required, very precise ramp-up sequence, and it adds to system complexity and directly affects the cost of your system. Second, of course, is if the temperature goes beyond a certain threshold, you have to apply active measures to cool down your electronics. So this could be something like a thermal pad, a heat, sink. It could be active fan or even heat pipes, something more advanced. But either way, whichever mechanism you use, it's going to make your system bulkier and more expensive and add to the cost of your entire application. And finally, the housing costs, now housing -- your electronic housing is directly influenced by the power and thermal management in your system. For example, consider an endoscope application. Small, tiny camera, and managing the thermals in that becomes challenging. But that is exactly where PolarFire excels in tight, commonly constrained environment. So if you were to put, say, numbers against these, we sort of picked numbers up of established published websites. And just to give you an estimate, potential savings just from lower power consumption is about USD 9 per unit at volume. So that's the scale you're looking at just by saving on power and using the PolarFire family of FPGAs. And if you were to apply this specifically to medical imaging devices, MRIs, for instance, would require less heat, would mean less heat -- cooling agents, specifically helium, which is a very expensive element. Reduces cost and the weight of the system. Similarly, for x-rays and C-arms, it reduces the weight of the system, so sort of enhances maneuverability, cheaper electronics in some cases and so on. So really, saving power consumption and better thermal dissipation is associated with a large number of hidden costs on your system. Next is security. Security is a hot topic. It's essential. It's crucial to any industry, any application globally and across various markets. But we believe that the center of all security is physical security, and it is the foundation for all else. So on top of that is trusted hardware. So you have -- we offer crypto [ roughly ] supply, secured supply chain and patent-protected DPA countermeasures. We also provide security and design. What that means is we have 32 built-in anti-tamper flags. We have bitstream security. We have secure nonvolatile memory, all of which approach -- all of which enable you to approach your design in a more secure fashion. And then, finally, of course, design and data security information assurance, which basically means we have built-in crypto accelerators, built-in random number generator and path protected key storage. So a combination of hardware design and data, which allows you to have a defense in-depth approach to any design that you're developing and is a key element in any medical-grade device or application that you're developing. We talked a little bit about reliability in the previous slide. It is a key focus for most medical applications and provides a strong foundation for any type of regulatory compliance that you have to certify your devices for, so we recently received a Functional Safety Certification for our PolarFire family, both PolarFire FPGAs and associate FPGA. In the industrial section, we received IEC 61508 –SIL 3 certification. And for automotive, we received ISO26262 ASIL D. So you'll see that these are high levels of certification for functional safety and provide you the necessary strong foundation for regulatory compliance for medical applications. What we pride ourselves for [indiscernible] at Microchip is a dependable longevity of supply, not just for FPGAs, but across the board within our organization. You will notice that we have maintained -- we continue to maintain supply for our oldest generation of devices. It's been more than 37 years today. And we will continue to do so for at least 20 years for our current portfolios as well. So this is one of our biggest differentiators, and it gives you the assurance that you can design with our products today and be rest assured that it will be available for the length of your product. So now let's dive a little bit into what the technology portfolio and solutions and IP looks like that target medical imaging. Now we do have a broad and complete portfolio that specifically targets some of the medical imaging applications out there. So for instance, if you were to look at ultrasounds or MRIs or CT scanners, these systems typically consist of 2 parts. There is a front-end data transport system and the back-end data transport system. In the front end, you have a beam former that talks to the FPGA, either through LVDS or JESD. Then there is transport between the front end and back end, which typically happens over Aurora, which is a serial link protocol or serial digital interface, SDI. Now all 3 of these IPs and solutions are supported by Microchip, either directly or through a partner. Now similarly, for endoscopes, these are minimally invasive devices for imaging and -- within the body. So they typically use high-resolution, high-bandwidth, but low-latency image sensors, like SLVS-EC and, in some cases, MIPI, but they also use CoaXPress to transmit over long-range reliably and at high speeds. Now again, all of these are supported by Microchip in-house with IPs and solution and the necessary hardware. Similarly, there are other patient diagnostics, like eye diagnosis or neural tracking and multiple other diagnostic tools out there, which may need USB or Ethernet, and we support USB 3.0, Gen 2 through a partner, also USXGMII and 10GMAC for Microchip to support Ethernet. And finally, visualization could be surgical, could be for any other medical application. We have HDMI and display port as display interfaces also available from Microchip that support the PolarFire family. So on this slide here, you can see two distinct imaging lines. The first one is for external modalities, like CT scanners, x-rays or, ultrasounds, and the second one is for endoscopes. These are block diagrams that more accurately depict what these applications look like and where the PolarFire family plays a role. So in the former, you can see that the analog front end is able to communicate with the FPGA. The analog data is collected, digitized and passed along, either over JESD or LVDS and, in some cases, PI, to the analog front end for some initial processing. And that is where the PolarFire has been tremendously successful. We have multiple such applications where the PolarFire is used in the real world. And then there is a transport interface that communicates with the back-end processor. This is typically Aurora or SDI, and then there's PCI over which it communicates with the host PC. Again, some cases, we do have PolarFire that is used in the back end as well. Next is endoscopes. So you have visual data that is captured and then preprocessed on the FPGA. Typically, the image sensor could be a MIPI interface. It could be an SLVS-EC interface. There is some image signal processing that happens on top of it before it is transported over CoaXPress. Again, all this entire system can be built completely on the PolarFire family FPGA. So really, the combination of power efficiency, security and reliability and the breadth of solutions and the technology portfolio has made the PolarFire family very successful in a lot of medical imaging applications across a diverse range, whether it be in the hospital, at the clinic, in field, portable, different types of applications and use cases including, but not limited to, MRIs, infusion pumps, CT scanners, lots of ultrasounds, different types of endoscopes, of course, and so on. So I will dive a little bit and give you some specific customer examples for where we've seen success and why we've seen success. It will give you an idea of how PolarFire is used in these applications. So the first one here is a portable ultrasound. As you can see, there is a quote from the developer that says that this device would not have been possible if not for the PolarFire FPGA. So this is a battery powered handheld unit. So clearly, power consumption and heat dissipation are both very crucial, and that' is exactly where PolarFire excels. Secondly, there is also -- it enables a larger feature set. So PolarFire here is able to perform a lot of additional functions for parallel processing, filtering, histograms, dynamic range control and so on. The second one here is slightly similar, but for veterinary purposes. Again, a portable ultrasound. This one required 2.5 hours of continuous operation, needed a lightweight design in the small-form factor and cost-effective price point. Again, here, you can see a quote from the CEO, which says that it was the most optimal choice to use PolarFire for the given requirements and that they have not used any type of active cooling measures in this compact device that uses the PolarFire. The next is an endoscope device. So you can see here that endoscopes are typically very compact in solutions. And the form factor comes into the critical path. With the PolarFire FPGA, we support form factors as small as 11 by 11 with the PolarFire 100 device and also the CoaXPress support. So we support up to 12.5 gbps per lane for CoaXPress with our IP. Now we recently also launched the SLVS-EC solution, which includes comprehensive hardware solution IP and other documentation resources. We do have a webinar that went out a few months ago, which will be linked on the resources on your console as well, if you'd like more information. And then, finally, again, is the portable ECG monitor. Now in addition to portability and the power consumption requirements, this one had a unique requirement that it needed to be placed near MRIs. And we were able to support that because we offer nonmagnetic packages, and that sort of enables this particular use case. So you'll see that all of our wins, all of our successful customer applications have been core medical imaging equipment, but also those that are portable because of our power -- extreme power efficiency and thermal dissipation offering, in addition to the security and reliability. So the Medical Imaging Solutions stack that I talked about a little bit earlier and all the IPs and solutions we offer are really a subset of our much broader and more comprehensive Smart Embedded Vision portfolio, which is really a single one-stop shop for any of your embedded vision requirements with FPGAs. So we offer all the way from image sensors like MIPI and SLVS-EC. We have ISP. We have DDR controllers. We have deep learning inferencing. We have compression algorithms. And we have transport interfaces like CoaXPress, SDI, HDMI, Ethernet and so on and so forth. So it's a very, very broad and complete portfolio of IPs and solutions. And this is supported by our robust hardware platforms. So the first one is PolarFire video kit. Now this one comes with a dual 4K 16 MIPI-based camera sensors and HDMI. And then we have the PolarFire SoC video kit, which adds on top of this, Linux capabilities, PCIe and also dual 1-gig Ethernet ports. And to support expansion to additional interfaces, we have multiple FMC cards, for different types of interfaces and protocols like CoaXPress, SDI, USXGMII and so on and so forth. And of course, on top of this, we do offer VectorBlox, which is our in-house machine learning inferencing software development kit. It is the most power efficient out there in the market, at least 3x more power efficient than competing SRAM FPGAs. It offers over 50 networks and solutions, including facial recognition and license plate detection. So this is what the breadth of our FPGA and SoC device portfolio looks like. We offer small CPLD replacement, small packages up to 30,000 logic elements, all the way to PolarFire and PolarFire SoC, which offer up to 460,000 logic elements with transceivers, that support up with 12.7 gbps. So the PolarFire SoC comes with a hardened risk 564 bit CPU 5-core with Linux-enabled. So this is really how broad our portfolio is. It's literally from the intelligent [ breadth and depth ] space, and they're all built on our very strong value propositions for power and thermal efficiency, military-grade security and exceptional reliability. So -- but we have been striving to make sure that your experience accessing resources for the medical imaging portfolio is as seamless and resource-rich as possible, so you can go visit our website. You'll see that there is an interactive diagram that will help you go through pretty much any resource that you require in just a single click to download the resource that you require for your application. So that sort of brings me to the end of the webinar. I'll quickly summarize. So the PolarFire family of FPGAs is definitely an optimal choice for medical imaging applications, especially taking into consideration the exceptional power efficiency 2x compared to the market, exceptional reliability and military-grade security. We do offer a comprehensive embedded vision portfolio tailored for medical imaging applications. This includes IPs and solutions like CoaXPress, SDI, SLVS-EC, Aurora, all very popularly used in ultrasounds, endoscopes and other such applications. And finally, we are powering numerous successful medical applications, and this is backed by customer testimonials like we saw today in the webinar. And we've been successful in a range -- diverse range of applications like MRIs, ultrasounds, endoscopes, surgical visualization tools and so on. That's all I had. Thank you. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them.

Perfect. Thanks, Apurva. We do have time to address a couple of the questions that we got today. The first one says, can you elaborate on the SLVS-EC solution that you mentioned today?

Sure. So our solution includes dedicated FMC that plugs into our PolarFire video kit, full featured IP, which basically complies with the SLVS-EC 2.0 standard, supports up to 5 gbps per lane. And it also has a demo design and accompanying documentation. We do have on the road map to develop something that will demonstrate SLVS-EC to CoaXPress tailored towards endoscope applications. So stay tuned and keep visiting our website to get more information when it's available.

Perfect. Thank you. The other question we can get to says, how do you handle the strict regulatory requirements in the medical market?

So that's a good question. Thank you. So we have IEC 61508 –SIL3 certification, and that shows our commitment towards functional safety. Medical manufacturers will need to certify for regulatory compliance by themselves. But what we've done with our functional safety, both industrial and automotive, is provide that basic very strong solid foundation for you to go and gain that compliance. It shows commitment towards functional safety, in general.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Apurva, and thank you to our audience for attending this session. Be sure to fill out our short survey and check out Apurva's other webinars as well as the rest of our content using that recommended webinar's widget. We'll see you next time.