Russell C. Ellwanger
Analyst · Chardan Capital Markets
Thank you, Noit. Welcome to all for our first quarter 2013 results conference call. During today's call, I'll review our business performance in the first quarter and relate to how that will impact the rest of the year and beyond. Oren will then provide detailed financial summary for our first quarter financial results. Our Q1 revenues were in line with our expectations in the second quartile of our guidance at $113 million. The quarter did have several noteworthy achievements. At the last call, we spoke of the 3 megatrends in our industry, green everything, wireless everything and smart everything. Our progress within these megatrends and our expressed target to be a foundry leader in the analog-predominant portion of these trends is strong. The first quarter of 2013 had about 100 design wins and set a record for the amount of mask-sets entering into the factory for each Nishiwaki, Newport Beach and Migdal Haemek. The photomask release to the factory is the last formal step in the design development cycle in order to start product manufacturing. From the time of mask tape into the factory to volume manufacturing is typically 1 year, with a net volume lifetime of 2.5 to 3 years. The number of masks entering into Newport Beach was up in Q1 year-over-year by about 60%, in Migdal Haemek at about 40%, for a total of about 4,000 masks entering into the factory. Nishiwaki also had a 60% year-over-year increase but from a much lower base. We should consider, however, that the reason we bought Nishiwaki was to meet our customer demand forecasts. The volume ramp of a portion of these tape-outs will be realized by our operational cross qualification and offloading strategies mainly into Nishiwaki. To restate, we did not buy Nishiwaki specific to the Micron business. We bought it due to the need for capacity and the opportunity to buy back capacity at a low cost with an excellent human resource core technical capability. Of course, it was wonderful to enter into a formal relationship with Micron, which opens the door to multiple other present business opportunities. But the specific Micron contract in Nishiwaki served one purpose, create cash flow during the period of qualifying our flows and customers in the Nishiwaki fab. We believe it has served us well. In reference to our analog objectives and leadership within the aforementioned 3 mega trends, this is the strongest the company has ever been. We guided Q2 mid-range up 13% and foresee continued significant quarter-over-quarter growth throughout the year. I'll speak to a few key activities in each of our business unit areas. Within the scope of smart everything, I mentioned a Tier 1 customer project for gesture control Near IR sensor. Not only is this project, which has a very high volume customer forecast, progressing well, but the platform is serving as a flagship capability, attracting other top-tier customers. In Q2, we will be releasing a new design kit for LCOS devices, which stands for Liquid Crystal on Silicon, for projectors. This technology is becoming popular as it provides very high brightness and contrast, allowing projection in a sun-lit room with no need for shading. We have a Japanese customer currently evaluating a prototype, and we are seeing numerous requests from other potential customers in Europe, Korea and the U.S. Our focus for 2013 for image sensors remains on high-end photography, x-ray and machine vision sensors. In each area, we are in the process of releasing the next-generation pixels and process capabilities, having partnered with our lead customers to enable next-generation product differentiation. This includes mobile shutter pixel from machine vision at Near IR automotive applications, very low noise pixels for high-end still and video cameras, and special high-dynamic range pixels with x-ray noise rejection for medical and dental x-ray applications. In our Power Management business unit, we continue to progress in both 0.18 micron BCD, as well as the 700 volt platforms. In particular, we see a wrap in LED lighting for 700 volt platforms, but this wrap is happening at a slower pace than our initial expectations. In 0.18 micron BCD, we successfully transferred the technology from our Israeli factory to our Japanese plant and taped out initial products directly to Japan for a major Japanese automotive customer. This technology will be dual source between the fabs, providing flexibility and additional capacity to satisfy growing demand. During the quarter, we also saw strong adoption with several tape-ins of a customized version of a 0.18 micron BCD flow specific for AMOLED display drivers and other power management ICs, which have integrated drivers. In this instance, we developed an innovative, fully isolated silicon platform, which eliminates the need for SOI starting material, the solution used by our competition. This innovation offers our customers 2 large benefits. Firstly, the design implementation requires only an incremental addition to a modular process design kit with which they are familiar and for which they can continue to use our own developed IPs. And secondly, a less expensive manufacturing cost, which cost benefit can be shared with our customer. We recently announced an expansion of collaboration with ON Semiconductor to result new products around semi, manufacture and TowerJazz BCD platform. The initial product announced was a programmable PMIC with integrated display driver. In our 700 volt product line, we continue to see a steady albeit slower than planned ramp in LED lighting, while we are prototyping initial designs in a high side version of the process intended for driver ICs, for IGBT and for MOSFETs. Also in 700 volt this quarter, we released design kits for a new device that reduces on-resistance, cutting the size of the 700 volt driver by more than 30%. We expect the new device to result in increased design wins, greater enablement to our customers throughout the rest of this year, which will impact production in early 2014. In short, we have and continue to make strong progress in Power Management. 25% of this quarter's design wins were in Power Management. This is the first-order capacity drive that will be filling the Nishiwaki facility. In our RF and high-precision analog business unit, we continue to achieve significant customer engagements and market share gain in the fast-growing Front-End Module market. We are pleased to say that in Q1, we were recognized by a leader in this area, Skyworks Solutions, who selected as both as Foundry of The Year and as well for an Iron Man Quality Award. Also during the first quarter of 2013, we began volume production of our latest industry-leading SOI process level. TowerJazz's latest RF SOI technology offers the industry-best figure of merit for antenna switch and antenna tuning applications. This technology is quickly replacing gallium arsenide and has already been adopted by multiple customers worldwide, with over 50 separate designs taped in and with initial designs wrapping to production. We also continue to make strong progress in our power amplifier offering, delivering prototypes of our most advanced silicon germanium power amplifier technology, which includes a thick copper back-end and the latest technology of through-silicon via with our implementation differentiating by allowing a thinning to 0.18 micron and post thinning processing without the need for a carrier wafer, which, in turn, enables reduced cost, greater flow efficiency and reduced wafer breakage. Without disclosing any specifics, it should be no surprise that the prevalent end-users of FEM technologies are Samsung and Apple. Such users have vigorous qualification cycles and certain windows for platform entry. Hence, for this specific application, the level of our customer activity is a good litmus test of our growth within the Front-End Module applications. The question is not if it will grow nor if it will grow big, but simply just a short-term question of exactly when. Within our high-performance silicon germanium product line, in late March we announced a significant partnership with Avago. This will enable us to manufacture leading-edge optical transceivers and components for Avago's fiber optics products division using our advanced 200 gigahertz and 280 gigahertz silicon germanium technologies, the latter being the fastest commercially available silicon germanium platform anywhere. In our CMOS business unit, we are seeing strong traction. We currently have multiple tape-outs in our manufacturing site in Nishiwaki, Japan, which already supports our 0.18 platform. We will continue to focus on transferring more of our technologies to Nishiwaki. During the quarter, we worked closely with a leading manufacturer of LCD drivers on providing a high-voltage CMOS solution for several high-volume products. We also saw increased demand for solutions such as our 16 kilobit Y-Flash high ESD rating, low-power IP libraries and more. Looking forward, we aim to continue enhancing our 0.18 platform for AMOLED applications, which require a low-voltage and high-rate ESD support. Our transfer optimization and process services business unit continues to perform with transfers and/or on-site co-developments in all of our factories. The press release with [indecipherable] activities in Japan are progressing well with multiple technologies. Additionally, in this quarter, we had several substantial new wins to both Japan and Migdal Haemek with binding commitments from our customers. We have spoken in the past about our involvement in the consortium, bidding for a government tender to own, build and operate an advanced-technology node, 300-millimeter factory in India. The government has indicated the decision is shortly forthcoming. Mr. Kapil Sibal, Indian Cabinet Minister of IT and Communications whose department is responsible for this project, will be in Israel next week. I have a scheduled meeting with him. We cannot predict nor commit to the outcome of their decision, but we believe to be in good position to win it. To summarize, we are in a better position than ever before with regards to customer acceptance, platform qualification and exciting new opportunities. Operational execution is in line and poised for the tasks at hand with a combined efficiency demonstrating a site-wide composite annual $60 million decrease in cost. Thank you. Oren?