Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:LSCC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And so we’re pretty excited about the continued product expansion. And I think the last part of your question was around disti and channel inventory. When I look at our distribution channel inventory at the end of Q1 relatively — it was relatively unchanged from the end of last year, Q4. And our disti and channel inventory is still low relative to what we would consider normal levels of inventory. So when you look at the channel inventory and say, well, that’s what’s pretty healthy and over time, we’ll need to replenish that a bit and so we feel well positioned for long-term growth for the company. We’re certainly not immune to any of the macroeconomic challenges or any demand fluctuations in our end markets, but we feel really well positioned over the long term.

Matt Ramsay: Thanks so much for that and all the detail there. As my follow-up, you mentioned in some of your commentary, to Sherri, the growth in the auto and industrial segment being really, really strong, but comps and computing, it’s no secret that there’s been some temporary server build softness and also some softness in the PC market that seems to be bottoming and maybe starting to turn. So if you could maybe talk us through the next couple of quarters in that particular segment, maybe lead times for your devices relative to in server ship or when PC builds start to turn around, if you could just kind of walk us through how should we think about the sort of reacceleration of that segment if those end markets do turn.

Jim Anderson: Yes. Thanks, Matt. Yes, we’ve certainly seen just, along with everybody else in the industry, we’ve certainly seen some end market unit softness in most servers and PCs. For us, servers is a bigger factor. Our position on revenue in servers is much larger than what we have in PCs at this point, although we see PCs as a continued long-term large TAM opportunity for the company. But in the servers space, both hyperscale and enterprise servers, that’s been a great growth area for us for at least the last three to four years. Actually, comms and compute has grown double digits for us now four — as of the end of last year, four years in a row, servers being one of the main drivers of that. But for us, most of that revenue growth in servers has actually been driven by content expansion.

That’s either higher attach rates, higher ASPs. That’s been a much bigger factor for us than the underlying server unit growth in terms of the server TAM. And we expect that to continue to be the bigger driver for us over the long term, the continued expansion of dollars and content for Lattice. We continue to see great areas of opportunity to grow that, and we expect that to be the bigger factor in our continued growth. That said, to the extent that there starts to be a pickup in end market server demand, we would expect to benefit from that. Generally, we would benefit from that maybe a quarter or so ahead of when the actual servers start to ship, just given the systems getting built in our system or our chips getting ordered ahead of time.

So we would expect to see a pickup about a quarter ahead of when and server deployments yet. But again, I’d stress that the majority of our growth in that segment is really more driven around, again, that dollars of content per server.

Matt Ramsay: All right. Thank you very much. Congrats again. I’ll jump back in the queue.

Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Tristan Gerra from Baird. Your line is now live.

Tristan Gerra: Great gross margin showing in terms of results and guidance. Could you talk about the driver and also how sustainable that is, if you could talk about the key drivers and your expectation for pricing for the rest of the year?