Len Perham
Analyst · Benchmark
Thank you, Bev. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. On today's call, I'm going to review second quarter activities including our success winning new designs, our robust sales funnel, and our product development activities. That said, Jim will discuss our financial results, and following those remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. We continued to execute reasonably well across all facets of the business in the second quarter of 2015. Quarter two design win activity not only expanded our customer base but also increased MoSys' market footprint across multiple geographic regions, and our goal of doubling design wins year-over-year remains well within reach. The first six months have been quite satisfying in terms of design wins. Shipments and IC revenue more than doubled sequentially and the backlog was up significantly. Though we are very gratified to see both shipments and backlog moving up into the right, we have not yet hit numbers significant enough for Jim and I to say that we are past the inflection point. This is very encouraging, very encouraging indeed, but not yet totally satisfying. We made reasonable advances on our new product development for both the Bandwidth Engine and the LineSpeed product families during the second quarter as well. Now let me provide a bit of color on our design wins. We expanded our design win count in quarter two although we did not achieve double-digit design wins as in each of the previous two quarters. Quarter two wins do represent increased traction across a variety of applications ranging from Data Center Edge appliances to routers and switches. Some notable highlights of our quarter two wins might include; we brought onboard three new Bandwidth Engine customers, all BE2 by the way; we secured additional wins with our existing Tier 1 customer for a new statistics application utilizing the BE2-820; won our first design in the military market space for a LineSpeed retimer for 100-gig line cards, I think this is a small order, but it puts us into a new space and that's what we want to do is get through the door and get started; achieved more wins in the USA, an area of strength these past few quarters, a great place to be doing business because of the big players around here; achieved multiple wins with a new customer for applications at the Data Center Edge, it's our second major win in this area and it goes to the fact that we're moving to the Edge and hopefully soon into the data center itself, or almost more strongly into the data center, we have a win or two there already. Similar to recent quarters, quarter two design win activity was primarily centered on BE2. These new wins represented continued expansion of our customer and application footprint and should provide a stronger and broader base to our business and further reduce our dependency on select customers and limited geographic regions. To reiterate, at this point our goal to double last year's design win count remains achievable as we currently have a very robust pipeline of second half design win opportunities that represent meaningful contributions to our revenue. Speaking of revenue, IC revenue was up significantly in quarter two over the previous quarter driven by the early ramping toward production of some of our first customer programs and increasing prototype quantity orders from earlier design wins. Q2 saw a significant increase in backlog with several orders pulled in and requested for earlier shipment during the quarter. We expect this trend to continue as our broader design win base begins to scale up and more and more customers move in the direction of a production release. The second quarter increase in IC revenue most assuredly represents a positive step forward as we strive to reach a meaningful inflection point. We anticipate quarter three IC revenue to again increase. However, we still remain in the early stages of what we hope will be a sustained and significant revenue ramp. Now turning to sales and marketing activities; as anticipated, our market opportunities are becoming more diverse as we continue to gain new customers and serve new applications. We continue to expand the sales funnel during the quarter with more design win opportunities. Customer interest continued to grow on a quarter to quarter basis, and we remain committed to winning as many new designs as possible for both the Bandwidth and LineSpeed families. We continued to strive for a strong strategic presence in key industry events in order to build more credibility and increase the user community's awareness of the power of our IC product families and their application to his or her future design challenges. Recently at the Ethernet Technology Summit, John Monson, VP of Sales and Marketing, delivered a presentation on low-power 5 [ph] solutions for 100-gig modules, while our team demonstrated various levels of BE2 interoperability with FPGA solutions from Altera and Xilinx. Additionally, Michael Miller, our VP of Technology Innovation and Systems Applications, recently spoke at the Linley Tech Carrier Conference addressing the capabilities of BE2 and BE3 to accelerate the latest software to find networking and network function virtualization standards. Through these efforts, we are spreading the word about Bandwidth Engine and LineSpeed, thus furthering both customer and partnership opportunities. Overall, I'm encouraged by our customers' requirements for more and more performance in the next-generation systems. It is becoming clear that the market environment and the need for ever higher performance from next-generation networking equipment is playing to the strengths of both the Bandwidth Engine families and as well our very high performance LineSpeed solutions. Bandwidth Engine is garnering more and more attention as the network transitions to 100-gig and higher performance system requirements, driving greater market opportunities over a wider variety of applications for this product family. We are also seeing more appliances at the edge of the network moving into 100-gig plus space serving applications for security, threat prevention, load-balancing, and monitoring among others. Most recently, we were able to capitalize on this trend by capturing two additional Data Center Edge design wins in this most recent quarter. While 100-gig is still early in its commercialization phase, all the devices at the edge and in the core will need retimer and/or gearbox devices or will connect with QSFP28 or CFP4 optical modules requiring retimers such as MoSys' MSH110, the low-power retiming solution. Furthermore, the semi space or semiconductor space has been experiencing a rash of M&A activity with further consolidation likely in the not too distant future. In my opinion, this consolidation may lead to a reduction in a number of high-quality suppliers available to our customers. Customers who wish to keep a diversified supply chain may be looking for additional suppliers so as not to become too dependent on just one or two suppliers. This could very well open new market opportunities for MoSys. In the meantime, we expect to meaningfully expand our product catalog in the second half of 2015 as we bring new Bandwidth Engine and LineSpeed devices to market. We remain focused on increasing market awareness and accelerating the adoption of our new products while expanding our product and technology portfolio. Speaking of strategic relationships, we continue to work closely with our partners including EZchip, GSI, Altera and Xilinx to further advance our mutual efforts. One of the keys to maximizing the benefit of these relationships is for our R&D efforts to remain in sync, paralleling our partner's development timelines. To date we've been effective in accomplishing this not only with EZchip but also with the new FPGA families available from Altera and Xilinx. In addition, we are engaged with multiple potential partners investigating the possibilities of a strategic collaboration that might result in a new product that we could jointly bring to market or a new capability that one or both of us might strategically market. This effort is primarily intended to generate non-diluted funding to offset some of our significant R&D costs developing our product families and in one or two cases might allow MoSys to bring some new system solution to market earlier than otherwise possible. Expanding our strategic relationships and securing one or more of these deals has been and continues to be a priority. Discussions continue with multiple parties and we are optimistic about closing one or more of these projects in the second half of this year. Let me close with a few brief comments on each of our product families before turning this over to Jim. Just to lighten things up or change the direction, I'll start with LineSpeed. As mentioned on our last call, we have an aggressive development roadmap intended to dramatically expand the LineSpeed product family offerings. During the second quarter, we spent significant time sampling and qualifying various new LineSpeed products and in particular made excellent progress with devices aimed into short-reach applications. Significant progress is made with our low-power retime, the MSH110, and we now have an optimized production with validated features and working customer designs. As reported last quarter, we have some early design-ins for the MSH110 and other new LineSpeed products that we expect to convert into design wins within the next few months. The increase in LineSpeed opportunities has driven growth in our sales funnel and I'm confident we will secure additional design-ins and design wins for our LineSpeed products in the second half of this year. The workload releasing these new LineSpeed products to the sales catalog has been substantial and we suffered a fair bit of congestion last quarter. Sales activity around these solutions is quite gratifying and we need to increase the pace at which we get these elements released to the sales catalog. In short, the ball on LineSpeed is to some degree in the operational court now. Sales and marketing has all kinds of activity going on. Turning to Bandwidth Engine, our BE1 customers are still advancing towards full production release and in some cases have taken extra time to replace BE1 with BE2 in order to meet their customers' system requirements. Last quarter, I spent time in Asia meeting with these customers to assess project status and came away confident that we have not lost our design wins and these projects will ultimately get to production, though perhaps not until later this year. In anticipation of that event, we have BE1 inventory on hand and are in position to support our customers' requirements when they are ready to release and start ramping the production. Current and new BE2 design wins are also moving forward toward full production release. As I mentioned previously, we have started to see order increases for BE2 Express programs begin scaling toward production and other earlier design wins require more and more prototype quantities. BE2 has definitely become the workhorse of this product family driving the majority of new design wins and revenue in 2015. The customer's mean time to integrating BE2 into a system as a working solution is decreasing as customers become increasingly more familiar and comfortable with the serial I/O on BE2 and are able to get it designed in and working in their system in shorter periods of time. This will greatly increase the likelihood of BE2 being reused again and again in various applications in this customer shop. Comfortableness with a high-speed serial I/O is the key to solving some of these problems and we're seeing reuse and reuse and reuse at the customers we've already done business with. It's quite gratifying. That said, we are still only at the very beginning of the production ramp for both of these product families. Regards Bandwidth Engine 3, I'm pleased to report that tape out is imminent. As a tip of the case with the chip design and its complexity, we did experience a few delays often due to changing design requirements and feature sets or integrating together with the chip next door to it. However that said, these delays did allow us to further improve the design, upgrade BE3 performance and simultaneously reduce power consumption while remaining in step with EZchip and our FPGA partners. As a result, we're able to further maximize BE3's capabilities and performance which will result in a product that offers a significant increase in memory access and network memory bandwidth as well as many new advanced functions such as search to address specific application acquirements. BE3 is a really very, very powerful and sophisticated solution. The level of customer interest in BE3 remains very good and we have customers in the wings awaiting reference boards as soon as they are available. We will also be leveraging our partner relationships to further accelerate the adoption of BE3. In closing, I'd like to remind everyone of our 2015 goals. Among them were doubling design wins year-over-year, looking reasonable from where I sit today; expanding our customer base including at least one new Tier 1, we have several Tier 1s in the sales funnel right now, I think that goal is looking – we're optimistic about that as well; taping out and sampling BE3 and being awarded our first design wins, ball is in our court to get our reference boards going, we should have a fair bit of time near the end of the year to get this done; releasing and getting to sampling on several new LineSpeed products, that's in process across a reasonably wide front as I speak; significantly expanding our portfolio of available solutions; six, substantially increasing our served available market; and finally, commencing a more meaningful revenue ramp in the second half of 2015m, to that goal I think we may have seen a signal that one of our customers might be getting very close to starting the ramp, hasn't come onto the backlog yet but we've been hearing some pretty strong rumors, so optimistic about a little headway there as well. Looking at this list, I believe we have made important inroads on most of these goals, and with the progress we've made since January 1, I remain confident that we have the products, the people, the customers, and the partners, as well as the right strategic plan in place that will enable us to meet most if not all of our goals by year-end. I'm going to turn the call over to Jim to discuss financials and then will come back and get your questions and so forth. Thank you very, very much.