Rambus - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Rambus delivered a strong Q2 2025 with total GAAP revenue of $172.2M and GAAP diluted EPS of $0.53; product revenue hit a record $81.3M (+43% YoY) and cash from operations reached a record $94.4M.
• Versus S&P Global consensus, normalized EPS modestly beat ($0.60* vs $0.59*), and revenue beat ($172.2M* vs $167.0M*); both were above expectations, driven by continued DDR5 leadership and early companion-chip traction.
• Q3 2025 guidance implies sequential acceleration: revenue $172–$178M, product revenue $87–$93M, and higher GAAP/non-GAAP operating cost envelopes; licensing billings guided lower, while contract/other revenue guided higher.
• Management highlighted secular AI tailwinds across chips and silicon IP (HBM4, PCIe 7, Security IP) and reiterated timing and opportunity for MRDIMM in 2H26+ with ~$600M SAM at maturity.
• Near-term stock catalysts: continued record product revenue in Q3, double-digit sequential product growth, companion-chip ramp, and strong free cash flow generation.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Record product revenue of $81.3M (+43% YoY), with management citing sustained DDR5 leadership and growing traction for new chips; CEO: “well positioned to capitalize on… AI infrastructure”.
• Record quarterly cash from operations of $94.4M reflecting the robustness of the business model; CFO detailed $84M free cash flow in Q2 (cash from ops less capex).
• Strong IP momentum with demand for leading-edge HBM4 and PCIe 7, plus growing Security IP engagement aligned to AI-driven custom ASIC development.

What Went Wrong

• Licensing billings guided down sequentially for Q3 ($58–$64M vs Q2 guidance $64–$70M), indicating near-term variability in licensing mix and timing.
• GAAP operating costs outlook raised for Q3 ($115–$111M vs $110–$106M prior Q2 guide), reflecting investment and scaling costs amidst rapid product expansion.
• Inventory levels were lean (~120 days) at quarter-end, prompting a plan to hold more strategic inventory; while lead times remain normal, lean inventories can create near-term fulfillment risk if demand accelerates faster than anticipated.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Welcome to Rambus second quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your touch-tone phone at any time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star zero at any time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Desmond Lynch, the Chief Financial Officer. You may begin your conference.

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Rambus second quarter 2025 results conference call. I'm Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer at Rambus, and on the call with me today is Luc Seraphin, our CEO. The press release for the results that we will be discussing today has been filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. We are webcasting this call along with the slides that we will reference during portions of today's call. A replay of this call can be accessed on our website beginning today at 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements including our expectations regarding projected financial results, financial prospects, market growth, demand for our solutions, other market factors including reflections of the geopolitical and macroeconomic environment, and the effects of ASC 606 on reported revenue, amongst other items.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may be discussed during this call and are more fully described in the documents we file with the SEC, including our 8-Ks, 10-Qs, and 10-Ks. These forward-looking statements may differ materially from our actual results, and we are under no obligation to update these statements. In an effort to provide greater clarity in the financials, we are using both GAAP and non-GAAP financial presentations in both our press release and on this call. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financials to the most directly comparable GAAP measures has been included in our press release, in our slide presentation, and on our website at rambus.com on the Investor Relations page under Financial Releases. In addition, we will continue to provide operational metrics such as licensing billings to give our investors better insight into our operational performance.

The order of our call today will be as follows: Luc will start with an overview of the business, I will discuss our financial results, and then we will end with Q&A. I will now turn the call over to Luc to provide an overview of the quarter. Luc?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you, Des; good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter conference call. Rambus delivered a very strong second quarter, exceeding expectations for both revenue and earnings, while continuing momentum in our growth initiatives. This achievement was driven by our memory interface chip business outpacing the market with 43% year-over-year growth and another quarter of record product revenue. The strong performance highlights our sustained leadership in core DDR5 products as we continue to execute on our strategic roadmap of signal and power integrity solutions and to drive the adoption of our new products. We also generated record cash flow operations of $94 million, showcasing the efficiency of our execution and the robustness of our business model. Our balanced portfolio and diverse revenue streams across chips, silicon IP, and patent licensing position us exceptionally well in the market.

They also provide stability in a dynamic microenvironment and enable our continued product investment to drive long-term growth. Our chip business continues to be a key growth engine for the company, with Q2 marking our fifth consecutive quarter of product revenue growth. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we delivered a historic quarter of record product revenue. Our strength in DDR5 continues to be a cornerstone of our success, with increased sales of our core products driving above-market growth. Looking forward to Q3, we expect our ongoing RCD market share leadership, combined with early contributions from new products, to drive double-digit sequential product revenue growth. We have growing traction for the record number of new products introduced throughout last year, with chips progressing through the respective stages of customer qualification and adoption. Additionally, we remain actively involved in the definition of future generation products with the industry.

As we look further into the future, we are also very pleased that our industry-standard MRDIMM 12800 chipset is advancing on schedule, and we are excited about its role in meeting the growing memory performance requirements of next-generation server workloads. Going beyond servers, we recently launched our client memory module chipset for AI PCs. With that introduction, we are proud to now offer chipsets for all JEDEC standard DDR5 and LPDDR5 modules. Our client chip solutions waterfall our proven server-class technology into new applications and extend our reach into next-generation high-performance PCs, opening up a growing market opportunity in the coming years. Our expanding product offerings support the next wave of high-performance computing platforms in servers and client systems. Through ongoing leadership in RCDs and growing traction across our portfolio of new products, we expect continued momentum and long-term growth.

Turning to silicon IP, we delivered solid results in Q2, and we remain on track for long-term growth. AI and data center applications continue to drive strong demand for our high-speed memory and interconnect IP, as well as our security IP. Our IP solutions are foundational to enabling the performance and security required by next-generation accelerated computing ICs. We're seeing strong demand and design-win momentum across our portfolio, led by our best-in-class HBM4 and PCIe 7 solutions. Now, as we look ahead for the company, the data center will continue to undergo profound transformation, driven by exponential growth of AI workloads and the increasing complexity of high-speed performance computing. Across the ecosystem, the shift towards scalable, heterogeneous compute architectures is accelerating demand for novel high-performance memory solutions and enabling technologies. These trends align directly with Rambus's long-term strategy.

We are strategically focused on advancing system memory bandwidth and capacity through groundbreaking memory connectivity and power management solutions. These capabilities are foundational to enabling the next generation of AI and HPC platforms. We have built a roadmap that addresses the increasing technical demands of data-intensive applications. Our leadership in signal and power integrity, core to enabling robust high-performance memory subsystems, places us at the heart of this transformation. With our strong balance sheet and ongoing focused investment, Rambus is poised to capitalize on these secular growth trends. In closing, Q2 was a standout quarter for Rambus. We achieved excellent financial results, delivered record product revenue, and continued to execute on our roadmap. We are excited to enter the second half of the year with strong momentum, and we expect another quarter of record product revenue with double-digit growth in Q3.

Our leadership in DDR5, increasing customer traction for new products, and strong business model position us well for continued success and long-term profitable growth. I want to thank our customers, partners, and employees for their continued support. With that, I'll turn the call over to Des to walk through the financials. Des?

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Thank you, Luc. I'd like to begin with a summary of our financial results for the second quarter on slide three. We delivered a strong quarter, exceeding our expectations for both revenue and earnings. Our chip business continued to drive our growth as we delivered record results, marking our fifth consecutive quarter of product revenue growth. In addition, our diversified portfolio generated record quarterly cash from operations of $94 million. Our ability to consistently generate cash is a key aspect of our strategy and enables us to continually invest in initiatives that fuel our long-term growth. Let me now provide you a summary of our non-GAAP income statement on slide five. Revenue for the second quarter was $172.2 million, which was above our expectations. Royalty revenue was $68.6 million, while licensing billings were $66.4 million.

The difference between licensing billings and royalty revenue mainly relates to timing, as we do not always recognize revenue in the same quarter as we bill our customers. Product revenue was $81.3 million, as we delivered another quarter of record product revenue. This represents a 7% sequential increase and a 43% year-over-year growth driven by continued strength in DDR5 products. Contract and other revenue was $22.3 million, consisting predominantly of silicon IP. As a reminder, only a portion of our silicon IP revenue is reflected in contract and other revenue, and the remaining portion is reported in royalty revenue, as well as in licensing billings. Total operating costs, including cost of goods sold for the quarter, were $93.2 million. Operating expenses of $60.4 million were in line with our expectations. Interest and other income for the second quarter was $4.8 million.

Using an assumed flat tax rate of 20% for non-GAAP pre-tax income, non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $67.1 million. Now, let me turn to the balance sheet details on slide six. We ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaling $594.8 million, up from Q1, primarily driven by record cash from operations of $94.4 million. SSecond-quartercapital expenditures were $10.4 million, while depreciation expense was $7.4 million. We delivered $84 million of free cash flow in the quarter. We consistently delivered value to our stockholders as we continued our stock repurchase program in the quarter. Let me now review our non-GAAP outlook for the third quarter on slide seven. As a reminder, the forward-looking guidance reflects our current best estimates at this time, and our actual results could differ materially from what I'm about to review.

The economic environment remains a dynamic environment, and we continue to actively monitor the situation. In addition to the non-GAAP financial outlook under ASC 606, we also provide information on licensing billings, which is an operational metric that reflects amounts invoiced to our licensing customers during the period, adjusted for certain differences. We expect revenue in the third quarter to be between $172 million and $178 million. We expect royalty revenue to be between $57 million and $63 million, and licensing billings between $58 million and $64 million. We expect Q3 non-GAAP total operating costs, which includes COGS, to be between $94 million and $98 million. We expect Q3 capital expenditures to be approximately $12 million. Non-GAAP operating results for the third quarter are expected to be between a profit of $74 million and $84 million.

For non-GAAP interest and other income and expense, we expect $5 million of interest income. We expect the pro forma tax rate to be 20%, with non-GAAP tax expenses to be between $15.8 million and $17.8 million in Q3. We expect Q3 share count to be 108.5 million diluted shares outstanding. Overall, we anticipate the Q3 non-GAAP earnings per share range between $0.58 and $0.66. Let me finish with a summary on slide eight. In closing, I am pleased with our strong financial results and ongoing execution. Our diversified portfolio and disciplined business model continues to drive profitable growth with strong cash generation. Our robust balance sheet allows us to invest in market expansion opportunities in the data center and AI, while consistently delivering value to our stockholders. Before I open the call up to Q&A, I would like to thank our employees for their continued teamwork and execution.

With that, I'll turn the call back to our operator to begin Q&A. Could we have our first question?

Operator (participant)

Of course. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touch-tone phone. Please save it to where you have ask one question and one follow-up, and then return to the queue just so we can access everyone's questions. Our first question comes from a line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. The line is now open.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director and Technology Analyst)

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I'll just ask my question and my follow-up together here. I guess first on the product revenue line, strong growth up 43.5% year-over-year. I'm curious, Luc, how do we think about the contribution from the RCDs, your positioning as, you know, I think your target's been 40% market share in DDR5, and where we're at as far as seeing the ramp of the PMIC opportunity. As the follow-up real quickly, can you just remind us again, as we think about Granite Rapids, from Intel, from a CPU perspective, and we look at the roadmap going forward, is the expectation that we see continual memory channel expansion with next-generation platforms, i.e., moving from 12 to 16 and so on going forward? Thank you.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you, Aaron. To your first question, yeah, we're very pleased with the growth of our product business with this 43% year-over-year growth in the second quarter. RCD remains very strong for us, and our belief is that we continue to gain share with the expansion of DDR5 in the market. We were slightly above 40% share at the end of 2024, and we expect to continue to gain share this year. We do start to see the contribution for new chips, power management chips, but all the chips that we're introducing to the market. It's still modest, it represents a low single-digit contribution to the product revenue in Q3, but it's going to grow to meet the upper single-digit contribution in Q3, sorry, it was a low single-digit in Q2. We do see momentum there. It's modest, but we do see momentum across the board.

As we said, we have different stages of qualification and adoption of these different products in the market, and we feel very comfortable with the momentum there. With respect to the different platforms, our partners continue to roll out platforms. We do sell chip ahead of the platform deployment. To the platform you mentioned, we're starting to see volume shipments of products on the RCD side. We do believe that, in addition to the Intel platform, AMD and the ARM-based platforms are also going to roll out products that will create demand for our DDR5 RCD chips. The fact that these platforms are transitioning from 12 channels to 16 channels is also going to create further demand for DDR5 in the quarters and years to come. That's good news for us.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director and Technology Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your questions. Our next question comes from a line of Gary Mobley with Loop Capital. Your line is now open.

Gary Mobley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Hey, guys. Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. I had some questions about the PC market. I know it's not what everybody's focused on, but if I'm not mistaken, your newly introduced power management IC products are geared towards Panther Lake, and with that launch imminent, can you share with us whether or not you've got any visibility into the power management IC sales into the PC market ramping this year or next? Are you generating yet any client clock driver revenue from the PC market?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you, Gary. As we said in earlier calls, we do see the requirements that we initially or historically saw in the data center flowing into high-end PCs and the need for the equivalent of an RCD or the equivalent of a power management chip flowing into the high-end PC market. We introduced the clock driver last year, and we are starting to see modest traction. Modest traction, not because the product is not successful. It's just the market is limited at this point in time. It really targets the very high-end speed layer of the market, and over time, it's going to flow down all the segments of the market.

We were encouraged with the reception of our PMIC products into the data center, and that's why we announced PMIC products for the client market, a Gen 2 PMIC for DIMMs in the client market, as well as an LPCAM solutions for the PC market. We're planting the seeds in a market that we think is going to be very fertile going forward. That's going to address the high-end PC markets first and then flow down. We do expect the contributions from these client markets to start to be visible in 2026, when this year we're going to just see the initial shipments of qualification and pre-production orders.

Gary Mobley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

All right. Thanks, Luc. As a follow-up, I wanted to quickly ask about inventory. It appears as though your dollars of inventory are getting lean and days of inventory especially lean. The reason I bring this up is, you know, are your lead times extending? If they are, is there a motivation for your memory customers to start to maybe sort of insure or hedge against that in the form of higher inventory?

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Hi, Gary. It's Des here. That's a good question. Our inventory levels in Q2 came down to about 120 days, which was mainly driven by finished goods inventory at the end of the quarter. It is important to note that our inventory holding at June 30 is just a snapshot in time, and really based upon our current view of demand, we will have sufficient inventory to support our customers' demand through at the end of the year. We do have long-term relationships with our supply chain partners, and they're fully supportive of our growth plans going forward into 2026 and beyond. As we look ahead, given our expanding product portfolio and strong cash generation, we are comfortable with holding more strategic inventory on our balance sheet, and this is something we'll definitely endeavor to do here over the next couple of quarters.

As it relates to lead times, I would say that they remain within normal levels and consistent with prior quarters from there, Gary.

Gary Mobley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Thanks, Des.

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Thanks, Gary.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your questions. Our next question comes from a line of Kevin Cassidy with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is now open.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you. Congratulations on the great results. You know, the AI ASIC market is exploding in the, you know, it's called the XPUs. Can you say how that ASIC market might be changing the demand for your silicon IP?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, sure. What we see with the AI market exploding and the emergence of these XPU solutions, ASIC solutions, is that the need for very high-speed connectivity and the need for very high-speed memory interfaces increases and accelerates. That translates for us into an acceleration of our development for solutions such as HBM4, HBM4e, as well as PCIe 7. We are engaged with customers. This market tended to be quite a bit like the RCD market. Everything is accelerating. We do have several engagements on these leading-edge technologies, on HBM4 and the PCIe 7 in particular, as well as for the security solutions. The need to actually secure data when it sits into those chips or secure data when it moves around between those chips is becoming critically important. That's also giving traction to the sales of our silicon IP in the security area.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Great. Thanks for that detail. Maybe a more mundane discussion is that there have been announcements for DDR4 end-of-life. Does that change anything for Rambus? I guess we had a couple of years ago, we had an inventory issue, so I guess that's out of the way now. What does it mean going forward?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

It doesn't change much for us. DDR5 sales remain very limited. This has been our message for several quarters now, and we don't see that picture changing. We do see inventories slowly going down in the market. We hear about the last-time buy orders. We expect DDR4 demand to remain low, if even decreasing, and maybe it's going to be on a case-by-case basis when people work through these last-time buy orders.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Great. Thanks. Congratulations again.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you, Kevin.

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Thanks, Kevin.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your questions. Our next question comes from a line of Mehdi Hosseini with SIG. Your line is now open.

Mehdi Hosseini (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yes. Thanks for taking my question. I want to better understand the mix of the product revenue, especially given the increased contribution from the companion chip. How should I think about the DDR5 RCD chip or RCD buffer chip versus a companion chip? How is that mix evolving?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

The way to look at it is we introduced a lot of products, and there are different stages of introduction and qualification with our customers. In Q2, these new products represented low single-digit contribution in % terms of our product revenue. When we look at Q3, that contribution in terms of percent is probably going to be mid to upper single-digit % of our product revenue. As I said earlier, we planted the seeds. We see traction, and we're very happy with the traction with our customers. The contribution today is modest, but we do see very strong momentum in terms of adoption of these products.

Mehdi Hosseini (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Gotcha. Thanks for that clarification. Would that increased contribution continue into year-end?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Yes, it will continue to a new year-end. We're still in the phase of introduction, pre-production of these products. When we look at the view of our product revenue for Q4, we're comfortable with where the street sees us, and we see a slightly higher contribution from our new products. The real thing is going to be 2026 when the platforms are in full swing into the market.

Mehdi Hosseini (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. If I may squeeze my second question, I want to better understand the same kind of a diversification in your silicon IP. There was a significant improvement on a QoQ basis of almost $6 million. Is that driven by HBM4? If not, what is driving that sequential increase in silicon IP? If HBM4 was not a factor, when should we expect customers to come back and buy more IP for that specific application, HBM4?

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Hi, Mehdi. It's Des here. We're really pleased with the performance of our silicon IP business, which delivered strong results in the first half of the year. We're really on track to meet our sort of annual growth expectations for the full year from here. What I would say is when you look at the different revenue categories of contract and other and licensing billings, these can move around on each sort of quarter, which is really dependent upon the IP that we are selling to customers. What you did see in Q2 is an increase in our contract and other sort of line, which represents more customizable IP being sold. We saw the corresponding sort of decline on the licensing billings line, which is off-the-shelf IP.

What we really see here is a really strong momentum in the business, which has really been led by the memory controller solutions of HBM4, PCIe 7, and also nice traction on the leading-edge security IP solutions. Overall, for the full year, we do expect the business to grow in line with our overall sort of expectations from here.

Mehdi Hosseini (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you, guys.

Desmond Lynch (CFO)

Thanks, Mehdi.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your questions. Our next question comes from a line of Natalia Winkler with Evercore. Your line is now open.

Natalia Winkler (Semiconductors Equity Research Analyst)

Hi. Thank you for taking my question. My first one, it was about the MRDIMM opportunity. Luc, I was wondering if you can help us with an update on how you guys see that market and maybe sort of, you know, the ultimate proportion of the CPU market that might be using that technology.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Yeah. MRDIMM is staged to enter the market towards the end of 2026. Depending on the availability of platforms, this is not the next-generation platform, but the one after. It's important to engage with customers very early on. At this point in time, we're very pleased with the progress we're making with our customers in terms of design winning and engagements on the qualification side. That will contribute to the revenue towards the second half of 2026 and beyond. You remember, the MRDIMM content is much larger than the content of the standard RDIMM for DDR5 because the RCD is more complex, the power management chip is more complex, but you also have 10 DB chips that were not present on the standard DIMM. We're very excited with the progress, but that's going to have an impact in 2026, second half, and beyond.

The market is difficult to assess at this point in time, but we expect in full swing it could represent about a $600 million market for MRDIMM, that you can compare to a market for RDIMM today, which is about $800 million. That's a significant growth potential in terms of SAM. That's something that's going to happen in 2026, the second half and beyond.

Natalia Winkler (Semiconductors Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you. That's very helpful. My second question is around ARM CPUs. If you could help us understand if there's a little bit of a trade-off, you know, from the standpoint of units of the CPUs and the channel count, if you guys view the ARM CPU market different from x86.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

We're kind of agnostic as to, you know, the CPU that is being used. Certainly, you know, different, I would say, platform providers offer a different number of channels. We kind of take that into account when we estimate the market size. For us, the very fact that people are developing chips based on ARM that are in competition with the x86 platforms is a good thing. It creates tension in the market, a competition in the market that is good for the rollout of higher-speed RCDs and companion chip solutions. We're kind of agnostic, but we see this in a positive way.

Natalia Winkler (Semiconductors Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your questions. Our next question comes from a line of Tristan Gerra with Baird. Your line is now open.

Tristan Gerra (Managing Director and Senior Analyst - Semiconductors)

Hi. Good afternoon. Is it fair to assume that the customized IP that you sold in the quarter, that it's more related to custom ASIC? Also, when you talk about the contribution going from low single-digit to mid to upper single-digit this quarter, from new product, I'm assuming companionship is really the vast majority of that increase. Is that more on the Granite Rapids platform?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Yeah. To your second question, it's a combination. We introduced eight new products last year, mostly companion chips. The chips that we introduced this year are companion chips for the client space, mostly in the power management area. Different customers are at different stages. When we mentioned this low single-digit going to mid to upper single-digit, these are all these new chips that we introduced, mostly companion chips. Your first question was could you repeat your first question, please?

Tristan Gerra (Managing Director and Senior Analyst - Semiconductors)

Customized IP? Yeah, yeah. It was regarding the customized IP and whether this was related to custom ASIC.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Yeah, mostly it's custom ASIC. It's people developing their own chips to address the demands of the AI market. There's a lot of interest now for AI inference in particular, which drives the need for AI chips for high-speed interfaces. It's mostly for ASICs, ranging from startup companies that want to enter that market all the way up to more established companies that already have a footprint into that market.

Tristan Gerra (Managing Director and Senior Analyst - Semiconductors)

Okay. Just as a quick follow-up, what is typically the timeline between when you collect this customized IP versus the timing when the custom ASIC is ramping? The reason I'm asking is because there is a number of hyperscalers that are at different stages of ramping custom ASICs over the next couple of years. I think you've mentioned that increase in customized IP was happening in the quarter, but not necessarily sustainable or lumpy. Shouldn't we see an increase medium-term from customized IP revenue over the next, you know, in the medium term into next year?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Yeah, that's a good question. Typically, you know, our IP business is a licensing business, so our customers pay us when we deliver the IP, you know, for a license, you know, for one use or several use, depending on the contracts. We typically see the revenue, it depends, you know, 12 months-24 months before the products ramp into the market. Our current sales address chips that are going to be in the market in a couple of years from now. That's why, you know, we do see demand for these, you know, leading-edge technologies. People are using, looking at HBM4, HBM4e, or PCIe 7, you know, for the next generation of products. We're going to be on that, I would say, leading edge, you know, as we move forward. It depends on how successful these customers are.

They are customers that have been developing chips for, you know, many years and will continue on that path with us. Startup companies, you know, there are more and more startup companies, you know, paying licenses to us as they move forward. Whether their chips are going to be successful or not is a different question. Again, it's important for us to have the revenue recognized at the time we sell the license, you know, when they actually decide to use these leading-edge technologies into their products.

Tristan Gerra (Managing Director and Senior Analyst - Semiconductors)

Great. Thank you very much.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your questions. At this time, apologies. We have a follow-up question from Mehdi Hosseini with SIG. Your line is now open.

Mehdi Hosseini (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yes. Yes. Thanks for taking my follow-up. When I'm looking to next year, 2026 and 2027, I want to better understand how you're thinking about the opportunities associated with the client market, PC market versus CXL. It seems like CXL 3.0 is more like a late 2026 if it doesn't push out again. Would the incremental opportunity from the PC market be enough, be large enough to offset if there is more push-out in CXL adoption?

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you, Mehdi. The way we look at it is that you're correct. CXL may push out even further, but we do see MRDIMM really being the solution that is going to be adopted for use case that has to do with memory expansion in particular. On the data center side, we have high expectations for the deployment of MRDIMM, as I said, with revenue in the second half of 2026 and 2027. I think that would address a lot of the use cases that CXL was supposed to address in terms of chip business. Now, clients are different. Clients, there's not really a CXL market for clients at this point in time or small for chips per se. The client business for us, we really see this as an extension of our companionship market for the data center.

As we said earlier, the technical requirements that we're going to find in high-end client systems are very similar to the ones that we currently find in data centers. This is going to be a driver for SAN expansion for clock driver chips and power management chips into the client business. That's a different area of growth for us, different than the MRDIMM in the data center space.

Mehdi Hosseini (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Thank you.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you for your question. At this time, there are no further questions. This will conclude the question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to the company.

Luc Seraphin (President and CEO)

Thank you to everyone who has joined us today for your continued interest and time. We look forward to speaking with you again soon. Have a great day.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This now concludes today's conference.