MaxLinear - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Q1 revenue of $95.9M grew 4% q/q and 1% y/y, with GAAP gross margin expanding to 56.1% and non-GAAP gross margin steady at 59.1%; non-GAAP EPS was -$0.05, essentially in line with consensus, while revenue modestly beat Street expectations. Q2 guidance calls for $95–$115M revenue and all end-markets up sequentially.
• Management expects a return to non-GAAP profitability and positive free cash flow in Q2, citing stronger bookings and backlog, and traction in optical interconnect, PON, Wi-Fi and Ethernet.
• Optical DSP momentum continued: Keystone (800G/400G) qualifications broadened; Rushmore 1.6T (200G/lane) DSP was demonstrated at OFC; management reiterated 2025 optical revenue of ~$60–$70M with greater growth into 2026.
• Near-term catalysts: confirmation of Q2 non-GAAP profitability/positive FCF, broad-based sequential growth across segments, and sustained optical/PON design-win ramp; key watch item is tariff policy uncertainty potentially impacting customer demand (not direct chip tariffs).

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • “We exceeded the midpoint of our guidance with $95.9 million in revenue, non-GAAP gross margin of 59.1% and a meaningful reduction in operating expenses… we not only expect to be profitable on a non-GAAP basis in Q2, but also… generate positive free cash flow in Q2.”
  • Optical interconnect trajectory: additional Keystone demo activity and Rushmore 1.6T DSP live demonstration; reiterated 2025 optical DSP revenue of ~$60–$70M, aligning with expected 800G ramps in 2H25 and broader revenue in 2026.
  • Broadband recovery outperformed seasonal norms; bookings strengthened, and a second major Tier-1 North American PON gateway platform is set to begin ramping late 2025 (with more material impact in 2026).

• What Went Wrong

  • GAAP profitability remains negative: GAAP diluted LPS of -$0.58 (vs -$0.68 in Q4), with GAAP operating loss at 48% of revenue despite improved margins; operating cash outflow of $11.4M in Q1.
  • Industrial/multimarket softness persisted, tied to China end-demand; management expects improvement in Q2 but volatility remains a concern.
  • Tariff overhang creates customer planning uncertainty; while semis are not directly tariffed and CPE box manufacturing has largely shifted out of China, management is monitoring downstream demand risks and working with customers/ODMs.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings and welcome to the MaxLinear Q1 2025 earnings call. [Operator's Instructions]. It is now my pleasure to introduce Leslie Green of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Leslie Green (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss MaxLinear's first quarter 2025 financial results. Today's call is being hosted by Dr. Kishore Seendripu, CEO, and Steve Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions. Our comments today include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements relating to our guidance for the second quarter of 2025, including revenue, GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin, GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses, GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense, GAAP and non-GAAP income tax, and GAAP and non-GAAP diluted share count.

In addition, we will make forward-looking statements relating to trends, opportunities, execution of our business plan, and potential growth and uncertainties in various product and geographic markets, including without limitation, statements concerning the future financial and operating results, opportunities for revenue and market share across our target markets, new products, including the timing of production and launches of such products, demand for and adoption of certain technologies, and our total addressable market. These forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties, including risks outlined in our risk factors section of our recent SEC filings, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2025, which we filed today. Any forward-looking statements are made as of today, and MaxLinear has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. The Q1 2025 earnings release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at maxlinear.com.

In addition, we will report certain historical financial metrics, including but not limited to gross margin, operating margin, operating expense, and interest and other expense on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We encourage investors to review the detailed reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP presentations and the press release available on our website. We do not provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance for future periods because of the inherent uncertainty associated with our ability to project certain future changes, including stock-based compensation and its related tax effects, as well as potential impairments. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed today are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable GAAP financial measures. We are providing this information because management believes it is useful to investors as it reflects how management measures our business.

Lastly, this call is also being webcast, and a replay will be available on our website for two weeks. Now let me turn the call over to Dr. Kishore Seendripu, CEO of MaxLinear.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Thank you, Leslie, and good afternoon, everyone. Our Q1 results reflect the continued growth and recovery of our business. We exceeded the midpoint of our guidance with $95.9 million in revenue, non-GAAP gross margin of 59.1%, and a meaningful reduction in operating expenses. We not only expect to be profitable on a non-GAAP basis in Q2, but also, most importantly, to be able to generate positive free cash flow in Q2. In total, in Q1, we made strong progress towards our return to profitability and are solidly executing with new product wins in high-speed data center interconnects, PON, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet. We are also seeing meaningful improvement in our customer order rates and backlog, which gives us confidence that we can continue to deliver growth in 2025 and 2026.

Now, looking at our key markets in infrastructure, the increasing demand for high-speed data is driving significant growth and design activity around high-speed interconnects in data centers, cloud infrastructure, and next-generation telecom networks. We continue to make strong progress with product calls across multiple customers for our 5-nanometer Keystone PAM4 DSP product. At the Optical Fiber Conference, we demonstrated nearly a dozen Keystone-powered optical and active electrical cable modules for OSFP switches. We also highlighted a reverse gearbox application using Keystone from one of the world's leading module makers, as well as a half-retimed active electrical cable Y cable solution also using Keystone. Our products were featured in demos at the booths of several partners, which are in various forms of production or qualification stages. We were also pleased to showcase a live demo of our Rushmore 1.6 terabit 200 gigabit per lane PAM4 DSP.

Like Keystone, our Rushmore family of PAM4 TIAs and DSPs for 1.6 terabit interconnections offers superior power and performance advantages. This continues the basis of our competitive differentiation and design win success. We anticipate additional qualification and rollout for 800 gigabit and 1.6 terabit data center applications throughout 2025, with exciting revenue growth in 2026. In wireless infrastructure at the Mobile World Congress, we demonstrated a highly integrated Sierra radio system on chip as a complete Open RAN macro radio unit solution. We seamlessly interoperated with all major GaN power amplifier suppliers, utilizing MaxLinear's proprietary digital pre-distortion technology. Our wireless 5G access single chip radio SoCs and our millimeter wave and microwave backhaul transceivers and modems are essential for supporting increasing mobile usage and data rates, as well as new functionalities such as edge AI.

We believe we are positioned strongly for content growth and share gains this year as service provider capital expenses improve and as our continued design wins at Tier 1 customers begin to ramp later this year. Also, within our infrastructure revenues, our Panther family of hardware storage accelerator SoCs is strongly positioned within the data center enterprise storage applications and the edge of the network with multiple design wins with major customers and value-added resellers across key geographies. It enables optimized cost, power, performance, and efficiency of storage and compute service systems by offloading complex tasks that otherwise require long and costly CPU cycles to execute in software. It provides unique and best-in-class capabilities around data compression, integrity, and security with support for 200 gigabits per second throughput and the lowest latencies essential for AI applications.

Shifting to broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity in the near term, we feel increasingly confident in the ongoing recovery of the broadband and connectivity markets. Now, with several quarters of improvement behind us, we're excited to begin the ramp of our single chip integrated fiber PON and 10 gigabit processor gateway SoC plus tri-band Wi-Fi 7 single chip platform solution with the second major Tier 1 North American carrier later this year. This is both a major win and a significant validation of our technology and competitive positioning in the fiber PON market. We expect that it will drive meaningful growth for our fiber revenues in 2026 and give us a strong foothold to continue to expand our presence in PON. Overall, bookings have continued to strengthen, and we are seeing incremental growth in demand for our cable data DOCSIS products as well as our Wi-Fi and Ethernet solutions.

With the broad portfolio of newly refreshed products ramping into this market and a healthier demand environment, we expect continued growth in these categories throughout the balance of the year. In conclusion, we view Q2 and 2025 as a year of strong growth and return to profitability transition as we begin to drive growth in strategic areas of our product portfolio and enjoy the incremental tailwind of the ongoing recovery in our core markets. Investments made in high-value categories such as high-speed interconnect for the data center, multi-gigabit PON access, Wi-Fi connectivity, Ethernet, storage accelerators, and wireless infrastructure are resulting in strong product traction with Tier 1 customers and partners. We believe this positions us well to accelerate our growth as these markets continue to gain traction in 2026. With that, let me turn the call over to Steve Litchfield, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. Steve?

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Thank you, Kishore. Total revenue for the first quarter was $95.9 million, up from $92.2 million in the previous quarter. Infrastructure revenue for the first quarter was approximately $27 million. Broadband revenue was approximately $41 million. Connectivity revenue was $20 million, and our industrial multi-market revenue was $8 million. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter were approximately 56.1% and 59.1% of revenue. The delta between GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin in the first quarter was primarily driven by $2.6 million of acquisition-related intangible asset amortization. First quarter GAAP operating expenses were $99.9 million, and non-GAAP operating expenses were $58.4 million. The delta between GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses was primarily due to stock-based compensation and performance-based equity accruals of $28.9 million combined, restructuring cost of $7.9 million, and acquisition-related cost of $3.2 million.

GAAP and non-GAAP loss from operations for Q1 2025 was 48% and 2% of net revenue. GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense during the quarter was $2.9 million and $2.7 million respectively. In Q1, cash flow used in operating activities was approximately $11.4 million. We exited Q1 of 2025 ahead of plan with approximately $104 million in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash. With the overall improvement of our business, we expect that in Q2 we will have positive operating cash flow and thus begin to generate cash again. Our days sales outstanding was approximately 94 days in Q1. Our gross inventory was down versus the previous quarter by approximately $4.3 million as we continue to make improvements with inventory turns at 1.3. This concludes the discussion of our Q1 financial results.

Before providing our guidance for Q2, I'd like to comment on the tariff situation and the geopolitical dynamics around semiconductors. As you are all aware, the market has a tremendous amount of uncertainty with regards to the trade environment. We are working closely with customers to address the changing landscape and have taken the current environment into consideration with our guidance. It's important to acknowledge, though, that the guidelines are still evolving, so it's difficult to know exactly how the demand drivers will play out for the quarter and for the rest of the year. With that, let's turn to our guidance. For Q2 of 2025, we currently expect revenue in the second quarter of 2025 to be between $95 million and $115 million. Looking at Q2 by end market, we expect all end markets, infrastructure, broadband, connectivity, and Industrial Multi-Market to be up in the quarter.

We expect second quarter GAAP gross margin to be approximately 54.5%-57.5% and non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 57.5%-60.5% of revenue. We expect Q2 2025 GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $92 million-$98 million. We expect Q2 2025 non-GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $55 million-$61 million. We expect our Q2 GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense each to be in the range of $2 million-$3 million. We expect a $2.4 million tax expense on a GAAP basis and non-GAAP tax rate of 10.5%. We expect our Q2 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted share count to be approximately 87.0-87.5 million. In closing, another quarter of improvement in customer orders and continued new product traction gives us confidence that we will continue to see growth and recovery in 2025 and beyond.

We're excited that our innovation and our investment in strategic applications such as optical high-speed interconnects, wireless infrastructure, storage, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and fiber PON gateways are beginning to deliver new and transformative business opportunities. Our continued growth, coupled with our strong focus on operational efficiency, is positioning us for a sustainable return to profitability and cash generation this quarter. With that, I'd like to open up the call for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. [Operator's Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna International Group. Please proceed.

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. Thank you so much for the question. I guess just as we all care about tariffs right now, I'll ask on the supply chain, and I understand the uncertainty. If you could perhaps walk us through some of the risks that you see in your own, but also your customer's supply chain. For example, I believe a lot of broadband equipment is manufactured in China. How transferable would this be to other geographies? Just generally, if you could give us a sense of these risks, how these risks could be mitigated, and if there's anything that kind of keeps you guys up at night. Thanks.

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Yeah, Chris, thanks for the question. There is plenty keeping us up at night right now. I mean, just maybe to start with, look, we do not have a lot of real direct impact. I mean, semiconductors are not included here, so we are not seeing direct tariffs. Our supply chain actually is pretty good. We feel pretty good about that. Your second part of your question kind of alluded to the customers. I think where we are just watching closely is what does customer demand look like? How do the tariffs kind of get transferred to the consumer? Ultimately, does that slow demand? We are watching that. I guess in between all of that, watching the ODMs and OEMs and how they are navigating this environment. You mentioned that China is a bigger kind of box manufacturing broadband.

That's a whole lot less true today than it was five years ago. Five years ago, we saw some impacts here. Most of those customers have moved out of China. We actually see less of a risk around that. As you know, there are tariffs that are being proposed on all the countries. I think the one that everyone seems to be circling around is China having the biggest impact. That is the one that we are watching closely. It seems like a lot of the other ones hopefully will be reduced a little bit and have less of an impact, at least on our ecosystem anyway--

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you, Steve. [Crosstalk]

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

I think that covers most of your questions.

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah, no, that was -- [Crosstalk]

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

I would say that.

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

That was great. Yes. [Crosstalk]

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

I would say that all our internet. Hey, Chris, I would say that none of our broadband CPE customers make any boxes in China for our customers. I can say that not almost, it's all of them. We are safe from a China manufacturing perspective. We do not have any exposure there. More importantly, I think our bookings have been pretty strong. Even let's say, we look at it in two buckets. The craziness that may come later versus what was, let's say, two weeks ago. Our bookings have been very strong. We have been taking bookings even into Q3, Q4. We are seeing a nice recovery that has now been going on for several quarters on our broadband business.

I would put it in two categories in terms of what is the true demand versus what is the supply chain-driven yanking, whether it's in an accelerated demand versus maybe a delayed demand. We see both sides of it. From our perspective, with our lead times for manufacturing being anywhere between 60-20 weeks, any gyrations that come from the 90-day tariff pause are not going to have any effect on our ability to supply chips in an accelerated manner or a decelerated manner. We are well past that.

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you, guys. I also, just as you brought up bookings, Kishore, I was just wondering, it was great that you think everything's going to be up next quarter. If you look at bookings, if you look at that order book, if you take a guess, and maybe you can fill us in in those inventory situations for end market, could you force rank those segments for us into the next quarter by strength?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Okay. I think in general, our problem is very different from the ones who have been enjoying the demand in the data center for some time now. We are recovering from what was a 2022 peak consumption of a product, specifically broadband and telecom markets. That depletion is almost fully set in now, and that is where we are seeing where we think the channel inventories are lower than they should be. We have been seeing strong bookings from Q4 onwards, even in Q3 last year. We are actually now taking bookings for Q3, Q4. I believe that the channel inventory issues that may develop because of for some of the customers are not necessarily particular to the issues we faced in the previous two years. We are pretty much right now in a filling pattern rather than waiting to deplete pattern.

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Did you see any strength, one segment versus the other?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

We are seeing generally a broad-based strengthening of demand, except we are seeing some weakness in our industrial markets that has got China exposure from an end demand perspective. Otherwise, we are feeling pretty positive that we will continue to grow strongly for the rest of the year and beyond.

Christopher Rolland (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you so much for the update, guys. Appreciate it.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Yep. Thanks, Chris.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from the line of David Williams with The Benchmark Company. Please proceed.

David Williams (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the stabilization and the positive outlook here. My first question is maybe, Kishore, you'd pointed to the design win progress on the DSP side for Keystone, and that continued through the quarter. Can you help us try to understand the magnitude of maybe that progress and where you are in terms of the design wins and maybe that ramp as you think about the next maybe 6 to 12 months?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

David, thank you. We are feeling very positive finally. When you reach there, it's only then you can sort of exhale. We're very happy that we are expecting to break even in Q2 and turn cash flow positive as well. It's a major milestone given what's happened in the last few quarters. That's the good news. We think that the rest of the year, we will keep generating positive cash flow. Moving to the data center, the optical fiber conference, we displayed about 20 designs on display that are done in our booth. There are partners who are showing that they were all actually Keystone-based. We had four demonstrations of evaluation platforms for a Rushmore design. If you look at those 20 designs, that's one way to look at all those 20 designs that are in various stages of qualification.

I think Steve has already guided in the last earnings call that we would land somewhere between $50 million-$80 million. I think he specifically said $60 million-$70 million, which would be a doubling of last year's revenue. I would say, given how long it takes to qualify in this market, and because it's a pretty highly demanding market, it's a pretty complex product, even though you call it the OSFP. The fact that we can double our revenue is proof that the quality of our designs and the caliber of our customers is quite different from last year. Otherwise, you won't be able to double your revenue. We feel very good. That leads to my own sort of musings, what does next year look like?

Obviously, we hope that if the calls all go in a nice way, can be doubled from here in 2026. That will require some key calls to complete. They are all slated for the second half of this year. We expect all the revenue next year actually coming from Keystone for a while. Okay? I hope that's helpful.

David Williams (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Fantastic color. Thanks so much there. Maybe just secondly, on the North American, that second tier one, it sounds like you're expecting that kind of ramp at the back of the year and then more fully next year. Can you kind of talk, maybe size the magnitude of that and how we should think about that ramp going forward? Thanks.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

I think you're talking about broadband. PON tier one operator in North America? Yes. I mean, we're pretty excited. We were the first ones to be selected for the new category of high-end boxes against what you all know is a pretty vicious competition. It will be a nice anchor that adds to our other tier one operator in North America for the gateway design. This clearly is a bigger player. We're very excited about it. I think once these guys ramp, we'll be shipping a few quantities. They have this year towards the end of the year, for sure, of course.

Next year would be the ramp. Hopefully, we're the first ones to ramp before a second supplier comes online. We seem to have a good lead on that, so we should enjoy significant growth. If you think of our PON revenue today, I mean, the $50 million range, next year, can you double overall? Absolutely. That's the goal here.

David Williams (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks so much.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from the line of Jeremy Kwan with Stifel. Please proceed.

Jeremy Kwan (Associate VP of Equity Research)

Yes, good afternoon. Let me add my congratulations on the recovery here. I guess maybe asking the end market question just on a longer-term basis, it looks like you're seeing some nice recovery in broadband and connectivity. Infrastructure, it looks like it's going to be a nice growth driver. Can you rank order those for us maybe as we look out to calendar 2026 in terms of a growth contribution?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Let me, maybe Steve can answer those sort of quantitative questions a little bit better than I can, but I would just say that infrastructure is clearly being the focus of massive investment for us. It is strategically important because I look at infrastructure as a very, very core American market. If you really look at it, there are two markets that are the biggest ones. One is the enterprise infrastructure market, which is now primarily the cloud market. The other one is a consumer market, and we are not a consumer products company. For us, being in the infrastructure market is a strategic imperative, and it drives a lot of differentiation and gross margin improvement for the company. I would think that the infrastructure would be the most exciting growth on a new product cycle basis.

What you will see in broadband is some level of pretty rapid recovery. I'm not going to comment on tariffs here. I'll just leave that aside. If you just look at it in a secular term, there'll be a strong growth driven by recovery in the core market and a pretty decent team sort of growth from new product cycles. I think that's a pretty healthy product. You add to that what's happening in the new product like PON we talked about, I gave the size of it. There's a pretty cable also, we should start seeing some outside of PON in the cable DOCSIS data market. Networks are still being upgraded. There's a lot of demand for increasing their competitive position against PON.

I think for us, broadband actually is kind of exciting, though data center and infrastructure are kind of a strategic imperative. On wireless infrastructure, a lot of good things are happening. Actually, we have very strong growth in 2026 on the back of our Sierra product access market. We will start pivoting towards being maybe one of the top silicon providers as emerging silicon providers. Yeah, I would say infrastructure broadband would be the new product cycle growth. You have, we'll have some other new product cycle growth, but it won't be as exciting in the industrial markets because the market is up and down in some areas. Those two would be-- I would rank pretty high.

Jeremy Kwan (Associate VP of Equity Research)

Great. Thank you. I guess just maybe digging a little deeper into the storage accelerator market, it sounds like that's finally close to contribution. Can you give us an idea of maybe what are some of the key applications, any sense of how many customers you can talk about just quantity-wise? Is this more enterprise, or is it more data center? Any color you can provide would be very helpful.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

At the end of the day, even if it's enterprise, I just want to make sure that they're selling these boxes to, if it's a storage appliance server or a compute server boxes, they're all ending up in some form of AI edge data center or in the data center. Having said that, we have 20-odd proof of concepts going on. The revenue we talk about, somewhere between $10 million-$20 million in 2025, is driven by enterprise storage today and some royalty software license revenues as well because we also have a sort of a paired offering using our superior algorithms for better compression storage in the traditional systems. Then we have these compute servers that are being, actually they're being demonstrated. We had the Atlanta Supercomputer Conference where we demonstrated with QCT, which is a major compute server manufacturer.

There they use storage compression. The key point is why do they need it? It's not just about compression and security for reducing the amount of storage space. It's actually a very, very powerful enabling capability where we reduce the latency of compute by really having a very, very low-latency storage with very, very high-density compression. What that does is when you think about AI-type applications, whether it is inside the data center or outside the data center, it becomes very critical not to have bottlenecks in the, whether it's a training or inference systems. I think at this point, to be honest with you, our revenues are coming from enterprise, which is basically storage appliances and compute servers. However, we have a lot of strong traction after our reference platform announcement with AMD, a joint development platform.

We're getting a lot of traction in the other non-enterprise markets as well. I think if you just fast forward this year, $10 million-$20 million, can it double or triple next year? Absolutely. Because once you're qualified, it just takes off. I had told a year ago that in two to three years, we should see based on enterprise storage alone somewhere peaking out at maybe $75 million revenue. I said $50 million to 75 million. I think, yes, it's delayed a little bit, but nothing beyond what we had forecast. I think we should be able to hit that benchmark purely off enterprise storage.

Now, if we were to get one or two calls on the compute side, I think this could easily be a 2x on that in a five to seven-year window. Very, very nice differentiated product with nobody else having such an offering in the world. Okay?

Jeremy Kwan (Associate VP of Equity Research)

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. Please proceed.

Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Hey, guys. Wanted to come back just to a couple of clarifications on tariffs. One, you mentioned none of the CPE boxes manufactured in China, but my guess is there are probably a number of them manufactured elsewhere in Southeast Asia where there are reciprocal tariffs. I know those have been paused for 90 days, but to the extent that those aren't totally taken away, would you expect some greater tariff effect possibly in the second half of the year? The second clarification is you guys manufacture everything overseas. There are no reciprocal tariffs for any semiconductor chips you ship into China, whether it's consumed in China, whether it's re-exported. No tariff costs on your products to the extent that they flow through China?

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

That's correct, Quinn. With regard to the first part of your question, Yeah. All of the other Southeast Asia countries where a lot of these boxes are manufactured are at least currently planned to be subject to these tariffs. I think this is the part that there's plenty of uncertainty in trying to figure out how things move around, right, and what the ODMs and OEMs kind of decide to do on this front. We don't have 100% clarity. It's all pretty new right now. This is where I mentioned kind of working with the customers, trying to help them get those boxes kind of through the whole tariff malaise, if you will. That's what we're doing right now.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

If you really step back a little bit, the broadband CPEs have been sort of tired offerings for the last two, three years because of the excess inventory in the system. Now they're transitioning to new generation boxes, whether it's 10 gigabit PON and so on and so forth. My surmise is that these are needed to be competitive offerings, and that's where the applications are going on. I think while I cannot, I'm not a macroeconomist, I think that the demand is the demand and that the prices will be adjusted within the supply chains here. I don't think the demand goes away because I think broadband is a very inelastic market. What makes it boring and what makes it exciting depends on which viewpoint you take. I feel very comfortable that we will be able to continue to grow in broadband.

Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Got it. Maybe just given all of this uncertainty, can you give us a sense how you approached guidance in this? Is the $105 million midpoint, did you kind of say, "Hey, we're going to take our forecast, judge it down," and you came up with $105 million at the midpoint, or is $105 million kind of where you think things fall, and then you just broadened out the range given the uncertainty? Just any sort of sense how you might have accounted for this tariff uncertainty in the guidance? I do have one business question if I could squeeze in a third.

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Yeah, Quinn, I think I covered this in the prepared remarks. Yeah, we've done our best to anticipate the tariffs that we have in front of us, and that's what we based our guidance on. What was your other question?

Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)

The other question, just I think last quarter you talked about some variability in the optical DSP ramp dependent on the timing of hyperscaler 800-gig ramps in the second half of 2025. Wondering, as you sit here today, how you're feeling about timing of those 800-gig ramps. Are you feeling better that those hit in 2025? Is there still some uncertainty on when those 800-gig deployments at the hyperscalers start to kick in?

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

I think you sort of covered this in his question. We've had a guidance of $60 million to $70 million. I think we stand by that. We're comfortable with that. As you're well aware, I mean, most of those 800-gig ramps are in the second half of the year, so that's also consistent with the way we've talked about them. I think we're completely comfortable with that.

Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Good. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from the line of Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Ananda Baruah (Senior Equity Analyst)

Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Good afternoon.

Ananda Baruah (Senior Equity Analyst)

I really appreciate it. Good to talk to you guys. I guess, Kishore and Steve, this may be implied in all the comments you guys have already made about demand environment, but let me also just ask it this way to make sure I cover the bases here. It sounds like, Kishore, no macro, no signs of macro impact yet in your order book. Let me also ask, do you think you're seeing any pull-forward revenue? It does not sound like it, but let me ask that question as well. Thanks.

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Oh, I was wondering when that question was going to come of the pull-forward. It looks like COVID, huh?

Ananda Baruah (Senior Equity Analyst)

Here we are.

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

No, not really. [Crosstalk]. We are pretty early in our earnings call in that 90-day window pause announcement a few days ago. The reaction time will take a little longer. If ads and bookings spike up, let's say, this week or next week, some people have talked about it, and we talked to colleagues in the industry, we will take them with more than a grain of salt, let's put it that way, and we will try to be measured about it. I want to repeat again that our lead time for chips is about 16-20 weeks. There is nothing you can do in the 90 days that's going to change our ability to ship product. We will not be able to mobilize even if they were to spike orders on us. That's the reality.

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Ananda, I just maybe echo, I'll just echo the overall demand. I mean, yeah, the world's kind of been turned upside down in the last two weeks, but I really want to echo the last quarter or two or three quarters, for that matter, we've continued to see improvements. That's the recovery that we both talked about a little bit earlier in the prepared remarks. That backlog has continued to improve. The bookings have continued to improve for six quarters now. A lot of encouraging signs on the new products as well as existing products.

Ananda Baruah (Senior Equity Analyst)

That's super helpful. I guess just my quick follow-up on the demand side is, Kishore, your comments about data center, it sounds like this all applies to data center as well. The data centers are, I'm paraphrasing here, you say full speed ahead, and maybe I'm making that up, but I thought there was some comment about data center energy spend. AWS and Google have come out in the last couple of weeks and reaffirmed spending plans. Vertiv this morning was super bullish, not just for hyperscaler, but for neoclouds and colos. I just want to just sort of clarify that as well. Sounds like you're seeing no change in activity in the data center space either. Is that accurate?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

For us, it's still about digging. Knitting the products together, so to speak. Qualifying and that sort of work. We don't have the levels of incumbency where the dialogue is very different. I think at this point, no change for us how we have to go about our actions. I really cannot comment on what large incumbent exposures mean to this situation.

Ananda Baruah (Senior Equity Analyst)

I got it. That's helpful. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Steve Litchfield (CFO and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer)

Yep. Thanks, Ananda.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from the line of Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks, guys, for taking my questions. I'll ask one on the wireless infrastructure side. Kishore, I think you've mentioned this briefly here, but I'd love to get a sense of your confidence of the ramp-up here later this year. Maybe you can talk to the extent to which you see the revenue growth coming more from the content side or also from the unit side as well?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Absolutely. If you look at it, up until now, our revenues were primarily consisted of two parts to our wireless infrastructure. One is millimeter wave, microwave backhaul transceivers and modems. Last year and this year, sort of suddenly, not last year, this year, the revenues came really, really down because the telcos stopped spending. However, we are now seeing bookings picking up very nicely, strengthening, and we hope to double from what we did last year on that product line alone. In addition, the access, we have a Sierra product where the content in the platform is going to increase quite a bit. It's a single chip macro radio unit. There is very good customer design with traction. In Mobile World Congress, we had so much sort of presence and traction in terms of all the things we were showcasing.

We expect there to be a strong driver next year as it starts picking up this year. That's a brand new platform where it's a single, we own the platform just like in the microwave and millimeter backhauls. We expect revenues to access to continue to grow for the next five to six years. On the backhaul side, there's a lot of strong demand now for E-Band. That means that these AI edge applications are driving more and more data requirements. We're seeing demand for millimeter wave products, which did not exist in the previous revenues. We are actually seeing strong growth in the millimeter wave transceivers and backhaul modems. Those two would be the big drivers of growth. On top of that, we expect a recovery of the normal core business as well. That would be the layering of it.

You will see a strong revenue growth coming from just recovery. Then product cycle secular growth over the next few years by content growth, both millimeter wave, microwave modems, and transceivers, and also the brand new category of single chip macro platform Sierra type product for the base stations.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Kishore, if I could just confirm one of your comments here. I think you said doubling from last year alone. I do not know if that was a comment across the whole wireless exposure or something specific. Can you clarify that, please?

Kishore Seendripu (CEO)

Yes. It's across the whole wireless exposure.

Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Got it. Perfect. My follow-on question is related to optical DSP here. I guess I wanted to get a sense of when and how do you expect to get and look for higher allocations of share with your Keystone platform, and/or to what degree do you see that success there happening and also being applied to Rushmore?