Brian C. Faith
Thank you, Alison. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining our first quarter 2024 conference call. Q1 revenue increased more than 45% year-over-year. This growth was driven by a nearly 60% increase in new product revenue, which was mostly from eFPGA IP contracts. With continued strong bookings, a record $179 million funnel and some very significant eFPGA contract proposals pending, we remain confident that we'll deliver greater than 30% year-over-year revenue growth in 2024. Let's take a few minutes now to update the status for some of our major contracts and accomplishments: First, our Strategic Radiation Hardened FPGA government contract that has a total potential of $72 million. Last August, we announced the second tranche which added Honeywell Aerospace as a foundry partner, and increased the funding rate from Tranche 1 levels to bring the Honeywell based development up to speed quickly. Tranche 2 also funded our continued activity with SkyWater Technologies. We are anticipating Tranche 3 will be awarded later in Q2, and as we stated in our last conference call, we are modeling the funding rate for Tranche 3 will likely decrease from Tranche 2 and be more similar to Tranche 1. Due to this, and the strategic shift in how we are now dividing revenue between engineering services and IP license, while we are projecting Q2 revenue will be up significantly year-over-year, we are currently forecasting a sequential decrease from Q1. We believe Q2 will mark the low point for the year. Since it is important, I'll take a moment to review how the change in revenue split impacts when we recognize IP contract revenue on our income statement. At the start of this year, we shifted the majority of the IP contract dollar values from engineering services, which are recognized over the course of the contract, to IP license, which is recognized at the completion of our deliverables. This shift better aligns revenue with our deliverables and improves our ability to effectively negotiate and win future contracts. While this change will push quite a bit of revenue recognition into the second half of 2024, it has absolutely no impact on our cash flow. We continue to believe we will be cash flow positive and solidly profitable for full year 2024. Beyond building on the success of our large government contract, we are very well positioned to significantly expand our IP business across many new customers and market sectors, as well as the number of fabrication nodes supported by our IP in 2024. During our last conference call, I announced that we booked the first of 2 IP contracts that will be fabricated using the 12-nanometer processes and that the second contract was pending. We announced finalizing the second contract in a March press release. Both of these contracts will contribute to cash flow during the first half of 2024, but revenue will not be recognized on our income statements until completion of our deliverables in the second half of this year. The first contract is with a Defense Industrial Base customer and will be fabricated on GlobalFoundries 12-nanometer process known as 12LP. I cannot go into any details beyond the fact this contract is not related to the large ongoing Radiation Hardened FPGA contract I just discussed. The second contract is with a large international company that I'm sure you would recognize. This design is for a new ultra-low-power SoC that is targeting a variety of commercial and industrial IoT applications. This design will be fabricated by TSMC on its 12-nanometer process. Within the SoC, our eFPGA technology is used for AI acceleration, which is a necessary function in most AI applications. We believe this will prove to be a rapidly growing application that is often better served by eFPGA technology than a processor running the acceleration algorithms in software. In short, an eFPGA IP can be reprogrammed to adapt to changes in acceleration algorithms and perform acceleration more quickly and using much less power than a processor based solution. In November 2022, I shared that we taped out a new device for a customer that incorporates our eFPGA IP. Due to strict confidentiality requirements, I can't share more details on the specific design win beyond a brief update. In line with what I covered during our last conference call, the customer is continuing to work through certain aspects of the design. This work is progressing, and we anticipate resuming our efforts during the second half of 2024. This customer could represent tens of millions of dollars in potential device revenue starting in a couple of years. Last September, we announced a leading technology company chose our eFPGA IP for a design that will be fabricated using GlobalFoundries 22FDX platform. Again, due to strict confidentiality requirements, I cannot go into more detail on the design, but I can share that we have delivered our IP to the customer and expect tape-out to initiate this quarter. Last November, we announced a global semiconductor leader chose our eFPGA IP for a design that will be fabricated on UMCs 22-nanometer platform. We have completed the delivery of our IP and expect tape-out to initiate this quarter. In total, we are on contract to deliver our IP on 5 different foundry/process technology combinations; including 2 that will be fabricated using 12-nanometer technology. This is up 3x from a year ago with minimal growth in the associated R&D costs. This demonstrates the market demand for eFPGA IP is accelerating and that the automation from our proprietary Australis IP Generator enables us to address this demand in a scalable way. We have several Chiplet opportunities in our funnel including deals with our partner, YorChip. As a matter of fact, we recently submitted 2 substantial proposals this year with a combined value of over $40 million; one in conjunction with YorChip. As I mentioned in our last conference call, our lead smartphone customer worked through its excess inventory of EOS S3 that limited our shipments during 2023, and we have resumed shipping to support production. We hosted a meeting with this customer at our San Jose headquarters earlier in Q2. Based on the customer's outlook, we expect volume will increase in 2024 as our EOS S3 solution was selected for new designs that will ship well into 2025. Consistent with the outlook we shared last quarter, we are forecasting a modest increase in display bridge shipments this year and expect mature product revenue will be similar to what it was in 2023. A couple weeks ago we announced the release of Aurora 2.6, our comprehensive eFPGA development tool suite. This release of Aurora includes a number of significant improvements that will expand our market opportunities and help us win new designs. In Aurora 2.6, we expanded operating system support to include multiple versions of Linux including Centos, RedHat and Ubuntu, and included support for Windows 10 and 11. Furthermore, through the incorporation of new architectural improvements, Aurora 2.6 can also deliver up to a 15% improvement in speed. In some eFPGA designs, critical path timing can be even more important than raw speed. To address this need, Aurora 2.6 incorporates Interactive Path Analysis and a new Graphical User Interface. For our customers, this means easier use, better performance, shorter development cycles and lower development costs. With our planned investments in R&D, we have a cadence of Australis and Aurora releases scheduled throughout this year that will provide further improvements to flow automation, increase IP core speed by up to 50% and reduced die size for our eFPGA hard IP implementations. Turning to SensiML, I'm very excited about the progress made during the last 3 months. In short, there has been a notable shift in strategy that has accelerated near-term revenue and we believe will substantially accelerate end user adoption. The first step was to sign a 6-figure contract with a major MCU company, which puts SensiML on track to deliver the material 2024 revenue growth I forecasted last quarter. SensiML is discussing a similar agreement with other MCU companies. The second step will be revealed in more detail tomorrow morning. Leveraging the 4-years of experience and success monetizing an Open-Source business model at QuickLogic, SensiML will announce its own Open-Source strategy in a press release issued before the market opens. The short story here is Open-Source provides customers the transparency and security they need to incorporate high-value IP in their designs, and in many cases also adopt proprietary processes and professional services. You have seen how this strategy has enabled QuickLogic to more fully leverage and monetize its proprietary IP, and expand its reach into a variety of end markets. I believe we will see the same from SensiML, and with the markets' ravenous appetite to adopt AI and ML, we anticipate a much faster ramp and a much broader market reach for SensiML. With that, let me now turn the call over to Elias for a review of the financial results, and I will rejoin for our closing remarks. Elias, please go ahead.