Leonard Charles Perham
Analyst · Feltl and Company
Thank you, Bev. Good morning, everyone. I'll begin today's call with a few highlights and then provide more detail on our third quarter activities. Jim will then review our third quarter financial results prior to opening the call for your questions. And I'll probably have a couple of closing remarks. Outstanding operational execution, that is, bringing out new products that work first time right out of the box, coupled with increased amount -- or a couple of the increased amount of face time we are getting with our customers now that we have multiple product lines to discuss with them, leads me to feel very good about our overall progress up to and through the third fiscal quarter of 2013. Other than the fact that I cannot be certain how fast our customers' revenue will ramp up once they release their new products to the market, I am pleased with the progress we've made throughout this last reporting period. From period to period, our production roadmap becomes more robust, which allows us to not only pursue many new design win opportunities for our existing products, but to discuss in substantial details the requirements of our prospective customers' future networking systems. We are gratified to see our Bandwidth Engine 1 design win starting to ramp into production and anticipate a reasonable increase in units shipped in the fourth quarter over third. Currently, among other important goals, we are intensely focused on operational execution; keeping new product development on schedule; system bring-up, that is, helping our existing customers ramp their end users up into production and get going down the road; and cost control. All in all, it has been a productive quarter, and I'm satisfied, quite satisfied, with our progress. A little about design wins. Bandwidth Engine 2 continues to outpace Bandwidth Engine 1 in the sales funnel as customers more opt -- more and more opt for the MSR620 Burst mode device, MSR720 access mode device or MSR820 intelligence-based device, all products which are derived from our base BE2 architecture. Additionally, as reported last quarter, once a customer has adopted the Bandwidth Engine solution and comes to understand the uniqueness of the GCI interface, the customer is very likely to use it again and again. To this end, we are gratified to add an additional design, a third platform win from our Tier 1 customer during the quarter being reported here today, and as well, we can report yet another design win out of Asia as well. At this point, I am reasonably certain that we will exceed 10 Bandwidth Engine design wins for calendar year 2013, probably in the range of 10 to 15, something like that, and that's discounting the wins from 2012. Turning now to product updates. Bandwidth Engine 2. We've now completed both the functional and performance level characterization in BE2, and we remain confident that we will pass the final quality assurance and reliability benchmark testing in the fourth quarter of 2013. We remain on schedule to do a full production release of BE2 before year end 2013. In addition to having all 3 Burst -- all 3 products, that is, a Burst mode, access mode and intelligence mode configurations of BE2, we will also offer the part in 3 I/O speed grades: 10 gigs, 12.5 gig and 15 gig. It's worth noting that, again, BE2, as with BE1, require no design changes, no expensive mask redesigns or rearchitecture of the design set or anything like that. The MoSys engineering team continues to do an absolutely outstanding job executing new products. Short statement about second source. As indicated previously, we have developed continuity of supply arrangements with our customers to provide absolute assurance of long-term supply. However, we continue to make progress toward a second source agreement, whereby there will be more than one supplier of the Bandwidth Engine product solutions. We hope to enter into an agreement by year end. However, there is no customer-driven pressure requiring this to happen, that is, we have no customer deadline, and this situation has not resulted in us losing any business with the BE family. In the end, this agreement has to be satisfactory to all parties and cannot be detrimental to our faithful shareholders, either in the short term or in the long term. A little bit about LineSpeed. Regarding the LineSpeed product family, although a relatively new product line, the Multi-Mode Gearbox and Quad Retimer devices are generating significant customer interest and resent -- and represent an increasing level of activity in our sales funnel. The LineSpeed family of high-performance SerDes solutions expands our addressable market, broadens our line of product offerings and enables us to increase the level of interaction we can have with both existing and prospective customers. We are beginning to be recognized as the supplier of very high-performance innovative solutions designed to address the critical challenges facing networking OEMs as they develop next-generation systems and product roadmaps or system roadmaps beyond that. As an indication of our progress, we participated in the industry interoperability event in London -- I think it's the European Conference on Optical Communication -- just a couple of weeks ago, in late September. Our intent was to demonstrate the capability and flexibility of our new SerDes solutions to the user community, and we are very successful. While there, we demonstrated extensive interoperability for both 100-gigabit Ethernet and OTN rates, optical transmission rates, with our 100-gig Gearbox IC communicating with CFP2 and CPAK optical modules from leading vendors, including Cisco, Fujitsu and Finisar. In addition, we demonstrated our SerDes ability to meet the OIF's long-reach, 100-gig standard by driving backplanes from Amphenol, Molex and others with our 100-gig Quad Retimers. These long-reach capabilities, available on both our Gearbox and Retimer products, are 5 to 7x further than competitors', only offering very short-reach solutions. We have new LineSpeed products in development and anticipate bringing those to market in 2014. This is an exciting new area for us, and it's generating huge interest and huge interaction between ourselves and our customers. Bandwidth Engine 3, last but not -- and certainly not least, BE3 remains on schedule for tape-out in the first half of 2014. The design is now essentially complete, and verification, though far to go, is well under way. BE3 is anticipated to find its way into the very highest-performance, next-generation networking systems and is expected to compete with applications -- is expected not to compete with applications better served by BE1 or BE2. We've been working closely with our potential SoC partners to make sure our respective I/Os can link up and communicate with one another right out of the box, and we remain very excited about the prospects with BE3 likely generating lots of discussion on these calls starting in the second half of 2014. Closing. In summary, during the last quarter, we made good progress against our goals and objectives for 2013, with a strong focus on winning new designs, continuing to execute flawlessly on our new product development plans, intensely supporting our customers and their customers during system bring-up, cost control and careful management of the company. We are gratified to report that we did win more platforms. Probably we'll end the year with 10 to 15 new platform wins, expanded the activity in our sales funnel and saw early design wins start to slowly ramp their new networking systems into production. In closing, I think it's safe to say that the performance requirements for our customers and potential customers' next-generation systems and beyond need to be supported by innovative chip architectures, which should play to the strength of both the Bandwidth Engine family of high-speed serial networking memories and, as well, our LineSpeed SerDes products as well. With that said, I'm going to turn the call over to Jim to discuss our third quarter financials, and then we'll open this call for your questions. James?