QuickLogic - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to QuickLogic Corporation's fourth quarter fiscal 2024 earnings results conference call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Alison Ziegler of Darrow Associates. Ms. Ziegler, please go ahead.

Alison Ziegler (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator, and thanks to all of you for joining us. Our speakers today are Brian Faith, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Elias Nader, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

As a reminder, some of the comments QuickLogic makes today are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to stated expectations relating to revenue from new and mature products, including the expected timing of such revenue, statements regarding our future profitability and cash flows, statements regarding the timing milestones and payments related to QuickLogic's government contracts, statements pertaining to QuickLogic's future performance, design activity and its ability to convert new design opportunities into production shipments, timing and market acceptance of its customers' products, schedule changes in production start dates that could impact the timing of shipments, the company's future evaluation systems, broadening the number of our ecosystem partners, and expected results and financial expectations for revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, profitability, and cash. Actual results or trends may differ materially from those discussed today, including as a result of the company's audit, which is still underway.

For more detailed discussions of the risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could result in those differences, please refer to the risk factors discussed in QuickLogic's most recently filed periodic reports with the SEC. QuickLogic assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of the respective dates of any new information or future events. In today's call, we will be reporting non-GAAP financial measures. You may refer to the earnings release we issued today for a detailed reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP results and other financial statements. We have also posted an updated financial table on our IR web page that provides current and historical non-GAAP data. Please note QuickLogic uses its website, the company blog, corporate Twitter account, Facebook page, and LinkedIn page as channels of distribution of information about its business.

Such information may be deemed material information, and QuickLogic may use these channels to comply with its disclosure obligations under Reg FD. A copy of the prepared marks made on today's call will be posted on QuickLogic's IR web page shortly after the conclusion of today's earnings call. I'd now like to turn the call over to Brian. Go ahead, Brian.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Thank you, Alison. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining our fourth quarter 2024 conference call. Due to external delays that pushed out certain contract awards, we reported Q4 2024 revenue slightly below the midpoint of our guidance, and we will forecast lower Q1 2025 revenue than we previously anticipated. The good news is the contract log jam that had delayed some key awards by a little over a quarter has now loosened. With two new eFPGA hard IP contracts now in the books and several more expected in the very near term, we anticipate a significant rebound in revenue and profitability beginning in Q2 and solid revenue growth, non-GAAP profitability, and positive cash flow for full year 2025.

Last week, we finalized a $1.1 million eFPGA hard IP contract with a new Defense Industrial Base, or DIB, customer that will use the 12LP fabrication process at GlobalFoundries, or GF. Due to the fact we already have eFPGA hard IP established for that process, cash flow will begin in Q1 2025, and revenue recognition will be in Q2 2025. Last week, we were also awarded the first phase of what we expect will be a eFPGA hard IP contract with another new DIB customer. This application, which enables low-power processing of changing algorithms, is perfectly suited for our eFPGA solution. We expect to be awarded the balance of this contract in the second half of 2025. We anticipate design services and IP revenue recognition could begin in Q3 and carry into 2026. Following that, we expect Storefront revenue could begin as early as 2027.

While some of our existing contracts have good Storefront potential that may materialize earlier, this is the first of what we believe will be several direct-to-Storefront contracts during the next couple of years. Earlier this month, we eFPGA hard IP design with another new customer. In addition to using a fabrication process for which we have already eFPGA hard IP, this design will also use an off-the-shelf hard IP core for a data converter in a wireless application that we previously developed using our proprietary Australis IP generation tool. The ability to benefit from the work we've completed is a big deal. Having developed IP for fabrication processes and hard IP core designs lowers customer risks, shortens our development and revenue recognition cycles, and provides us with favorable financial leverage in the form of improved margins.

We anticipate these benefits will start to become meaningful this year. In addition to these recent wins, we announced the award of the fourth tranche of the Strategic Radiation-Hardened FPGA government contract valued at approximately $6.6 million on December 23rd. This brings the total of our awards through four tranches to roughly $34 million. The total potential for this contract, including future options, is currently $72 million. We are seeking permission to share more details on the expanded scope of the program and test chip timeline. Turning to Intel 18A, we expect to be awarded the first eFPGA hard IP contracts within weeks and the second one very shortly thereafter. The combined value of these contracts is anticipated to be mid-seven figures. If the contracts are both awarded in the timeframes outlined by our customer, we expect to recognize all of the revenue in Q2 2025.

Due to the NDAs and the formal process for press release approval, there may be delays in the announcements of these contracts. Please keep in mind, as it stands today, QuickLogic is the only company eFPGA hard IP that is optimized for Intel 18A. We believe the significant investments we made during 2024 ahead of contract awards to realize this unique position will provide us with solid returns on that investment going forward. Turning to the competitive landscape, last November, Analog Devices announced the acquisition of our most capable competitor, Flex Logix. This is a clear testament that large semiconductor companies are embracing the value of incorporating eFPGA into their standard products. Following this acquisition, we announced the appointment of Flex Logix's former VP of Sales, Andy Jaros, as the new QuickLogic VP of IP Sales.

Since Flex Logix' eFPGA IP will no longer be available for licensing, there is a notable void in the market that we can fill. This is particularly true for customers that now need to secure a new long-term partner. Andy is working closely with the former Flex Logix customers that have multi-year eFPGA roadmaps to introduce the benefits of moving to QuickLogic. Now, let me take a moment to update our progress on existing contracts that are scheduled to contribute to eFPGA hard IP revenue. A number of these contracts have achieved significant milestones during the last several months. These include tape-out and, in several cases, test chips that have been completed and are in validation. This is important because, in some cases, test chip validation will lead to an IP production license and, in a few cases, new designs for our eFPGA hard IP.

These are also good illustrations that a long tail of revenue is commonly attached eFPGA hard IP contracts, and following that, a stream of royalties or Storefront revenue that can extend for years and, in some cases, more than a decade. During the first quarter of 2024, we announced two contracts that target 12nm processes. The first contract is with a Defense Industrial Base customer and includes two cores that will be fabricated on the GF 12LP process. We completed our initial deliverables for the first core during Q3 and the second core during Q4. With our IP deliverables complete, we anticipate nominal revenue recognition during Q1 and Q2 2025 in support of customer test chip development. We will eFPGA hard IP we developed for this contract to accelerate revenue recognition for the new 12LP contract I mentioned earlier.

The second contract is with a large, well-known international company. This design is for a new ultra-low-power SoC based on TSMC's 12nm process that is targeting a variety of commercial and industrial IoT AI applications. We completed our deliverables on this contract and recognized the associated revenue during Q3. Their test chip has been manufactured and is currently being evaluated by the customer. We expect the evaluation to be completed in early Q2, at which point the customer will make a decision regarding a second design. In November 2022, I shared that we taped out a new device for a customer that incorporates our eFPGA hard IP.

While we are in a holding pattern due to a delay with one of the customer's subcontractors, we continue to believe we will resume work during the second half of 2025 and that this design has very substantial Storefront potential starting in a couple of years. Since our last conference call, we have engaged with this customer on multiple new ASIC and chiplet design opportunities that eFPGA hard IP. These designs target other foundries and fabrication nodes for which we have eFPGA hard IP. This means we will be able to recognize revenue fairly quickly if we are successful in winning these engagements. In September 2023, we announced the leading technology company eFPGA hard IP for a design that will be fabricated using GF's 22FDX platform. The customer has completed its design and tape-out, and test chips are currently in fabrication.

If all goes as planned, we anticipate revenue recognition of a production license during the second half of 2025. In November 2023, we announced a global semiconductor leader eFPGA hard IP for a design that will be fabricated on UMC's 22nm process. The customer now has a test chip back from fabrication, and their evaluations are going very well. We anticipate continued involvement in their marketing efforts during the first half of 2025 and expect the design will generate production IP revenues for QuickLogic this year and royalty revenue beyond. A quick update on chiplets. We attended the annual Chiplet Summit in January with YorChip. There was a definite uptick in interest this year.

I think YorChip's CEO, Kash Johal, is right in his forecast that 2026 will be the year of the chiplet, which should coincide well with YorChip's introduction schedules for merchant chiplet solutions. This also dovetails well with the elevated interest we are seeing in AI inferencing at the edge. As a matter of fact, one of eFPGA hard IP customers that I previously mentioned is already leveraging our technology for an edge AI inferencing application. While the market for merchant chiplet solutions develops, we are continuing to work with various companies that are targeting internal ASIC chiplet solutions eFPGA hard IP. We already have existing contracts that may evolve to include ASIC chiplet solutions. In line with our forecasts, we released Aurora 2.9 in Q4. Aurora 2.9 includes some very significant enhancements that you can read about on our website.

Following this, we released Aurora Pro 2.9, which integrates Synopsys's Synplify FPGA synthesis software. The integration of Synplify was driven by large strategic customers who worked closely with us during beta testing. This integration has already helped us win one of the new contracts I mentioned earlier, and we believe many more will follow. We are on pace to include further updates for Aurora with the release of version 3.0 later this quarter. The new distributors that we've discussed in some detail during our last two conference calls are executing very well. In total, they have more than doubled the value of QuickLogic design opportunities they are addressing. While the bulk of this value is eFPGA hard IP designs, they are also advancing the new EOS S3 and discrete FPGA opportunities I mentioned last quarter.

In line with the forecast I shared last quarter, shipments of EOS S3 increased sequentially in Q4 2024, and we are forecasting a modest sequential increase in Q1 2025. While our primary smartphone customer is scheduled to continue using EOS S3 and new designs that extend to 2026, the demand for older designs will likely decrease in 2025. Turning now to SensiML. Last month, we announced that our board of directors is actively exploring options for SensiML, and there were preliminary discussions regarding the possible sale of the company or its assets. Due diligence is ongoing, so I cannot comment other than we expect a conclusion before our next earnings call and that our full-year outlook for solid growth and profitability does not include any contributions from 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.

Elias Nader (SVP and CFO)

Thank you, Brian, and good afternoon, everyone. Total fourth quarter revenue was $5.7 million within our guidance range. Total revenue was down 24% from Q4 2023, but up 34% compared to Q3 2024. New product revenue in Q4 was $4.7 million, down 32% from Q4 2023 and up 32% compared to Q3 2024. Mature product revenue was $1 million, up from $0.7 million in both Q4 2023 and Q3 2024. The decreases in total revenue and new product revenue from the same period a year ago were mostly due to the timing of certain large eFPGA IP contracts. Non-GAAP gross margin in Q4 was 62%, in line with our outlook range. This compared with non-GAAP gross margin of 78.3% in Q4 2023 and 60% in Q3. Non-GAAP operating expenses in Q4 were approximately $2.9 million, just below the low end of our outlook range.

This compares with non-GAAP operating expenses of $3.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 and $3.3 million in the third quarter of 2024. Non-GAAP net income was $0.6 million or $0.04 per diluted share. This compares to non-GAAP net income of $2.6 million or $0.18 per diluted share in Q4 2023 and a non-GAAP net loss of $0.9 million or $0.06 per share in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. The difference between our GAAP and non-GAAP results is related to non-cash stock-based compensation expenses. Stock-based compensation for Q4 was $0.9 million. For the fourth quarter, two customers accounted for 10% or more of our revenue. At the close of Q4, total cash was $21.9 million inclusive of an $18 million credit facility. This compared with $22.4 million inclusive of a $20 million credit facility at the close of Q3.

The timing of payments for accounts receivable and contract assets, which resulted in a $2.1 million increase for the combined accounts, impacted our cash usage during Q4. Cash usage during Q4 was also impacted by continued development of eFPGA hard IP and the integration of Synopsys Synplify ahead of orders. We are anticipating significant IP contract awards that will leverage these investments in 2025 and beyond. Going forward, we do not anticipate developing eFPGA hard IP for new fabrication processes ahead of orders. Now, moving to our guidance and outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2025, which will end on March 31. Revenue guidance for Q1 2025 is approximately $4 million, plus or minus 10%. First quarter revenue is expected to be comprised of approximately $3.4 million in new products and $0.6 million in mature products.

As Brian stated in his remarks, our lower-than-anticipated Q1 revenue guidance is attributable to the delay of certain large IP contracts that we thought we would be awarded late in Q4 2024. With the recent wins and significant contracts we expect to close in the very near term that Brian also noted, we anticipate a significant rebound in revenue and profitability beginning in Q2 and solid revenue growth, non-GAAP profitability, and positive cash flow for full year 2025. Based on the anticipated Q1 revenue mix, non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter is expected to be approximately 50%, plus or minus 5 percentage points. This is mostly attributable to our lower revenue outlook. We are modeling our full-year non-GAAP gross profit margin to be in the mid-60% range. Our non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $3.2 million, plus or minus 5%.

We are modeling our non-GAAP OPEX to be approximately $3.3 million per quarter during 2025. Please note that given the nature of our industry, we may occasionally need to classify certain expenses to COGS versus OPEX or capitalize certain costs. The classifications are mainly related to labor and tooling for our IP contracts with customers. Such capitalization may reduce OPEX and alter the timing for recognizing the corresponding expenses in COGS. This may cause variability in our quarterly gross margins and operating results that we usually balance out at the operating line. After interest and other income, we currently forecast that our Q1 non-GAAP net loss will be approximately $1.2 million-$1.4 million or $0.07-$0.09 per share. The difference between our GAAP and non-GAAP results is related to non-cash stock-based compensation expenses. In Q1, we expect these compensations will be approximately $0.9 million.

This is the same as Q4 2024 and down 42% from Q1 2024. As a reminder, there will be movements in our stock-based compensation during the year, and it may vary each quarter based on the timing of grants to employees. Cash flow for Q1 2025 is highly dependent on the timing of certain large contracts we anticipate finalizing this quarter. Setting that aside, we are confident there will be cash flow positive in Q2 and for the full year 2025. Looking back to 2024, we invested heavily ahead of contract awards to become the first and, as it stands today, only eFPGA hard IP for Intel 18A. We also invested to integrate Synopsys Synplify and Aurora ahead of being able to charge our customers for its use.

To provide us with the flexibility to manage the expanding scope of a large government contract and the timing and cash flow from large contracts we anticipate finalizing later this quarter, we will put an ATM in place following this call. The details of the ATM will be covered in a pro supp, which is a prospectus supplement, and an 8-K filing with the SEC that will be available before the market opens tomorrow. With this improved flexibility, we are very well positioned to leverage the benefits of the aforementioned investments as we recognize revenue from recently awarded and pending contracts beginning in Q2. Thank you. With that, let me now turn the call back over to Brian for his closing remarks.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Thank you, Elias, and thank you and your team for tight management of our finances that helped us realize a second straight year of non-GAAP profitability. We are very excited about our unique positioning as the only company eFPGA hard IP that is optimized for Intel 18A. We believe the investments we have made during the last nine months to achieve this unique position ahead of contracts will deliver solid ROI beginning this year. Inclusive of 18A, we eFPGA hard IP for six unique fabrication process technologies. We anticipate expanding this to nine or possibly ten during 2025, with all new processes being funded by customer contracts. We expect this expansion to be weighted towards TSMC fabrication processes. In addition to these, we expect to win new contracts for fabrication processes where we have already established eFPGA hard IP.

This means with those investments in our rearview mirror, new contracts will generate higher profit margins and higher positive cash flow. An example of this is the new contract targeting GF's 12LP that I mentioned earlier. We anticipate our first Direct to Storefront contract that I also mentioned will leverage this benefit too. We have extended this benefit in a recent win to include the leverage of off-the-shelf hard IP core designs we've developed. In this case, the customer will eFPGA hard IP core that we previously developed. In short, we are beginning to see the momentum and leverage provided by our past developments. These benefits will become more evident as we move forward. While the defense industrial base will continue to be a very important element of our short and long-term growth, we expect to further diversify our end markets during 2025.

In addition to expanding our fabrication process coverage, signing contracts with new customers, and broadening the end markets we serve, we believe we will also win new designs with our existing customers. Several of these opportunities were highlighted earlier in my prepared remarks, and several others are a bit too early in the process to discuss today. In short, once customers adopt a specific supplier's programmable logic and user tools in a design, they become sticky and are used in future designs. We are already seeing evidence of this benefiting QuickLogic. With that, I would now like to open the call for questions.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your headset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we pull up the questions. The first question comes from the line of Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Hi, Brian. Elias, how are you guys doing?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Doing well. How are you, Richard?

Elias Nader (SVP and CFO)

How are you?

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Doing fine. Thank you. Let's see here. Obviously, giving us a guide here for the first quarter, but I think it's more interesting to think about what you have in mind for the second quarter. You're talking about a sizable increase here. I just want to make sure I've got the kind of the parameters we're thinking about, kind of break even in the profitability levels you're expecting for the year, and then probably a couple of follow-ups on that.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

I can definitely take the first question, Richard, on the Q1 to Q2 transition. The IP design pushes that we had talked about in the call, starting from the late part of Q4, one of those is that $1.1 million one that was the first bullet of our earnings release today and what we went over in brief detail in the opening remarks. That one we expect in Q2 in full to be recognized. The second one is this one related to 18A. We've been public that we felt like this is sort of a mid-seven-figure deal, and that would all be in Q2.

When you add those two up and you look at sort of the baseline of revenue today, being in that sort of two-ish and up dollar value, kind of paints the picture of Q2 being north of $6 million, which is, I think, coinciding with the non-GAAP profitability and cash flow positive in the model for moving forward. Does that answer your question?

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. Yeah. For a high level, probably think about that and follow up some others here. Brian, I did hear you talk about a funnel, which you talked about for at least a year and a half here. Not sure if that's something you're going to continue to do or not, but how do we think about that and whether you continue to use that metric as a way to judge how things are progressing?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Yeah. I'm glad you asked that question because we intentionally did not talk about the funnel in terms of quantitative numbers today. I will say quantitatively, it is up on a net basis, primarily from new eFPGA opportunities coming into the funnel. Given this is the first call of the year and given the feedback that we have been receiving over the last year from investors and other folks in that community, we decided that we're going to try to get away from actually putting out the actual number for that and focusing more now on these hard IP contracts that we're talking about, these development contracts, because that's really where the rubber hits the road. Qualitatively, I will say that the funnel did grow from where it ended on our Q3 call till now, and most of that growth was in the eFPGA part of the business.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. All right. Fair enough here. Maybe let's touch on Intel 18A. An increasing amount of focus over the last few quarters on this seems very interesting. I guess my question is twofold. How do we see the opportunities from this node, and how many different customers might we see develop over this year here? As I get questions related to Intel generally across more than one of my coverage companies here, everyone's worried about potentially Intel getting broken up in some manner, which obviously hasn't been announced here. What's your response to people's worries about risks from that situation?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Yeah. I mean, firstly, let's talk about my view of what I've felt for a while but what I've heard from others just on the overall demand for 18A. I think that if you look at really advanced process technology that's done onshore in the U.S., the established foundries, especially the U.S.-owned foundries, they're sort of end-of-the-line as 12nm or 14nm, depending on how you want to talk about process technology. There are more aggressive ones, but they're by foundries that have foreign ownership. Intel being U.S.-owned, 18A is clearly more advanced than a 12nm or 14nm node. I think there's a lot of interest from the government and the defense industrial base to have that sort of capability physically onshore and operated by a U.S.-operated or owned foundry. For those reasons, I think there's a lot of promise for the demand for 18A.

I think there are several companies that Intel has talked about with respect to adopting 18A. If you sort of parse that into two, there's the defense, and then there's the non-defense side or the government-oriented and the non-government-oriented side. I think that there are a lot of interest within the U.S. government or the U.S. defense base for 18A because of the power or the performance and the area gains of some advanced process like this. For that reason, I think regardless of whether Intel remains as Intel or is in different parts, I think that there's still going to be the strategic interest in that particular process node. I think very recently, I think it was even last week, Intel Foundry announced that they are now ready for production tape-outs on 18A.

My hope is that we'll start to see more companies publicly acknowledging that they're interested or designing for 18A. Should they be needing or wanting or exploring adding programmability to those ASICs, then we're going to stand ready to be the first and only IP provider for eFPGA to enable that. If you think about it, the more expensive it is to design a chip from an NRE perspective, from IP acquisition, from mask sets, and so on, the more value eFPGA actually has to that ASIC because you don't want to redo a very expensive ASIC very often. You want to have it serve a lot of use cases, a lot of end markets. In fact, eFPGA is exactly how you do that at a silicon level. I believe Intel 18A is going to be successful. I think we will be successful with it.

We have more than one customer in our opportunity funnel. I think the fact that we did make that investment speaks to that conviction that it's going to be a successful node for us and that if they want eFPGA IP for those ASICs, then we're going to be that guy. We're going to be that supplier, and we're going to see more than one win this year on that.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Maybe two questions for me, and I'll jump out of line. The first one is related to Flex Logix. I think your commentary was that the recently hired VP of IP sales is working hard to work with prior licensees or maybe those who are in process here. What kind of a timeframe do you expect to convert those or get subsequent designs, start to see that pop up in your funnel and in bookings and then ultimate revenues? Would you call this a shorter period of time or a longer one, or how would you characterize that?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

I would definitely say it's shorter. The $1.1 million win that we just talked about in the first bullet of our earnings release is actually one that Andy helped close. I would say accelerate faster than what it may have just naturally. I think that there's a lot of efficiencies that we can get from an organization when you have somebody in sales that knows where the fish are. Him being in Flex Logix, he clearly knows the parts of the pond to drop the line. I think he understands the technology very well, having sold it for eight years, and that's really helping from an efficiency standpoint and also just the communication of the value proposition standpoint. I think that combined with those long-term relationships he has speaks well for the future.

You do not have to trust me on that because that first order was his order.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. That sounds great. My last question for you, Brian, before I jump out of here is I'm trying to find my notes on your comments here at the very end of the call here. Talked about kind of diversifying end markets here. Defense industries are basically a growth driver. You just talked about diversifying here. Maybe you can talk about where this is coming from, how this overlaps with the nodes you're working on? Maybe just expand on it. I'm not sure we're, I mean, it's obviously great to see diversification, but wondering if you can give us any more detail as to how that develops over time?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Yeah. We had already started to see some opportunities last year that were outside of the areas of aerospace and defense, which has obviously been our mainstay market. I'd say that part of the funnel has grown even faster with Andy coming on board because a lot of the engagements that I think Flex Logix had was also outside of the areas of aerospace and defense. If you go back in time, you can see that where we had been proactively investing in process technology ports was sort of intentionally not trying to directly overlap with Flex Logix, right? We do not want to go someplace where somebody already is because that becomes more of a price war than anything else.

With the acquisition by Analog Devices, now we can more purposely go after those other nodes like the TSMC ones I mentioned earlier, knowing that there's more of a green field there. You'll start to see that this year, and that's done in concert with opportunities outside of aerospace and defense. We have industrial now coming in. We have some communications in our funnel now. We even have some consumer ones, believe it or not. I think we're going to close some of those, and those will drive new process technology ports that we haven't done so far. We want that balance. Like I've said many times, I don't see that aerospace and defense is ever going to be less than 50% of our revenue just because that is such a prevalent market for programmable logic technology in general.

The other thing I'd say, and this ties back to Andy for a second, he's coming in, and he's knowing where the likely targets are or where we should focus our energy to help convert over if they're interested to QuickLogic. I think he also understands how to leverage his team really well because it's after all, it's a team sale, bringing in the architects and the technical team. Those are resources that are very scarce in our company. We need to be very mindful of when we bring them in and how much time we do to really focus on efficiency. I think he's got that mindset. It speaks well for this $1.1 million one.

I think you're going to see that efficiency in this notion of selling cores that we already have done as opposed to needing to do custom work for a customer. Faster times of revenue, better use of resources.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Excellent. We look forward to seeing more of that. I will jump out of line. Thanks a lot, Brian.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Thanks, Richard.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Martin Yang with Oppenheimer and Company. Please proceed.

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

All right. Thank you for taking my question. First question, U.S. and the benefit you get from distributors into new regions, do you think that the revenue ramp you see there could continue throughout 2025 or that follows more through normal seasonality?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Could you repeat the last part of your question, Martin?

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

Yeah. Do you think that—

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

What do you think that 25 revenue or what else?

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

Yeah. In 2025 revenue, the benefit you get from having the additional distributor, would that help your EOS S3 family revenue to continue to go up in the sequential quarters?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

They definitely will. I mean, really good external sales partners, whether they're reps or distributors, offload our direct resources to really spend time on more strategic accounts or pre-filtering designs before they come into the funnel and consume resources. I do think we will be generating revenue this year both from an IP, hard IP licensing, as well as EOS S3. In fact, I was just on the phone with one of our guys today talking about a new EOS S3 opportunity from a distributor. They continue to come in, even though it's a mature product. It's a great product for distributors to sell being EOS S3 because it's stable in all the support infrastructure: software, silicon, dev boards, etc. They can run with it and then just bring our guys in when they need to do deal closing.

On the IP side, it actually frees up the sales folks to focus on the more strategic sales that in some cases need more evangelizing before we get to a deal. The bottom line is we'll see, I think, revenue contribution this year from the distributors and new reps, and that'll also help accelerate more from our direct guys directly.

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

Got it. Thank you. One question on the potential broader use of FPGA in edge AI inferencing. You referenced one customer. Can you maybe elaborate on how that customer is utilizing FPGA in their applications and what verticals are they in?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Yeah. I'm happy to do that. If you go back in time, and I'm talking a few years now, we collaborated with a university in Europe called ETH in Zürich in Switzerland. There was a group there that does a lot of research around Parallel Ultra-Low Power processing in semiconductors. A lot of what they were looking at is, how do I reduce the computational energy required to do AI inferencing using RISC-V processors? Some RISC-V processors actually came out of that research. How can I minimize that power or energy consumption even further by augmenting that with embedded FPGA? We did this joint research project with them, and we actually published that research together in a joint paper.

It showed that the energy consumption, if you use embedded FPGA to offload computationally intensive convolution algorithms, you can reduce energy by like 20x. In a battery-powered system, a 20x energy savings is a big deal, right? It's a big deal in the data center. It's a big deal when you're dealing with batteries. That paper became the basis of how we would talk about the benefits of eFPGA with other prospective customers, not just this university. The 12nm TSMC eFPGA win that we talked about last year was sort of inspired by the outputs of that paper. That's the one that has the silicon back, and they're going through the silicon validation. I'm hopeful that that will turn into another eFPGA win after they've gone through that.

Clearly, their validation is going to involve running algorithms and measuring power consumption both with and without the eFPGA contributing to the workload and see if there's a net gain there. Based on what we found in that paper, to me, the published results speak for themselves, and I'm pretty bullish about that. Clearly, we want to get beyond just that one customer, but I think the more demonstrable numbers we have coming from this customer to supplement that one with ETH in Zürich will be used for sales collateral with other customers as well. To be clear, it's not the training, the heavy-duty sort of iron that you see today that people are doing the GPUs. We're talking about much further out at the edge, just the inferencing part where batteries and power matter.

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

Got it. Just to clarify, so that customer, is that the larger well known international customer?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

That is correct.

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

Got it. Thank you. My last question is on our revenue facing this year. You expect a very significant step up from Q2. Can you maybe talk about some of the puts and takes on the quarterly revenue patterns in the second half?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Like what we're mentioning qualitatively for Q2, it's going to be driven from embedded FPGA IP contracts. We are clearly planning on the continued investment by the U.S. government in the Strategic Rad-Hard FPGA throughout the year, and then layering into that now more of these embedded FPGA IP designs. We talked about the two big ones here contributing to Q2. We have several more of these seven-figure ones layering in from an opportunity timing for Q3 and Q4 revenue recognition. All of the ones that are looking into our financial planning on the revenue side are ones we already have in the funnel that we've engaged with for some time.

These are ones that we are targeting for these newer IP cores that we've developed, which are on more advanced process technology, which are higher average selling price, which means we do not need as many licenses to have significant revenue contributions in those quarters. Moreover, the fact that we have already ported to a node and/or designed an actual core for a customer means that our operating expenses to do customer-specific derivatives for those new opportunities is much less. That is why we are, I think, really pleased with those developments and how we should see better gross profit margin and cash flow in that second half because a lot of that investment has already taken place. A lot of leverage there in the model. Does that help answer the question, Martin?

Martin Yang (Executive Director)

Yes. Yeah. That's it for me. Thank you.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Fantastic. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

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

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks, guys. Let me ask two more questions. The first one is just regarding the strategic Radiation-Hardened opportunity here. How do we think about the revenue opportunity here versus past years? I know there's not a complete overlap between the kind of the phases here and the work going on with one or more foundries here. I'm not sure if you've elaborated clearly on exactly what that looks like for this year, but maybe just want to get to the end conclusion here, how to think about the revenue contribution this year versus last year, last few years on this project.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Sure. From a revenue contribution perspective, I think we're modeling sort of at the same level, plus or minus a little bit as last year. There are some pretty interesting things I'd like to share about the latest contract, but as I put in the script, we are still seeking permission to talk in more detail and openly about those before I can do so publicly. I am really excited about the things that we are doing this year for that. Like I said, the revenue should be plus or minus sort of in that same range as last year from a revenue perspective. Probably could be a little bit less, but I think what you'll see from the output, you'll be quite pleased.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. I will look forward to seeing that. Related to Strategic Rad-Hard here, it sounds like things are mostly on track in terms of timing. Wondering if you agree to that. If that's the case, what kind of time frame do we think about for getting the start of and/or even material or noticeable Storefront revenues out of that?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

That is a question I'm going to need to punt until I get permission to talk about the stuff I'd like to talk about, if that's okay with you.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Since the government says so, I guess we'll have to both be satisfied with that answer. Maybe I'll ask another one as my last one then, Brian, here, which is you used a phrase that maybe I've missed out on or not sure I quite understand. You talk about Direct to Storefront. What exactly does that mean?

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Yeah. This is the first time we've introduced that direct to prelude or preamble. When we've talked about Storefront in the past, this has been where we are not just doing an IP core for a customer. We're actually doing a chip design for a customer, some of which must include embedded FPGA, the intention being that if we do the chip design, not only do we get the NRE for that, but we, more importantly, want to do the Storefront sales in support of that to that customer. As an example, like the Strategic Rad-Hard FPGA falls into that category, right? The development revenue is great. We're doing this design for the government. Ultimately, we want to do this so that we can be the Storefront for that chip.

In a Direct to Storefront concept, this is where from the get-go, the customer is not evaluating whether they want to do an eFPGA core. They are doing a deal with us where the first phase of the contract is clearly about specifying what this device looks like. From day one, they would want this to be a Storefront deal with QuickLogic. The Direct to Storefront is sort of saying that we're circumventing a lot of this drawn-out evaluation back and forth. Do I want you to do the design? Do I want to work with a third party? We're engaged with them on this whole path from day one that it's Direct to Storefront. That's good. The customer is putting some skin in the game right now.

We're working closely from an engineering perspective to make sure that the spec is meeting the mark, and then we can move into contract for implementation, like I said, hopefully starting in Q3.

Richard Shannon (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Fair enough. That is all from you guys. Thank you.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Thanks, Richard.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Brian Faith for closing remarks.

Brian Faith (President and CEO)

Yeah. I know that some of our other analysts were having some maybe planned or unplanned connection issues, so we'll make sure that we connect with them offline after the call at some point. Thank you, everybody, for attending the call today. I'd like to update on some events and actually a lot of events in this next quarter. We're going to be quite busy with external events. Tomorrow, we have the Oppenheimer 10th Annual Emerging Conference. That's a virtual conference. If you're interested in that, contact your Oppenheimer rep. March 6th, we'll be at the Starting Five Virtual Conference. March 11th, in Washington, DC, the Intel Public Sector Summit. March 17th to 20th, we'll be at GOMAC in Pasadena. If you're interested in the government microelectronic work, that's a great show to go to. We'll be at HEART in Monterey, April 7th to 11th.

Again, very oriented around radiation-hardened semiconductor technology. April 19th, Intel Foundry Forum. We've been talking about 18A. We'll be at the Intel Foundry Forum in San Jose. Lastly, April 29th, we'll be at the Andes RISC-V Conference in San Jose. As always, thank you for your time and support, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.