Robert Bruggeworth
Chief Executive Officer at Qorvo
Thanks, Doug and welcome everyone to Qorvo's fiscal 2024 fourth quarter call. I'd like to begin by reminding our audience that we issued a press release last week announcing the date of our upcoming Qorvo 2024 Investor Day. The event will be held June 11. It will be webcast for all audiences and it will begin at 08:30 a.m. Eastern. Our last Investor Day was in 2018 and we're very excited to discuss in detail our expanded opportunities and our enthusiasm for the future.
Across our businesses, Qorvo is at the forefront of global secular macro trends, including mobility, connectivity, electrification and datafication. These macro trends are enabling new applications and new user experiences, many of which are made accessible to you by the company's Qorvo supplies and the devices we enable.
Our customers continually seek to improve key performance parameters such as power out, current consumed, talk time, battery life and time between charges. This is happening across our markets in aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer, infrastructure, industrial and enterprise. It is increasing customer focus on power efficiency, throughput, functional density, form factor and other areas where Qorvo delivers a significant competitive advantage.
Complementing this, legacy technologies are transitioning to more advanced technologies like active electronic scanning systems, advanced power management, force sensing touch sensors, RF MEMS and a range of system on a chip and system in a package solutions to improve performance and enhance functionality. Also, new connectivity protocols are being adopted across our businesses, including 5G advance, DOCSIS 4.0, Wi-Fi 6, 6E and 7, Matter and ultra-wideband. Qorvo is driving innovation to enable these trends, while expanding our capabilities and product offerings to target a growing set of opportunities.
Now let's turn to the strategic highlights beginning with HPA. HPA returned to year-over-year growth in the March quarter, supported by strong sequential growth in defense and aerospace and continued improvement in end markets other than base station. In defense and aerospace, we're very pleased to have completed the acquisition of Anokiwave in the March quarter. The Anokiwave team brings robust capabilities and high performance integrated silicon ICs for intelligent, active array antennas.
Their commercially proven portfolio includes silicon beam forming ICs and IF to RF conversion solutions which are complementary to our transmit receive RF front ends for SATCOM, D&A, 5G and other beam forming applications. Record annual and March quarterly revenue in D&A was driven by large defense programs and SATCOM growth. The D&A content opportunity for Qorvo is especially strong in phase three, where our solutions can enable transmit receive elements. Phased array radars can contain hundreds, up to tens of thousands of transmit receive elements per system, underscoring the multiplier effect for Qorvo.
Adding to this, we are developing more highly integrated placements that combine Anokiwave solutions with our existing RF and power management IC portfolios. Design wins for the quarter spanned airborne and shipborne radars, SATCOM applications and solid state PA products. We secured our first design win for ball based filter bank solution that enables new architectures for large defense customers. In low earth orbit SATCOM applications, we are engaged to supply multiple Qorvo products including LNAs, switches, mixers and BAW multiplexers to support ubiquitous, non-terrestrial connectivity.
Turning to power management, we are investing to expand our reach in markets where Qorvo enjoys longstanding customer relationships such as consumer, D&A and mobile, while also targeting more fragmented and more diverse industrial markets. During the March quarter, we secured a motor control design win and a power tool platform with a leading manufacturer of residential and commercial lawn and garden products. We also secured new PMIC designs at new and existing solid state drive customers.
Looking more closely at power management opportunities in mobile, there are increasing requirements for compute and processing power in the device that are creating new growth vectors for Qorvo PMICs. The opportunity is significant in both volume and content and we are able to leverage our exceptional customer and ecosystem relationships. Qorvo is a recognized leader, delivering RF solutions, addressing customer challenges related to efficiency, functional density and power consumption. Our RF power management portfolio includes envelope tracking, average power tracking.
Beyond RF power management, there are incremental power management opportunities in the phone where Qorvo is leveraging our expertise to reduce current consumption, improve battery life and better accommodate more data intensive use cases. We have very strong power management IP that can be extended across markets, making our PMIC portfolio an engine for diversification, growth and profitability. We are also extending our reach in broad markets by building out more ways to engage with existing and new customers such as our recently launched QSPICE analog and mixed signal circuit design and simulation tool.
QSPICE has gained quick traction with engineers by providing them measurable improvements in speed, functionality and reliability of circuit simulation. Since its launch, QSPICE has surpassed 20,000 unique downloads. In power devices, customers continue to transition from silicon to silicon carbide and design activity for Qorvo remained strong in our target markets. We continue to secure design wins for high density server power supplies and added a second Tier 1 North American server OEM during the quarter.
In infrastructure markets, Qorvo is leading the transition from DOCSIS 3.1 to DOCSIS 4.0 with a broad portfolio of products. DOCSIS 4.0 will increase the efficiency of existing infrastructure and significantly enhance the user experience. DOCSIS 4.0 will support download speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second and increase upload speeds by four times compared to DOCSIS 3.1 to six gigabits per second.
In our base station business, customers continue to award Qorvo design wins, however, we expect the demand environment to remain weak. Longer-term, we are very pleased to have been selected by a European based OEM to support their 6G development efforts.
Turning to CSG, we are supporting increasing number of applications requiring the security and precision location awareness of our ultra-wideband solutions across mobile, consumer, automotive and other markets. In mobile, our ultra-wideband placements are among many Qorvo's solutions supplied to Samsung and supported their Galaxy S24 flagship brand. In consumer markets, recent wins include a robotic lawn mower that leverages Qorvo's ultra-wideband to provide the precision location accuracy required to enable this application.
In automotive, customer engagements are expanding to enable a range of applications that leverage Qorvo's ultra-wideband radar capabilities. Automotive applications for ultra-wideband technology include secure access and digital key, as well as kick sensors and the reliable detection of both intrusion and occupancy. During the quarter, customer activity included an ultra-wideband design win enabling secure access for an EV manufacturer in North America.
In other automotive applications, we were selected to supply automotive Wi-Fi 6E solutions in support of a different North American EV OEM. We were also selected to supply our DVAC solution for an automotive OEM in Europe on a platform ramping in calendar 2025. For an EV OEM in Asia, Qorvo was selected to enable their 5G network access device with six solutions, each of which contain our low band, mid high band, ultra high band, diversity received, average power tracker and high performance BAW filtering.
Production for this program begins this year and the win is noteworthy as this 5G reference design will be marketed to additional automotive OEMs and Tier 1s. For Wi-Fi markets, we continue to roll out new technologies and solutions. We are migrating our newest and most advanced BAW technology across our Wi-Fi portfolio. We launched 6 GHz Wi-Fi 7 filters using our next generation BAW and we will soon launch Wi-Fi 7 iFEMs that combine our next generation BAW with our PA switch and LNA content in a single placement.
We also ramped our newest Wi-Fi 7 long nonlinear iFEMs for a Tier 1 network operator in the US and we sampled next generation, high efficiency Wi-Fi 7 iFEMs aligning with a leading mobile Wi-Fi chipset. Connected home applications, we began sampling our next generation matter SoC and we secured a design win with a leading network operator in the US to supply our BLE, Zigbee SoC to remote controls for home gateways. In four sensing touch sensors, we expanded our engagements in track pads and other consumer applications.
In ACG, Qorvo is unique in our opportunity to drive growth across major smartphone OEMs. Our largest opportunity remains dollar content gains at our largest customer. We have clearly invested to grow this account to represent a larger percentage of Qorvo's revenue and our continuing investments today reflect our confidence in our multi year growth opportunity.
Within the Android ecosystem, mass market smartphones are set to transition to 5G through the decade. We are the primary RF supplier to the Android ecosystem and our strong roadmap and multiyear collaboration positions us to benefit, as the Android ecosystem continues to transition to 5G.
During the quarter, Qorvo supported Galaxy S24 launch with a low band, mid high band, ultra high band, secondary transmit and receive tuning Wi-Fi and ultra-wideband solutions. This highlights the strength of our portfolio and the breadth of our opportunity at Samsung and we are pleased to support them across their flagship and mass market 5G smartphones.
For mass market Android 5G smartphones, we see strong pull for our recently launched low, mid, high band pad. Qorvo's LMH solution reduces surface area by 40% by combining in one placement the low, mid and high band main path content traditionally offered in two placements. We have expanded customer engagements to include the top four China based 5G Android OEMs and volume shipments are set to commence this calendar year.
To broadly support all customers with best-in-class portfolios, we continue to advance new technologies across our products. We are proliferating our next generation BAW technology across high performance discrete and integrated solutions. We also recently released a next generation LRT SAW process to complement our advanced BAW and SAW processes in select bands. The first module combining our LRT SAW and BAW filters will support a flagship launch later this summer.
In summary, the increasing emphasis on throughput, efficiency and size in Qorvo's markets is growing the content opportunity and demand for better performing, smaller, more highly integrated RF and power solutions. For customers in automotive, consumer, defense and aerospace, industrial and enterprise and broad markets, we are leveraging core strengths including our manufacturing scale, system level expertise and advanced packaging capabilities to expand our RF and power product portfolios and deliver outsized growth. For customers in the mobile market, we are addressing new product categories and expanding our SAM across tiers from the flagship tier to the mass market 5G tier, to capture a growing percentage of the total opportunity.
And with that, I'll hand it off to Grant.