Len Perham
Analyst · Benchmark. Your line is open
Thank you, Beverly. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. On today’s call, I’ll review our first quarter progress from a business operational and product perspective. Following my remarks, Jim will discuss our financial results in more detail. And then we’ll open the call for questions. I’m pleased to say that just over a quarter into the year the company’s performance has been in line with our 2016 goals, that is substantially increased revenue, expand our product portfolio, add to our design-win base, reduce costs and increase our customer count. More specifically, let’s discuss our first quarter progress within the context of our 2016 goals. To that end, we shipped meaningful volumes of production units and a fair quantity of prototypes into new opportunities to pull customers in this quarter. As a reminder, we a significant base of the BE2 design-wins most of which have yet to commence production. I may have mentioned this couple of times, mostly the design wins to-date have all been either 2012 that slipped into 2013 or 2013. We haven’t really seen any of the 2014 or 2015 design wins start ramping yet. Further, a portion of BE2 shipments this quarter represent post-releases from a large annual order placed on MoSys by our Tier 1 customer earlier this year. We currently have a substantial number of design wins to this Tier 1 network equipment supplier. And we continue to leverage this key relationship for additional design win opportunities, both through the Bandwidth Engine and LineSpeed product families. During the quarter, we also saw an increase in orders for Bandwidth Engine 1, as well as early production and prototyping orders for our increasingly larger LineSpeed IC family. With an increasing number of prior design wins ramping into production, we’re entering the second quarter with a growing book of orders, which already exceeds our first-quarter product revenue. Though we continue to believe our full-year revenue will be back-end loaded, these early indications of a growing revenue base are quite encouraging. We still expect 2016 revenue to be primarily driven by Bandwidth Engine products with a lesser incremental contribution from the LineSpeed family. The number of customers and projects we’re shipping to is increasing, but again it’s important to note that to-date only our initial early design wins are moving up the ramp into production. All that said, we are pleased to see that at this early stage, the current product ramps or production ramps are roughly aligning with our in-house revenue model. With regard to new design wins for the quarter, we secured additional wins from both the Bandwidth Engine and LineSpeed families, including three with new customers. Additionally, we entered the second quarter fiscal year 2016 with a strong pipeline of potential new design wins spread across multiple customers. In particular interest in our BE2 product family continues to grow into new market segments, finding new applications as the network infrastructure and the data center moved to higher data rates and started to experience the same memory bandwidth and access challenges that come with aggregating 40 to 100 gig data-flows. These pending wins are at various stages of development, but give us an increasing level of confidence for achieving our full-year goal of growing design wins in 2016 substantially over design wins won in 2015. A little bit about industry trends. While we expect design-win momentum to continue to increase throughout the year, we are seeing design decisions take longer than we’ve seen in the past few quarters. This is possibly due to a general sluggishness in some areas of the datacom markets or it could be a slowdown driven by our customer base, now starting to embrace the next generation of larger more powerful FPGAs currently being released by both Altera and Xilinx. The interest is probably there to move forward with next-generation designs, however, it seems that transitions into development, which is where we deploy [ph] the design-win and moving more slowly, a bit more premeditated than we experienced last year. The industry trend toward higher speeds and increased processing per packet throughout the network strongly supports the need for our Broadband Engine solution into next generation networking systems. Applications in the 100 gig to 200 gig range would be too [ph] has significant value are showing up in access, security and datacenter markets, and serial memory at higher sturdy speeds is gaining broader acceptance and more widespread use. Furthermore, the adoption of the 25 gig Ethernet will drive rates up and create new opportunities for our LineSpeed’s family of physical interface devices. We are seeing more applications moving into that space, fueling additional opportunities for BE2 as well as new synergistic opportunities for both the BE3 and BE2 serving different functions on the same line card. These are but a few of the industry trends that we believe will drive increasing design-win opportunities in the direction of MoSys going forward. Turning now to a few product-specific updates, BE1 and BE2 are both in production, shipping to various customers. However, BE2 does represent the lion’s share of these shipments. Looking out over the balance of the year, we note that the design-wins most likely to ramp imminently our BE2, not BE1, which will benefit our gross margin given the higher ASPs and lower cost to produce BE2s. Customer time to integrate BE2 is lessening, but it’s still dependent on the customer’s overall system architecture. We are also experiencing substantial customer interest in our Bandwidth Engine 3 family of products. We are having ongoing product review and applications meetings with multiple customers who are evaluating the features and capabilities of these new more advanced highly intelligent networking memories. BE3 dramatically increases the BE family’s performance with twice the serial throughput and on-chip memory capacity and onboard intelligence, enabling increased statistics and metering capability to be brought on board. To-date we have released two unique BE3 products which are available for immediate sampling. We are currently in the later stages of characterizing BE3 and working on fine-tuning various other configurations while moving towards full carrier-grade qualification. Based on past experience, we expect that BE3 will achieve a full carrier-grade quality assurance, reliability certification sooner than did either BE1 or BE2. However, it is good to remember that a high-temp operating life test for example, individually take 1,000 hours, and there is no shortening that requirement. Our long-standing partnerships with both Altera and Xilinx have been very gratifying. To bring up time to integrate BE3 with FPGAs from either these excellent programmable device manufacturers will be shorter than from previous versions. This is because the ecosystem developed for the serial memory and the bandwidth engine in particular is significant and proving extensible between the generations based on a now proven expertise with low latency, high signal integrity and high-speed sturdy I/Os. We are expecting our FPGA partners to roll out their new advanced next-generation FPGAs in the second-half of 2016, leveraging new capabilities and with sturdy speeds running up to 28 gigabits per second. This should enable us to help our shared customer find an awesome next-generation solution faster than before. Thus positioning us to shorten the time to achieve the design wins for BE3 and by doing this to shorten the customers’ time, the first product shipments. We also continue to make good progress with our partner Mellanox, as they bring the market to NPS-400 processor, so which we developed awesomely configured networking memory device, the BE3-Z30. We are excited to be partnered with Mellanox, we completed this acquisition with EZchip in the first quarter. Our relationship with the expanded Mellanox EZchip team is proceeding very smoothly. The working relationships are excellent. We are actively engaged with multiple perspective customers for the BE3 Z30 and expect expanded opportunities to given Mellanox to strong data center market person, combined with the existing strength that’s acquired network processing products in carrier application. During the first quarter, we also launch a Programmable Search Engine platform, with utilizing much of the same interface, logic and ecosystem, as the Bandwidth Engine we provides the programmability of custom capabilities to customers, who might desire to implement their own functions, such as an algorithmic of TCAM specialized search and/or numerous other applications. Our PSE products provide MoSys with the base for new products that more precisely target new and different applications, without requiring a costly hardware re-spin [ph]. While both BE3 and PSE utilized the common interface infrastructure. The architecture and capabilities available to the customer with the PSE are quite different than would BE3, where functions are more defined and more standardized in order to address specific applications. Our PSE products behave like acceleration engine designed to optimize to accelerate customizable subroutines, including packet processing or security functions offloaded from a network processor, FPGA or application-specific standard product. We are in initial discussions with customers looking to use the PSE’s programmability to perform a number of proprietary functions. This product is quickly generated a fair bit of excitement and interest among both our existing customers and our larger design win partners group. Turning to our LineSpeed family of products, we substantially advance of our efforts on these products, secured multiple new design wins in Q1. Additionally, we recently introduced our LineSpeed Flex 100G Full Duplex Retimer, the MSH222 supporting for error-correction and a total of eight independent lanes, each supporting rates over 28 gigabits per second with options to support different line card and backplane reach requirements. We already have multiple customer engagement through this new product and we are optimistic about converting these into design wins over the next quarter or too. We do expect additional traction to these devices during the year with the potential for revenue contribution as we move closer to or into 2017. It is also particularly gratifying that we’ve begun to see new synergistic opportunities for the use of both our LineSpeed retimers and gearbox devices, on-board with band retention two and three IC, all sitting on the same line card. Standalone or in combination with another product family, I believe our product roadmap is producing a very cohesive catalog of leading edge devices from which we will benefit both in the near and in the longer term. Before I pass this call onto Jim, I want to speak to another important 2016 goal. Improving our financial performance, they’re reducing our cash burn. Jim will go into more detail, I’m sure, but I’m pleased to note that we gained the benefit from our restructuring and other cost down initiatives in the first quarter. We are now a leaner and cost efficient organization, and we expect to see significantly lower annual operating expenses as we go forward. Despite these reductions, we’ve ensured that we have the right resources on-board to both meet customer support requirements as they bring our products to markets been embedded in their product and support new design wins and product development activity. We are also benefiting from back-end manufactured improvement and lowering our cost and further increasing our gross margins. Reducing our cash burn, while simultaneously ramping revenue remains an ongoing first priority goal, we continue to pursue external collaborative programs and/or joint projects with multiple partners to find - to fund product development and to provide some cost relief, until our revenue ramp gains a little more altitude. In summary, 2016 will be a pivotal year for MoSys, as we strive to achieve our goals to increase revenue, expand our product portfolio and additional design wins, reduced costs and broaden our customer base. I expect our early Bandwidth Engine 2 design wins and increasing backlog to drive increasing revenue growth in the second half of 2016 and into 2017. Furthermore, our expanded design win pipeline and new products will serve as the engine driving continued revenue growth over the longer term. Although still early in the year, I encouraged by our progress to date and believe will remain our plan to achieve our goals, while working to gain additional momentum throughout the remainder of this year. This concludes my prepared remarks. I’m now going to turn the call over to Jim, for review of our financial results and following his remarks, we will close the call - or we will take some questions, then I’ll close the call with a few comments. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Jim?