Thank you, [Chamali?] .

Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss MaxLinear's third quarter 2026 financial results. Today's call is being hosted by Dr.

Kishore Seendripu, CEO, and Steve Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions.

Our comments today include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements regarding our guidance for the fourth quarter of 2026, including revenue, GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin, GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses, GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense, GAAP and non-GAAP income taxes, and GAAP and non-GAAP diluted share count. In addition, we will make forward-looking statements relating to trends, opportunities, execution of our business plan, and potential growth and uncertainties in various product and geographic markets, including without limitation, statements concerning the future financial and operating results, opportunities for revenue and market share across market share gains across our target markets, new products, including the timing of production and launches of such products, demand for the adoption of certain technologies, and our total addressable market.

These forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties, including risks outlined in the Risk Factors section of our recent SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, which we filed today. Any forward-looking statements are made as of today, and MaxLinear has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

The third quarter 2026 earnings release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at maxlinear.com. In addition, we report certain historical financial metrics, including, but not limited to gross margin, income or loss from operations, operating expenses, interest and other expense, and income tax on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis.

We encourage investors to review the detailed reconciliation of our GAAP and non-GAAP presentations and the press release available on our website. We do not provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance for future periods because of the inherent uncertainty associated with our ability to project certain future changes, including stock-based compensation and its related tax effects, as well as potential impairments.

Non-GAAP financial measures discussed today are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable GAAP financial measures. We are providing this information because management believes it is useful to investors as it reflects how management measures our business.

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

Kishore?

Thank you, Leslie, and good afternoon everyone. As the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout momentum continues, and as AI data center clusters continue to scale to unprecedented size and bandwidth requirements, we believe MaxLinear is emerging as a key enabler of next-generation connectivity technologies.

Demand for our optical data center connectivity and infrastructure solutions continues to strengthen, and we believe MaxLinear is in the early innings of a multi-year AI-driven growth cycle. Against this backdrop, our AI data center business continues to outperform our expectations.

In Q3, overall revenue grew 72% year on year, driven by accelerating adoption of our optical PAM4 products, expanding customer engagements, and strong execution across our infrastructure portfolio. Infrastructure as a category grew 210% year on year, and which is now larger than the rest of our revenue categories combined.

Reflecting this momentum, we are raising our 2026 optical data center revenue outlook to $250 million to $270 million. With strong visibility and bookings extending beyond 2027, we expect another significant step up in revenue next year.

Keystone, our 5nm CMOS 100 gigabit per lane PAM4 SerDes family, continues to ramp rapidly in high-volume production across multiple hyperscalers. Its industry-leading power efficiency and performance position MaxLinear at the center of today's 800 gig optical infrastructure deployments.

Looking ahead, we are seeing accelerating customer activity around Rushmore-based 200 gigabit per lane PAM4 1.6 terabit architectures, where qualification programs are advancing toward expected production deployments in 2027. Rushmore is building on Keystone's foundational success and is also expected to become a major multi-year growth driver.

Big Sky, our family of next-generation 400 gigabit per lane 3.2 terabit optical and electrical PAM4 interconnect technologies, will further catalyze growth as data center network speeds continue to accelerate beyond 200 gigabit per lane. Beyond PAM4 SerDes optics, we continue to broaden our AI infrastructure footprint across optical and electrical interconnects, retimers, control plane connectivity, telemetry, and power management.

This strong expansion of content inside the AI data center stack positions MaxLinear to participate across multiple layers of future AI data center architectures. Already, Annapurna, our 1.6 terabit electrical interconnects product family, addresses 1.6 terabit active electrical cable and on-board retimer applications for AI scale up.

Washington, our 200 gigabit per lane TIA platform, not only supports PAM4 DSP-based optics, but also non-DSP-based linear pluggable optics consisting of LRO, LPO, NPO, and CPO solutions. We expect initial Washington and Annapurna revenues in 2027, followed by a stronger volume ramp in 2028.

We are also excited about our AI rack commander portfolio consisting of USB, PCIe, UART connectivity bridges used for telemetry, power management, and protection solutions for rack-scale AI infrastructure. Rack commander expands our role beyond data movement and into the control plane of the AI data center.

Customers require advanced telemetry, monitoring, connectivity, and power control capabilities to maximize performance and efficiency, which is critical for infrastructure management. We believe this represents a significant long-term growth opportunity while expanding our strategic footprint.

Additionally, our XGS-PON hyperscale data center design win, which serves as the control plane connectivity network across multiple data centers, has completed qualification. Supported by secured backlog, we expect first deployments of this inter-data center control plane solution to start in 2027.

Separately, Panther, our storage accelerator platform, continues to gain momentum as customers seek more efficient AI infrastructure. By significantly increasing effective storage utilization and unlocking KV cache capacity for agentic AI applications, Panther enables customers to support larger AI inference workloads without increasing storage infrastructure spending.

We expect Panther revenue to roughly double this year, with potential for another meaningful increase in 2027. While AI data center remains our primary growth driver, we expect edge AI-driven upgrades to also drive growth in '27 and '28 for our wireless infrastructure and broadband access and connectivity solutions.

These include Sierra single-chip 5G RAN remote radio unit solution, our millimeter-wave and microwave backhaul RF and modem SOCs, and XGS-PON fiber broadband home gateways. Both broadband and connectivity categories delivered sequential revenue growth in Q3, driven by large-scale deployments of fiber PON and Wi-Fi 7 gateways at major Tier 1 service providers in North America and Europe.

In closing, accelerating hyperscale deployments, increasing optical connectivity content, new product ramps, and broader participation across the AI infrastructure stack give us confidence that MaxLinear is still in the early stages of a significant growth cycle. Our strategy is focused on strengthening our leadership in high-speed data center connectivity, expanding into adjacent infrastructure markets, and increasing our content share and strategic relevance with hyperscale customers.

With strong customer momentum, great backlog visibility, and a differentiated technology portfolio, we believe MaxLinear is well positioned to deliver sustained growth and long-term shareholder value. With that, let me turn the call over to Steve Litchfield, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer.

Steve?

Thanks, Kishore. Total revenue for the third quarter was $218.1 million, up 29% from $168.8 million in the previous quarter, and up 72% from $126.5 million in the third quarter of 2025.

Infrastructure revenue for the third quarter of '26 grew to approximately $125 million, broadband revenue grew to approximately $53 million, connectivity revenue was approximately $25 million, our industrial and multi-market revenue was approximately $15 million. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin for the third quarter were 58.7% and 60% of revenue.

The delta between GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin in the third quarter was primarily driven by $2.5 million of acquisition-related intangible asset amortization. Third quarter GAAP operating expenses were $97.8 million, and non-GAAP operating expenses were $66.5 million.

The delta between GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses were primarily due to stock-based compensation and performance-based equity accruals of $28.8 million combined, and acquisition-related costs and other costs of $2.3 million. With the strong growth in our business, coupled with continued spending discipline, we have delivered significant improvement in our GAAP and non-GAAP operating margin over the past 12 months.

GAAP operating margin for Q3 2026 was 13.9%, and non-GAAP operating margin in Q3 was 29.5% of net revenue. GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense during the quarter was $2.1 million and $2 million.

GAAP diluted EPS for Q3 2026 was $0.30 per share. Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.62 per share.

In Q3, net cash flow used in operating activities was approximately $13.6 million. We exited Q3 of 2026 with approximately $109.9 million in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash.

This included a substantial prepayment for wafers supporting rising demand for our data center products for which we have committed order backlog throughout 2027. Our days sales outstanding in Q3 was approximately 31 days versus 28 days in the previous quarter.

Our days of inventory was down in the quarter from 123 days to 111 days. Finally, today we announced that we have amended our existing credit agreement to increase the amounts available under the revolving credit facility by $70 million to $200 million.

With this facility, our total available liquidity is much improved, giving us additional flexibility to address further customer demand and other growth opportunities. This concludes the discussion for our Q3 financial results.

With that, let's turn to our guidance for Q4 of 2026. We currently expect revenue in the fourth quarter of 2026 to be between $240 and $260 million.

Looking at Q4 by end market, we expect strong growth in infrastructure driven by data center optical interconnects. We expect broadband and connectivity end markets to be down seasonally, while industrial multi-market end market is expected to be up.

We expect fourth quarter GAAP gross margin to be approximately 58% to 61%, and non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 59% and 62% of revenue. We expect Q4 2026 GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $96 million to $101 million.

We expect Q4 2026 non-GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $65 million to $70 million. We expect both our Q4 GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense to be in the range of approximately $3.5 to $4.3 million.

We expect a $1.3—I'm sorry, $1.5 million tax benefit on a GAAP basis, and non-GAAP tax provision of approximately $1.5 million. We expect our Q4 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted share count to be approximately 99.7 million each.

In summary, our quarterly performance highlights the continued strength of our optical product portfolio and the accelerating momentum across several growth drivers within our infrastructure business. The progress and innovation we have achieved in this area have been transformative, and we believe we remain in the early innings of a multi-year growth cycle marked by expanding revenue and increasing operating leverage.

We are excited about the opportunities ahead and remain confident in our ability to deliver sustainable long-term value for shareholders. With that, like to open up the call for questions.

Operator?

Yes. Thank you.

Kishore, Steve, congrats on the strong results. I guess my first question is on the PAM4 DSP side.

You upped the number there for calendar '26. Based on my rough math, I think it'd be running at about a $100 million a quarter run rate.

As we think about '27, is $400 million plus a good number? How should we think about the mix next year between 800 gig and 1.6T?

Thank you.

Yeah. Hey, Tore.

This is Steve. I don't think we're planning to give guidance in the out year today, but certainly, I do believe you've seen us with some very strong growth coming from our optical DSP business.

I think we're actually doing a really great job on the market share standpoint. I think as you look into 2027, you're starting to see the momentum pick up.

I would expect to see us outgrow the market in 2027.

Very good. Thank you for that.

Then as far as customer diversification, I noticed you didn't have any 10% customers this quarter. I had a question specifically on your optical DSP business.

How should we think about the composition there by amount of customers, module makers, geography? Any color you could share with us on how diversified that business is becoming real-time?

Thank you.

Thank you, Tore. I think when you go to the first order of diversification for us, it's really exciting that now we are transitioning from 800 gig fully established as a growth vehicle and market share gains, and we are in strong qual cycles on 1.6 terabit Rushmore products.

Not just only in optical products, but we're in a strong qual cycle on electrical products as well at the 1.6 terabit speeds. That's the first layer of diversification, if you will.

We expect in the near-term Rushmore to start picking up revenue in 2027. If you look to '28 and '29, it's going to be a massive growth driver for us, in addition to Keystone at 800 gig, still growing for us as well.

That's the first order of diversification. The second part is that our revenues are quite broad-based.

It's across all the major module makers. We have a growing set of module makers who are also engaged in 1.6 terabit, beyond our 800 gig product lines.

The same applies on the data centers as well. Our penetration of geographically in Asia and the US is increasingly now.

The momentum on the designing cycles is starting to shift towards 1.6 terabit. I think the US is in a more advanced phase of 1.6 terabit deployments.

We naturally expect the US to become an increasingly strong driver or value proposition in the optical module space as well.

Great. I'll go back in line.

Thank you.

Hey, thanks. Thanks, guys, for taking the question, and congrats on the continued good progress.

It's cool to see. I guess two if I could, Kishore, just sort of sticking there on the hyperscaler diversification.

Maybe this is partly clarification as well. You've said in the past 1.6T production shipments is really a mid-'27 dynamic.

How much of the business between now and then in 800G kind of if any is from US-based hyperscalers? It's just even anecdotal, and I have a quick follow-up.

Thanks.

Ananda, we have never broken down that revenue. We never do that.

However, it's pretty broad-based. Sufficed to say, as 1.6 terabit revenue start ramping and the initial revenues actually in early '27 and stronger ramp in the second half, the US data centers will start becoming very important both on a static snapshot basis and also from a trajectory basis.

Because the US is the one that's going to adopt 1.6 terabit a much earlier cycle than their Chinese counterparts, right? I think that what we take extreme satisfaction and joy in is that 1.6 terabit traction is quite across the board substantially.

The US data centers are just beginning to start ramping 1.6 terabit outside of an NVIDIA and a Google in that order, right? Our supply diversity across the various speed nodes, across 800 gig and 1.6 terabit on the supply lines, including the fabrication process, really puts us in a unique position where within our company, we're not competing across product lines for the same technology node.

In a sense, we should be able to win this race in terms of becoming a major provider in 1.6T.

That's good context. I appreciate it.

That's helpful. Then the quick follow-up is you mentioned NPO, CPO, is there a useful way for us to think about your SerDes participation NPO, CPO, if even just kind of from a paradigm approach, how involved you expect to be and what ways you expect to be involved?

The question's been coming up and it'll be, kind of relevant 12 months from now. Thanks.

Okay. If you look forward, you see a future where all the alphabet POs will be in coexistence with the PAM4 SerDes-based optical pluggables, right?

We have seen that the shoreline density and power consumption scenarios will drive a certain volume of the speed connections to the optical-based what I call incarnations, right? Be it an NPO or an LRO, right?

If you look at the LRO, our DSP naturally lends itself into a full-blown participation. We believe that in the US, LRO is a real option at the 200 gig per lane.

I believe it'll be a major option in the 400 gig per lane as well. That's my particular view.

Then if you look at CPO has gotten delayed because the challenge of the optics in a hybridized co-packaged configuration, a huge problem. Therefore, I think NPO supplants what we were thinking about as CPO.

NPO, the advantages of maintenance, modularity, diversity of suppliers for the product, as against being locked to the ASIC players on the switch side or the GPU side. I think it's a natural place where the ecosystem goes.

I think the NPO will be big. How big, I cannot speak, but I would say on a snapshot basis in 2030, you should expect 60% to 70% pluggable, 20% NPO, and 10% all various forms of it.

That's my personal view, not a market view. I think we'll be a major player in NPO and LROs, which will be the natural ideally suited for low-power applications versus an LPO in the future as the speeds increase.

Okay?

That's great context. Thank you.

Yep.

Hey, guys, congrats on the progress. It's been great performance.

Kishore, maybe can you talk about your visibility into '27? If you're not going to talk yet about the scale of your optical ramp, can you maybe just talk about your bookings or your lead-time visibility for the next few quarters?

Steve, you want to take a shot at it?

Sure. Cody.

Look, we have great visibility, as I'm sure you've heard from others in the industry. We're booking products throughout '27 into 2028.

Lead times for optical product are 26, 28 weeks, but customers are certainly coming in and placing orders out much further than that, just kind of given they want to secure supply. You've seen a lot of our upsides that we've delivered.

I think you'll continue to see more of that growth in '27.

Steve, maybe just continuing with you, can you just bridge your next gross margin thoughts between mix, pricing, manufacturing costs, and product transition over the next couple quarters?

Sure. Gross margin, as we've been making some nice progress, kind of moved up from 58.

We delivered on 60% this quarter, our guidance at 60.5. I think we're really seeing some nice progress, kind of despite some of the cost increases that we're seeing across our entire ecosystem here, I guess.

Some of that we've been able to pass along to the customer. I think our cost structure is actually just very good.

As the mix continues toward more infrastructure products, I think you will see our gross margin continue to trend up.

Excellent. Thank you, guys, and congrats.

Thanks, Cody.

Hey guys, thank you for the question. Regarding DSP, last cycle, maybe the 400, 800 cycle, DSP was much more widely available.

Transceivers had shorter lead times. People could wait for land power shell to be built before making what was kind of a last minute order on optical.

Do you guys view that as different now, with longer lead times? Does this kind of perhaps create an effect where people are ordering ahead, more significantly, perhaps even over-ordering, they can't get their AI data center up without these transceivers, does this become perhaps the golden screw that people are willing to purchase more of than they might need, just for the initial deployment?

Chris, I don't think so at all. Not at all, actually.

You have to keep this in mind that, even on the supply chain, nobody is signing real long-term agreements. You have strict discipline on lead time.

There's a lot of manufacturing shortage. It is really naturally organizing the entire supply chain into very disciplined on a you'll only get what you need now sort of behavior.

I don't think there's any double ordering. Then you get back to our DSP world.

We are the only pure-play DSP provider in the optical pluggable. Wafer capacities are allocated by companies by the major foundry.

If you're in 5nm, for example, you're welcome to choose how you distribute your silicon between switch, pluggables, GPUs, TPUs, and so on and so forth, right? Every company gets to prioritize what is in their best value interest.

I would say that that is not the case at all, number one. Number two, is that, even to place over-ordering, the data center guys are very, very disciplined about creating pure supply chains.

What I mean by that is, the optics, the DSP for a particular qualification at a data center is very unique, so that they don't cross-corrupt the supply chain. I think it's golden, it's not a screw, but it's a bolt.

There's a bolt there that is really, really fastening the cantilever bridge quite well here. That's for those in San Francisco Bay Area, but yeah, it's looking pretty good.

Excellent. Maybe a follow-up there and a second question.

I guess first of all, obviously you guys have some unique 4nm DSP capacity that others don't. Can you talk about how you see constraints in the optical market playing out?

Is it DSP? Is it other parts, lasers, etc.?

If you could talk about your place there. Then secondly, DSP in the world of CPO, some believe it's less meaningful.

Would like your take, Kishore, as a technologist.

Ooh, okay. Chris, there's a lot of questions of there that you posed here to me.

I will take the first one, which is basically related to supply. I think the optic supply is easing.

We are really constrained by foundries on the DSP supply. The data center buildout is really accelerating.

People talked about TAM units for optical pluggables, no matter what flavors, is in the order of 120 million units. Now they talk about '27, '28 maybe in 200 million units.

I'm not keeping count anymore, right? However, the fab capacity is not coming online.

These are huge multi-year efforts. There's really, really a fab capacity shortage, I would say.

The DSP supply is a pretty strong supply constraint, and the opportunity on the CPO stuff really is a scale upside, which is a greenfield opportunity for us. I do believe the NPO is going to be the more bigger success driver than a CPO.

In an NPO scenario too, as well, as you go to higher speed longer term, there'd be a DSP required just like an LRO configuration on the what you call a half DSP. Because we can all agree now that the LPOs are really, really a very small fraction, point technology, and they don't have legs for the future.

Right? We have product portfolio that spans TIAs, we have drivers, and also we have announced products along those various categories.

I feel we are very well positioned whichever way the industry goes, and we'll have a full portfolio.

Awesome. Thank you, Kishore.

Yes.

Hi. This is Sam Salfino on for Karl Ackerman.

First, based on your extended visibility into calendar '28, can you provide any color on how we should think about the relative growth rate between 800 gig and 1.6T? Should we expect 400 gig to grow through calendar '27?

I'll take that. This year, our optical growth is almost all 800 in the first half.

As we've stated, and Kishore mentioned earlier, 1.6T starts in '27, but it'll have a much bigger growth year in 2028. What is the mix in '28?

I think it's substantially 1.6. Maybe you'll see 800 kind of trailing off, but potentially it can sustain as well and up until probably 2029.

We see significant growth in '27 as well as '28 on both of those.

Got it. Thank you.

Hey, guys. Congratulations on the results and strong DSP outlook.

I guess, Steve, for you, it looks like the prepaid assets on the balance sheet increased by about $50 million in the September quarter. I assume that that's probably the large majority of that are your prepayments that you talked about.

Given it sounds like you're fairly well booked for calendar 2027 now in the DSP business, do you feel the prepayments and the wafers you've secured support that 2027 backlog? Do you still have more work to do in the fourth quarter in terms of prepayments and securing wafers to meet the demand you're seeing for calendar '27?

Hey, Quinn. Yeah.

We've talked about this a little bit before. Similar to others, the prepayments mostly on the wafer side.

There's lots of other things going on out there. On the balance sheet, isn't just TSMC.

There's other things on prepayments as well that we don't break out. I talked earlier about visibility in '27.

Backlog, as you would imagine, is very, very good in '27 and into 2028. Look, I expect prepayds to continue to go up from here as our revenue projections continue to go up as well.

I think that's part of the reason why we increased the revolver itself, just to make sure that we can capture all of that upside capacity that's coming from increased market share that we've gained.

Got it. Thanks.

Then a follow-up. Steve, I think at some of the investor conferences over the past few months, you've estimated your DSP share currently maybe in the 5% to 7% range.

Do you think you're at the high end of that or potentially above that by the end of 2026 just based on the strong backlog you're seeing and the increase in the DSP forecast this year?

Hey, Quinn, this is Kishore. I I think it's very hard to estimate share given yeah, thank you.

I think it's very hard to estimate share given the accelerating demand on units as well. If I'm looking backward, then I think we're well above that number.

If I'm looking forward, maybe we made more progress beyond that share percent, but I don't know at what level we are. Can I say what we would look like two years from now?

Sure. It should be in the teens, for sure, right?

I think that's a very backward-looking number. For on a share percentage basis, on a backward-looking TAM basis, it should be larger.

On a forward-looking basis, very hard to estimate because the numbers are moving all around. Sufficed to say, we are gaining share every day.

I think in 12 to 24-month window, we we could be neck and neck with one of our two competitors. Right?

That's the hope, that's the goal, and that's the momentum.

Excellent. Thank you, Kishore.

Hey, good afternoon. I'll add my congrats on the results and the outlook.

Now I want to go back to You're welcome. To kind of market growth, market share-type discussion.

Steve made a comment earlier in the call about outgrowing the market. I think we may have a baseline there.

Marvell talked about kind of the AI interconnect unit for them growing, call it 65% on a CAGR through 2030. That's coincidentally what MaxLinear is growing overall in '26.

As we look at the optical DSP business, is it fair to use something like that as a baseline, and when you say you want to outgrow the market, just based on your run rate, it seems like we should be thinking closer to a double here than anything else for '27. I just kind of wanted to bounce that reasoning off of you.

No, Tim. I feel very confident we're outgrowing the market which I think is supportive of what you're asking, yes.

We can't speak for Marvell's numbers.

Okay. I'll go on and ask this one anyway then, which is, yeah, I think your market share is 6% here.

If you take those forecasts out to their conclusion, they're talking about, I don't know, a $15 billion optical DSP market in 2030. If you get into double-digit share before that, you should have a billion-dollar business on your hand pretty quickly.

I want to bounce that one off you too, and then that'll be it for me.

Tim, we can't comment on that, right?

Yeah. The numbers you're talking about, look, there's a lot of growth here.

Kishore commented earlier about the transceiver growth. People are talking 200 million units next year.

These numbers make a lot of sense, as Kishore stated, it being up in the teens over the next couple of years very achievable. I think we are doing a great job.

I think you've seen that from us in 2026, but I would say it's just getting going. You're going to continue to see through that in '27, '28.

Thanks very much.

Hi, guys. This is Travis Poulson on for Joe.

Thanks for taking my question. Steve, I just wanted to switch gears to broadband.

You spoke of seeing some seasonal softness in 4Q 2026. Just curious how we should think about this moving forward into the first half of 2027 into the second half of 2027 and just the overall broadband recovery in general.

Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks, Travis.

Yeah. We actually feel pretty good.

We do see some seasonality in Q4, certainly, but as far as '27 goes, just as we had talked about previously with the telcos' spending, but then also our market share gains on the PON side, we do expect to see growth in 2027. Feel very good about that.

Got it. Thank you.

That's it for me.

Thank you. Now that the basic questions are out of the way, I just had a few more specific follow-ups.

Kishore, I think you said you expect 1.6T revenue already first half of next year. I think in the last quarter, you talked about maybe middle of the year.

What changed there? Is it the market that's accelerating earlier?

Is it based on some new design wins? Any clarification there.

By the way, does that include DSP and TIA, or is it just DSP?

Tore, obviously it's been three months and we do not know where we would be, but I think there's an initial design win that will start shipping in the first half. The exact amount of quantities is not clear, but it's meaningful in the sense that it sets up the second half very nicely.

Also, second part also is correct what you asked. There are accelerating design qual momentum going on.

Somewhat we are bottlenecked by our own ability to support multiple quals simultaneously. We're all going through resource bottlenecks from that angle.

That narrative is also about accelerating on the qual windows across the module space into the data center cycles, right? I think that's what gives me more.

Then we also have commitments both for DSP and TIA in these design wins. It's not just our DSP alone.

Obviously, we live in a world where we want to attach our own TIA to our own DSP for selfish reasons, beyond there's a great performance advantage and cost-saving for our own customers in terms of power efficiency and the total BOM efficiency, right? I think all the three questions you asked, sir, are a strong affirmative response.

Very good. Last one is on pricing or content.

We're hearing as you go from 800 gig to 1.6T that maybe prices could be 2x. You're obviously going to be shipping more than the DSP with the TIA.

In your case, I guess, you could potentially have more than 2x as the market goes from 800 gig to 1.6?

You're absolutely right. If you just take the proverbial 2x, historically never stuck when you change speeds, right?

This time, it's sticking, right? The ASP on the DSP is more or less doubling, and then we have TIA that we do not add before.

All in all, we'll be growing more than a 2x on the ASP number. The TIA is not just a TIA, right?

It's got smarts that really has what I call trajectory guide to our NPO strategy and our CPO strategy and our LPO strategy and LRO strategy. It's an all-in-one deal in the MaxLinear TIA world.

Okay?

Great color. Thank you.

Yep.

Hey, guys, just a couple follow-ups as well. Maybe, Kishore, can we go back to that comment you made about constrained ability to support more than one qual?

Is this just wafers out of Samsung that you're talking about, and what's the ability to address that so that you can get quals lined up a little faster?

Oh, the quals has got nothing to do with wafer supply, right? Let's say you have 10 module makers, and that's not unrealistic.

Then all of the 10 want to go simultaneously get their modules ready to go to the data center qual. We'll have to pick and choose, right?

Because at the end point, multiple module makers are targeting the same data centers as well. That constrains us in terms of how we prioritize our own internal resources to get qual ready.

That was the contest I talked about, right? These are pretty complicated.

People simplify it and call it a pluggable. Sounds so trivial, but these are one of the most complex technologies that chip people have ever developed in over the last 20 to 30 years.

You ought to think about this in not just in terms of pluggable alone, you also have to think about interoperability with the switch, the other two vendors of silicon, and the pre-existing 800 gig silicon as well. Not just 1.6 terabit.

It's pretty complicated. We're constrained in how many we can activate at the same time.

You, of course, sequence and prioritize them. That's the constraint I was referring to.

Gotcha. Thank you for that clarification.

Then just lastly, with Washington, can you talk about your expected attach rates to Rushmore and the opportunity for standalone as you get into '27 and maybe looking into '28? Then maybe the same thing with your AECs.

Can you talk about a mix of onboard versus cables for Annapurna?

Okay. Good question.

I would say, if you take the short-term window versus, let's say, a year-out window, the TIA attach rate answers would be quite different, right? In the short term, let's say it's an 80% attach rate, and in a year and a half from now, I know it's around the corner, it'll be 100%, and we hope it to be more than 100%, right?

It's a TIA that works with other DSPs as well. There's only one other real TIA vendor that is meets the performance benchmarks that you need for a 1.6 terabit type of product with the power envelope that you need to meet.

That is the truth, despite what anybody can tell. We hope to be the other guy outside of the one guy, and we have validation to show that.

We expect the attach rate to be 100% at least, and more in a year and a half from now. Right?

That's the number one answer. Could you repeat that for me, please?

I just forgot.

Annapurna. Just Annapurna, the cables.

Annapurna. Annapurna, look, yeah, it's an active electrical cable, right?

There's one large leader, which everybody knows, it's Credo. They're 93% or maybe 99% of the entire AEC cable market.

I think the market is diversifying now because the problem is getting a lot more complicated. There're going to be multiple AEC vendors, and our solution will be a pure silicon play to selling it to a cable maker or somebody who makes what I call the paddle card for the AEC.

Our revenues for the AEC will not be as large as selling a whole cable, but it will correspond to what an AEC market would dictate in terms of silicon pricing inside it. I would think that it'd be similar pricing as our PAM4 DSP for optical.

We expect not to get a big share, let's assume. We are planning around one or two big data centers, and then a share of those guys through intermediaries, and so I think we should be able to get to 20% to 30% in the 1.6 terabit cycle somewhere in the next couple of years.

We won't expand it to multiple data centers, right? It'll be only one or two data centers in the US.

Excellent. Thanks for the help, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you, [Chamali?] , and thank you all for joining.

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