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

Sherri Luther: Yes. Thank you, Tristan, for the question. So we’re really very pleased with our — another record quarter gross margin for us, 70.3%, 260 basis points improvement year-over-year. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we’re now in our fifth year of our gross margin expansion strategy, where we’ve driven 1,360 basis points improvement since we started this program in 2019. And really the drivers are multiple factors. New products have added value to our gross margin, pricing optimization, mix, product cost efficiencies, all of those items have been factors that have contributed to our expanding our gross margin. So we’ll continue to focus on gross margin, and we look forward to our Investor Day on May 15, where we’ll give you an updated financial model at that time.

Jim Anderson: Yes, and maybe I’ll jump in. I think Tristan also asked about pricing at the very end of the question, Tristan, just to address the pricing perspective. I think you’re asking kind of go-forward pricing. We believe our pricing is durable, as Sherri mentioned, part of that gross margin improvement initiative that we’ve been working on over the past now our fifth year is that included pricing optimization and just frankly, better pricing discipline within the company. And so we feel like we’ve built some strong muscles around pricing and we feel like our pricing is durable. And also, what I would add is we’ve added a tremendous amount of software content to our software portfolio. And we see increasing adoption from our customers of our higher-level software, our application solution stack, the adoption rate or attach rate’s now over 50%.

And software, when it’s adopted by our customers, that also helps us secure higher ASPs and helps drive generally higher — better solutions to our customer and better ASPs for us over the long term. And so that’s a net tailwind to our ASPs over time as well.

Tristan Gerra: Great. And then for my follow-up, you’ve mentioned the attach rate above one in data center. You mentioned just on this Q&A that you expect the attach rate will continue to increase. So if you could talk about the drivers, obviously, as you expect to continue to outpace data center units? What are going to be the driver for attach rate to go even beyond where they are today and/or the ASPs to go further? Is that going to be reliant on new products? Or do you feel that there is more functionality that you can address or that your existing products already addressing in data. Any color on that path for continued expansion of data center?

Jim Anderson: Yes, it’s a great question, Tristan. And let me talk about both parts, the attach rate and the ASP expansion, which combined to drive dollars of content per server. On attach rates, which are now, I would say, well above one-x, we continue to see more opportunities for across the server infrastructure for more lattice chips to be used within the server, whether it’s on the motherboard itself or the cards that are attached into the motherboard or just sort of multiple different places where we can see additional Lattice chips being adopted. And so we continue to see more opportunity there, number one. And then number two, and you kind of alluded to this, is as we bring more functionality, more capability through our new products, new devices through the new software that we’re developing, and even with Avant coming out as well, we see opportunities to just bring additional content and capability to servers, just like we’ve been doing over the past four to five years.

And so when you combine that opportunity to continue to bring more content, which brings higher ASPs with continued growth in attach rates, we continue to see this as a really good growth area for the company. And you should expect us to talk in a little bit more detail about this at our upcoming Investor Day. We’ll give some more kind of specific examples of where we see continued opportunity in the server and data center infrastructure segment.