Good afternoon, and welcome to Sivers Semiconductors Capital Markets Day 2022. We have a very packed schedule for you today, and, let's move on into the agenda. We'll start off with me, Anders Storm. I am the Group CEO, and I've been working now for Sivers soon in eight years and been in the telecom, datacom industry for over 25 years. We will have our MD, Wireless, Mike Noonan. After that, we have one of our very exciting customers, ALL.SPACE, with the CEO, Jon Finney. We're gonna have a short break. After that, we will have our MD from Glasgow, Billy. We have Charlie from Ayar Labs, also a very exciting customer we'll tell you more about. We have our group CFO, Håkan, who is here as well, and we do Q&A.
We will also inject Q&A questions after the customer presentations because they might have to leave in a certain timeline. If you're sending questions to this, please do that ahead of the questions from the customers. Also today, please note that we have a lot of customers right now and people have asked me if we can talk about all customers and so we don't really have time for that in that sense, so we'll focus on what we have in the presentation and try to answer sort of specific questions if that's the case. We cannot talk about all of them here today. This is the people who will present today. I am especially happy to see that we have two very interesting customers, upcoming companies.
Both companies are sort of startups in a sort of a later phase, C-round type of things, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and so forth. It's gonna be very interesting today with them sharing two very different areas, but very, very exciting technologies. Let's start with a video here that will explain a bit what Sivers Semiconductors is doing and give you a very high overview where we are and which space we're working in.
All efficient products and strong commitment, we achieve great things. With focus on semiconductor technology, our passion goes from innovation at every stage, all the way to our customers' success. It's a passion for customers, products, and technologies, and how they contribute to a more connected and safer world. That's us. Passionate at the heart of innovation. Today, broadband and being connected is equally important as water and electricity. Without reliable technology, there will be impact on your everyday life.
At worst, with devastating consequences. Sivers Semiconductors is a vital link in the chain to secure a connected and safer world. With small, efficient products and strong commitment, we achieve great things. With focus on semiconductor technology, our passion goes from innovation at every stage, all the way to our customers' success. It's a passion for customers, products, and technologies, and how they contribute to a more connected and safer world. That's us. Passionate at the heart of innovation.
That is a video who shows you a lot of the technology actually that Sivers is providing, and we are providing, to be very clear, sort of the technology between the sort of the digital world and the analog world. We're making the chipsets both in the 5G world, in the SatCom world, and in the Photonics world of lasers, the technology that sends out the signals in the world. Here you can see some of the. You know, sort of in the high-speed broadband, wireless broadband stuff, we are providing the antennas and the chipset that sends that out in there. The same with the lasers. We provide them within these things and send these into the different fibers or within Silicon Photonics, it's sent as optical I/O that we'll hear more about from Ayar Labs.
As well as the car you saw that almost crashed here using, for example, LiDARs or radars for autonomous driving. We are the physical interface to the reality, basically. Which areas are we working in? We are working really hard in the areas where sort of some of these mega trends for the future is actually placed. High-speed broadband, gigabit broadband and upwards. Even today, you will hear Ayar Labs talk about 2 Tb solutions inside computers. That's where we wanna be. Autonomous driving with radars and LiDARs to create a way of secure travel with cars without anyone driving the car. Silicon Photonics, merging the technology that has been silicon and photonics into one, which is a very new thing, and we are the Photonics in Silicon Photonics. Satellite communication, same there.
We're making the solutions that ALL.SPACE will tell you about, the specific chipsets that connect the world in that sense. Augmented reality, we can do sensors, high-speed broadband, and everything for that. We can also make sensors for health monitoring, measuring things in the air quality, and all of those things. We have a lot of different solutions that you now can use. For you who haven't heard so much about us before, Sivers Semiconductors has two different business areas. One is within Wireless, where we have 5G, SatCom, and emerging markets. The other one is within Photonics, where we have lasers for all different things I just talked about. We have been building this company now over a seven, eight year period from a company who was sort of small volumes and so forth into these mega trends and mega markets for the future.
We already secured a hefty number of customers. We have 43 design wins in the Wireless segment, everything ranging from companies who make tractor-trailer solutions, Wireless broadband, to different kind of radars or satellite communication. In the other markets, like the Photonics market, we have customers ranging from the largest Fortune 100 companies in the world making consumer electronics all the way to LiDAR solutions for autonomous vehicles and so forth. Today, we are about 140 people, head office out of Stockholm, listed on Nasdaq Mid Cap today, Stockholm. We also have offices, main office of our Photonics business out of Glasgow, where we have our own fab.
We also now with the acquisition of MixComm, which was a very, very important acquisition for us, we have also created a foothold in the U.S. with a main office outside of New York. Of these 140 people, there are 42 PhDs. Making this connection between the digital and analog world is a very difficult technology to do, and it's really hard to make the right type of technology. It's really important to have these kind of things. Another thing is that we've been working now out of Sweden and out of Europe for quite some time. We have a strong investor base here, but now we're also working a lot on getting a strong investor base in the U.S., where we recently acquired MixComm, which I think will be sort of a step in there.
70% of our sales is in the U.S., so it's really important for us to be there. We had a cash position of 108 million SEK, about $11 million a few weeks ago when the dollar was lower. That is sort of a really important piece of the puzzle as well to drive the company, of course. If we look back a bit here, what has happened over the years since 2016 when we put in this new strategy and it created all of these things. We actually acquired the Photonics company for $23 million in 2017. From that, we've been sort of building and re-engineering that company.
Billy, as the new CEO, have done a lot of work, especially in the Silicon Photonics business, which wasn't really there at that point at all. From that point, of course, we have got all these design wins, all these Fortune 100 customers and so forth. We also moved from Aktietorget to Nasdaq First North, and now to Nasdaq main list. We have been in different phases, but now I will say with the last sort of acquisition with MixComm, we are sort of transforming the company into new business verticals like satellite communication and tier one customers as well in that phase. We're also now getting into phase where we need to see sort of volume coming in the future from all of these design wins and so forth. That's sort of the next phase getting there.
We have got the first volume orders. We got the SEK 20 million order here in January this year and so forth. We are getting there, but it's going slowly and gone a bit slowly due to the pandemic and the semiconductor crunch and the economy in general. We're getting closer and closer on that. What have happened during during this year so far? We have had the first half. We increased sales by 34.4%. Quite okay under the circumstances in the market. The transformative acquisition I talked about with MixComm has been finalized and integration is complete, which is really interesting. We have got multiple orders from our Fortune 100 customers who's been with us now for almost four years. SEK 34 million is a record this year, and in total, SEK 130 million.
This is just in development cost to get to a sensor for their future solutions. I have never been more sort of positive in the way that we are getting closer and closer than I am today when I'm seeing these orders and what's happening with that customer. Also, this five-year order I mentioned, we also got our third Fortune 100 here in May, a very exciting large, technology company from the U.S. as well. Also working with the upcoming future winners that you will see here today, like Ayar Labs and ALL.SPACE, for example, but also other Photonics winners in the radar and so forth. SatCom will be sort of a huge thing in the future, and I'm looking forward to hear what John will tell us about that.
As well as moving away from only being infrastructure on the 5G side, we now also have partnerships from a company in South Korea, for example, who do antenna in displays that you can put onto any consumer electronic device. In a few years, I hope that we'll be able to see us also in consumer devices on the 5G side, for example. To dig in a little bit on what are we doing and how are we working, and Håkan will also talk about this a bit, but we have two different legs in the company. One is the Photonics, where we actually have our own fab and we produce our own lasers. That's very important on that side. It's very hard to not have that and do good solutions. That's why we are very strong in that area.
On the other side of things, we are fabless, which is sort of another good thing where you can actually produce things without large capital investments in that sense. We do all of these things, and then it is our customers who builds the technology, put it together, and sell it to the end customer. We are way back in the value chain, which is sometimes hard, but it's also very growth model to be used if you really wanna grow heavily in the future. As I said, our guest today, John, who will talk about satellite communication. Everybody has seen these dishes you watch TV on and so forth. Now we're getting to flat panel arrays, and our technology with beamformers are perfect for that.
John will tell you more what they are doing in that area, which is very interesting. We have Ayar Labs that will change the inside of the computers from normal electricity between the CPUs to light, and we provide the light sources for their solutions, and that is also very exciting area, and Charlie will tell you more about that in his presentation. I think this is one of the sort of game changers for the future, and this will be with us all the way I think to really large technology changes in even PCs going way forward. Investment highlights. We are working in rapidly expanding markets with big growth. We have very little sales so far, so it doesn't really matter if it's $2 billion or $10 billion.
It's a lot of market that we can address with these technologies. We have completed the acquisition on MixComm, helping us securing even more superior technology in the 5G space as well as in the SatCom space. We have a leading heritage from our old businesses as well with the Fortune 100 companies in our Photonics business. We have continued next generation for the growth markets as well. We have a proven market strategy. We have brought in a lot of customers so far, and we are growing the company using that. Financial attractive and scalable, yes, we have in the future 40%-60% gross margin on hardware sales. That's the target. We have a large pre-funded NRE project where actually the customer in many cases fund all the work we're doing to get to these volumes in the future.
We have an efficient production with our own foundry, which you need to have in the Photonics business, but also being fabless in the 5G business is in a really good place with companies like GlobalFoundries, which is one of the major players in this area and are actually a shareholder as well. With that said, I want to present Mike Noonen, who is our interim manager in Wireless, and he will now take you through more details on the Wireless side. Thank you.
Very good. Thank you, Anders. Today I'm gonna talk about, you know, Sivers's millimeter wave innovations and how we're applying this to deliver what we think is the real 5G, but to markets so well beyond 5G. Next slide first. First I'm gonna start off with a Wireless market overview. Next slide. A bit of a recap of the markets that we serve with our millimeter wave, you know, products and technology. In the 5G space, you know, there's the licensed bands. These are frequencies, you know, that go from 24 GHz so on up through 28 GHz, 29 GHz, as well as other bands, such as 49 GHz.
We also have, you know, solutions, enterprise class solutions in unlicensed band, and this, you know, typically, you know, 60 GHz. Satellite communications, as Anders introduced, and we'll hear more from John Finney, was another market that we serve. We're also starting to move into what we believe are, you know, some emerging opportunities and very exciting opportunities such as radar using our millimeter wave technologies. Next slide. First, when it comes to the overall 5G rollout, and this is across all frequencies, you know, 5G is really rolling out worldwide with almost 80 countries having commercialized, you know, 5G or undergoing 5G trials. Next slide.
We're still at the early stages of 5G millimeter wave, where, you know, the U.S., you know, Japan and South Korea probably have the largest deployments, but still, you know, very early days with respect to the rollouts of these networks that'll deliver, you know, the 5G experience that many people expect. Next slide. Just to give you an indication on how this will roll out, you know, by the middle of this decade, about 50% of all, you know, new network deployments will be 5G. By the end of the decade, it'll actually be the majority and almost all new deployments of 5G networks will be millimeter wave. Next slide. Who are deploying these networks?
Well, you know, this shows the market share of, you know, the major, you know, Wireless infrastructure vendors, where Huawei you see there in the gold color, having the largest market share. Worth noting that's almost entirely, you know, within mainland China, and, you know, for a variety of reasons, you know, Huawei's market share has been trending downward. For the rest of the world, it's really, you know, Ericsson and Nokia, you know, providing about 50% of deployments with Nokia, you know, starting to grow substantially.
Worth noting, you know, some relatively new players when it comes to, you know, not only, you know, Wireless infrastructure, but growth, and Samsung and Fujitsu, you know, taking share and deploying, you know, networks for both, you know, 5G in the lower bands as well as millimeter wave. Next slide. One of the major trends that we think is going to accelerate, you know, this deployment is really the development and the evolution of Open RAN and what RAN is, radio access networks.
As you can see here in the charts on the upper right-hand side, you know, traditionally, well, all of the elements of a Wireless, you know, infrastructure and network deployment would have been for one vendor. With the emergence of Open RAN, you're starting to see that, you know, different vendors can participate and provide, you know, best-in-class product, you know, for different portions of the solution with companies, you know, like Intel and Dell, you know, being major providers and suppliers there. We think this is going to not only accelerate 5G in particular, but also the deployment of millimeter wave. Next slide.
When it comes to the other side of your 5G, and that's really the user equipment, about you know 50% of products that have been released have been you know mobile phones. What's interesting and quite exciting is you know the diversity of deployments of other applications and equipment you know such as fixed Wireless access. We also believe that there's going to be new applications you know such as augmented reality and virtual reality you know glasses and goggles so that really leverage you know the advantages of 5G with ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Also the low latency is very important in applications like gaming. Next slide.
When it comes specifically, you know, to the portion of the markets that we serve, you know, and the category is, you know, RF front-end market forecast, when you look at the, you know, the dramatic growth of 5G overall, you know, back, you know, pre-pandemic year to 2019, you know, and for 5G millimeter wave, you know, the growth is, you know, quite astounding. You know, going from about $50 million to, well, by the middle of this decade, about, you know, over $2.5 billion. Next slide.
Rounding out, you know, the market outlook, you know, we believe that the satellite communications and in particular, you know, the flat panel arrays which Sivers is focused on, is going to enjoy, you know, some dramatic growth. We actually think, you know, that it might be even more exciting than what's shown here. On the right-hand side, you know, showing just one application for radar, automotive radar, which already is a very large market, but is expected, you know, to triple over the next, you know, five to six years. Next slide. Having covered an overview of the markets that we serve, let's talk a little bit about, you know, the technology that we're using, you know, to address these exciting growth markets. Next slide.
First, when you think about, you know, 5G, well, there's three bands that you need to think about. You know, there's the low band, which is, you know, the sub-1 GHz, where there's the band that's, you know, you basically by its naming, you can tell what it is, you know, sub-6 GHz, and then millimeter wave. Next slide. It's really the millimeter wave, you know, that is enabling what people really expect when it comes to, you know, a new G and what 5G can mean. Well, millimeter wave, you know, delivers the highest bandwidth with the greatest capacity and the lowest latency. To give example of what this really means, well, let's go to the next slide.
Here's a study that one analyst did, you know, comparing 5G millimeter wave, you know, versus, you know, other Wi-Fi that, you know, you might have, you know, in your office or perhaps at home, you know, to a 5G sub -6 GHz 4G, and then a public Wi-Fi. You can see that 5G millimeter wave, you know, delivers what a downstream speed that's 30 x faster than public Wi-Fi and 20 times faster than 5G sub-6 GHz. We believe this is gonna be one of the reasons why, you know, the acceleration of millimeter wave is gonna be deployed just because it delivers, you know, such a dramatically better experience. Next slide.
We also believe that, you know, millimeter wave, you know, which has, you know, started deployment with mobile networks, is going to go, you know, basically everywhere. Next slide. You know, it's going to go into the office enterprise, you know, factory floor, you know, defense applications and automotive. Why is this? Well, you know, there's a general demand, you know, and really an insatiable demand for more Wireless capacity. It turns out, you know, because of this capacity, millimeter wave is the lowest possible cost, you know, for a service provider, you know, to deliver a gigabyte of data. The ultra-low latency is important, you know, for applications such as factory floor, you know, to manage robotic arms or, you know, be able to augment to automotive and autonomous driving.
One of the other reasons we believe it's going to go, you know, across, you know, so many markets and well beyond just the mobile networks is because it's going to provide, you know, much better security than what Wi-Fi, you know, can deliver. This is going to become, you know, even more important as we move into the, you know, to the future where, you know, people move, you know, from, you know, their mobile network, you know, to home, to enterprise. Having, you know, seamless security is going to be quite crucial. Next slide. What it was needed is, you know, really a better millimeter wave radio.
You see here, you know, some of the headlines as you know, 5G was starting to roll out, hard to find, RAN very hot, not very reliable, very expensive. Next slide. Well, we've identified our three major challenges to solve if we're really going to make the most of 5G and particularly millimeter wave. You know, first, being able to have a much larger range and getting well beyond the limited range of previous products. You know, solving the power consumption and the excessive power consumption that not only makes operations of mobile networks expensive but also undermines reliability. Then overall, you know, we need to bring down the cost.
Because if we can do that, you know, this is also going to accelerate the deployment of 5G and millimeter wave. Next slide. How does, you know, Sivers solve these challenges? Well, let's dive into that. Next slide, please. First, you know, we're delivering an RF front end that really is, you know, addressing, you know, two critical aspects of these challenges. You know, the first is, you know, output power, you know, per power amplifier. You see in this chart on the Y-axis, you know, that, you know, Sivers solutions, you know, provide, you know, 6 dBm-12 dBm better output power than compared to other technologies, well, that have been, you know, widely deployed.
In addition to having much better output power, it's much better power efficiency, you know, with you're 3-5 x better. This allows you the best of both worlds. You know, extended reach, but doing it in a way that's much more efficient, energy efficient and much more economical, you know, to operate and it improves reliability, you know, in a tremendous sense. Next slide, please. The superior performance of a higher output power and to a much better efficiency really have benefits, well, you know, and substantial benefits for our customers.
You know, the improved, you know, reach and the range of networks using Sivers's components, you know, can drop, you know, the capital expenditure, you know, dramatically, you know, compared to other technologies, you know, such as CMOS. Just being able to boost output power, you know, by 10 dBm, as you see in the chart on the left-hand side, you know, can reduce, you know, the CapEx required, you know, by millions of dollars per square kilometer. The middle chart shows, you know, by having a higher output power, we can increase the uplink, you know, very important with for applications like, you know, video conferencing that we're on here today, but also fixed Wireless access.
To improve that, you know, 2.5 x, again, compared to, you know, solutions using, you know, CMOS arrays. Because, you know, we require fewer elements, you know, to get the same output power, the cost can be much lower because, you know, there's fewer devices needed. Up to 75%, you know, with smaller arrays and reduction in the cost of goods sold, again, compared to competitive solutions. These are some of the ways that our technology dramatically impacts our customers as well as our customers' customers outcomes when deploying 5G millimeter wave. Next slide.
Another innovation that really is, you know, helping our customers, you know, deploy, especially in the higher frequencies, is being able to take all of the complex elements, you know, from the beamformer ICs, the power amplifiers, you know, very expensive, you know, PCBs, heat sinks, antenna arrays, and put them all into an antenna in package. Sivers is in partnership with GlobalFoundries and is now, you know, starting to sample, you know, the world's first antenna in package for infrastructure. We've been able to optimize, you know, the antenna spacing, making it more reliable and much, much less expensive compared to traditional solutions. Next slide.
We quite cleverly designed it so that, you know, one of these antenna in package, you know, what might be able to, you know, to be used, you know, for, customer premises equipment for fixed Wireless access. Next slide. By tiling them, you know, to get more output power, you know, they can be used, you know, quite easily and scaled, you know, for a small cell application repeater or, you know, for a full, you know, base station. This is a quite an exciting, you know, breakthrough to reduce the complexity and again, reduce the cost of millimeter wave deployments with our unique antenna in package. Next slide. By having, you know, the fundamental technology, you know, we really offer the broadest offering when it comes to 5G millimeter wave.
You know, from the beamforming ICs, you know, for base stations to RFICs, you know, for you know more customer premises equipment, you know, covering the full range of spectrum that is millimeter wave, both licensed and unlicensed bands, repeaters, modules, up/down converters, and the very unique, you know, antenna in package. You can see how, you know, Sivers's, you know, compared to other, you know, very important and very successful companies, Sivers's is the only one who covers all of 5G millimeter wave with these crucial technologies and products. Next slide. We reinforce that with what we think is, you know, the strongest ecosystem, you know, in the industry. Ranging from our founder partners as Anders, you know, mentioned and highlighted, with partners like GlobalFoundries.
You know, to, you know, your very close partners, you know, such as, you know, Rohde & Schwarz, as well as, you know, baseband partners, you know, such as NXP and, with, AMD Xilinx. This is quite important, you know, so that, you know, we can help our customers get to market, you know, much faster and do it with, you know, best-in-class products. Next slide. Here's a couple of examples of, you know, customers who are using, our technology and building on that ecosystem in a very exciting way.
Airvine is a very exciting company in Silicon Valley in the U.S. that's using, you know, Sivers's, you know, high output power, you know, for a 60 G radio that can start to replace wiring inside an office building. Being able to go actually through walls without having to pull, you know, a very expensive, you know, either cable or having to perhaps, you know, do construction, you know, to install your networks. You know, the Airvine with the WaveTunnel, you know, using, you know, Sivers's, you know, high output power 60 G solutions makes that very easy to deploy and do it, and Airvine we think is gonna be, you know, doing great things as they start to ramp up with their production. Next slide.
Another very exciting customer, you know, and really a new market and opportunity as Anders pointed out was with our partners, you know, KREEMO in South Korea, where they've taken, you know, Sivers' best in class efficiency and used it in a way, you know, to deliver unique products. We have one example is this 360-degree antenna system, you know, that not only solves the bi-directional challenges that previous millimeter wave solutions have had, you know, by being able to blanket a conference room with millimeter wave, it does it in a very efficient manner that doesn't require very expensive cooling technologies.
They've also, you know, taken, you know, our best in class efficiency and used it in a way to essentially, you know, turn, you know, the glass on perhaps a smartphone into an antenna. Again, solving, you know, the issue of, you know, having your hand, you know, perhaps, you know, block, you know, an antenna, you know, by essentially making that, you know, not an issue because the display, the glass is the antenna. Very exciting with developments, again, leveraging, you know, Sivers', you know, unique, you know, capabilities and do it in a way that we think is going to have a big impact, you know, very soon and with these high volume markets. Next slide.
As you've seen, you know, Sivers has, you know, we believe and what our customers tell us and our partners tell us are the best, you know, products for 5G licensed, you know, for base stations, repeaters, hotspots, fixed Wireless access, as well as 5G unlicensed. You know, the backhaul, you know, the transportation, our radar opportunities, and the only one that has our complete solution for millimeter wave infrastructure. Next slide. Our offerings go beyond that, and especially the very exciting, you know, market of satellite communications. Next slide. We believe that the industry in satellite communications is transforming from the mechanical dish to the flat panel antenna.
Now we're very excited to have John Finney, the CEO of ALL.SPACE, the company we believe is really leading this transformation and showing what can be done in the area of revolutionary and we think quite innovative flat panel antenna solutions for satellite communications. Let me hand it over to John and thank you so much for joining us.
Great. Thanks, Mike. Good to see you again, and good afternoon everyone. Delighted to take this opportunity to present what we're doing in ALL.SPACE, but also put a finer point on why we've chosen to work with Sivers as closely as we have, not just up to this point, but I think if I look out to the future, it's a relationship that's going to grow exponentially in terms of the influence that the relationship has to both of our companies. A little bit about ALL.SPACE, a little bit about the space industry to set the scene, set the context. ALL.SPACE is a C round, we're in the stage of our C round right now, pre-revenue, deep tech, mid-stage growth company.
Our mission is very, very simple to say, quite hard to accomplish. It's connect everything to everyone. To do that, we have set about pioneering a piece of technology, breakthrough technology that allows simultaneous access to all satellite networks in all orbits and all cellular networks concurrently. Whatever is there in terms of radio waves and opportunity to connect, we have a single device that doesn't have any moving parts that can do exactly that and hold as many connections as we require to everything that's out there. That is a radical step change for data communications globally. We really focus first and foremost in solving a big problem in space.
I'm sure you realize there are major new entrants that have come into view, so Elon Musk, Bezos, and they are essentially cash-rich investors that have an alternative business model aligned to the new satellite systems that they're placing in low Earth orbit. That's either dominating space tourism or it's ultimately commoditizing a launch vehicle in order to get to interplanetary exploration and more. That ultimately has caused all other incumbent satellite operator players to tip their hat in the ring, if it were, to compete on their own terms and invest heavily in next generation systems in both MEO, LEO and GEO and also highly elliptical orbits. Whereas historically, most satellites, in fact nearly all, were just several years ago on the geosynchronous arc.
In other words, the satellites are moving in line with the Earth's rotation. As you have orbits that are lower to Earth, they're effectively flying over the Earth's horizon. At medium Earth orbit, they're spinning around the Earth at four times a day. Low Earth orbit, it's eight times a day. That means there's a fundamental requirement to be able to track a satellite, even if you're in a stationary position on Earth, because the satellites are moving. In some cases, if you're in a mobile platform, you have to track satellites that are moving and fixed and stationary to the Earth's rotation. There's right now SEK 50 billion of capital that's being invested worldwide in satellite factories around the world, if you add up all of those players.
There is a real turning point for the industry, which is effectively space is opening up. That's really because of Elon Musk and the launch vehicle. Previous to the SpaceX launch vehicle, it was the equivalent of flying to Australia and then throwing away the plane. You can imagine the per seat ticket charge, and it's exactly analogous to that. Now getting into space and building new systems, there appears to be no end to it. Not just these players, but the European Union's constellation. I'm excluding Russia and China from the markets that we focus on. There is a continuous stream of filings and next generation capacity coming online. That means that the demand is a 3,000% increase guaranteed. It's a knowable fact within the next seven years. Space is opening up.
And yet there's a real challenge, which is every single antenna. Well, there's two challenges. Firstly, not one of these operators, despite being a specialist in global communications, can actually talk to another network in space, network to network, orbit to orbit. Therefore, if you wanted to converge those satellite systems, you'd have to do it from the ground, looking up to those satellites. There are two dominant technology platforms, one which Mike's mentioned, which is phased array, which is inherently single link. Whereby the only way to get multiple links is to essentially copy the entire circuitry and duplicate the cost from a very high bar. It's totally impractical. A phased array, for example, would cost more than a coach or a bus. It wouldn't open up the land transport sector. On the other side, there are these clunky parabolic antennas.
They've stood the test of time. Ultimately, they are again, single link. If you wanted to have the ability to access multiple orbits at the same time, you'd need multiple antennas, multiple real estate, you'd multiply your cost. In a moment where the industry is trying to open up, it is fundamentally the Achilles heel of the entire industry because accessing all of this capacity the way that we do, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, our ADSL jumping onto fiber, is ultimately the way that it should be. Solving that Achilles heel of existing antennas has been the mission that I've been on, having exited a MEO system called O3b to SES in 2016. I've been on that mission to pioneer a deep tech piece of innovation that will solve all of that. That was done in January.
Anybody that's seen the technology has entered into a supply contract with ALL.SPACE. We've solved this problem by a pioneering approach called transformation optics. They're optical lenses. You can't see through them, as you can see here, but they're invisible to microwave frequencies. It means that we can bend radio waves through this lens and create multiple beams going in multiple directions and by a process of feed selection, pick out the satellites that we want, as many as we want, track them continuously, bring down and aggregate all of that data into one place and send it on into the network. We have a very special modular approach. This is a tri-lens module which could fit in the palm of your hand. That's important because we intend to access the entire data ecosystem. In terms of our relationship with Sivers, think about volume.
Everything from IoT to hyperconnectivity, connected cars, commercial maritime, government land, sea and air and defense. Whereas every other current satellite technology on the ground today can only operate within a single niche. Certain types for aero, certain types for IoT, certain types for commercial maritime. The intention from the outset that I had was to design a piece of technology that would scale to create a billion-dollar revenue company. That required us to go deep tech as the answers weren't in the industry back in 2016. In that tri-lens module, the beating heart is Sivers. That started with our initial relationship with MixComm, where the frequencies that we're starting out with are 24 GHz-28 GHz.
It's so close to the most popular filed 5G frequency that from our point of view, it doesn't matter, which means, MixComm, as they were then prior to the Sivers acquisition, had the generic building blocks, the inherent IP that allowed us to sort of ride the coattails of a lot of work that had already been completed and then build on from that, which is the project that we have underway currently, which is, I'm pleased to report, is going very well. Ultimately where that takes us as a market opportunity, both for us and for Sivers, is that we're collapsing all of this.
If this were effectively an antenna system that we're having two links to two satellites with one as a spare with the necessary modems and mediation drives, we take all of that away, which is incredibly skilled, incredibly expensive, and we just have one single device, and it will connect to all things in space, and it's field-proven. Behind that, because of the work that we're doing with Sivers, we have a very, very advanced digital architecture, which allows us to add software services that you must have our unique hardware for. Simple example of that is in defense, Russia, as an example, in Ukraine is jamming GNSS receivers on the ground. Troops don't necessarily know where they are when that happens. It's GPS denial.
If you can connect to three satellites or more, well, you can reverse triangulate your position on Earth. Even when our GPS is denied, we can take the known positions of those satellites, track them, and then inform the end user, in this case, NATO forces, exactly where they are when their GPS denied, and that's software. It's software that relies on our unique hardware, and it's a digital architecture that's actually well-enabled by Sivers. That's part of the breakthrough. It's how the optics and the IC technology matches up. Very much relevant to this and what the future holds in our relationship with Sivers, this technology, that module which encapsulates the Sivers' integrated circuits, will transcend all of these verticals and hit economics and scale, which has not been seen by any one particular antenna company in the world historically.
It's a huge step change. We integrate cellular connections with all of this, so it's multiple connections, not just in space, but also terrestrially. That means things like land transport, rail, ubiquitous connectivity, enterprise class connectivity during your journey, during your commute to work. It's opening up those markets. We're adding software into that hardware as the next level of convergence. We're extending that communications with software services such as PNT. We're delivering cloud access, which is, we have high-performance computing integrated into this module as a into this antenna as an option, and a range of software services that offer operational intelligence. A lot of that comes down to the sophistication of the beamformers, which the back end of that module. I think we need to get these logos updated to Sivers.
The back end to this module tells you what you need to know, that Sivers is the beating heart of our technology behind the optical beamforming and has created a massive industry breakthrough. In terms of why we chose Sivers, really, you know, people counts for a lot in my view, right? These are complex undertakings, and the close working relationship with Sivers and formerly MixComm, if anything, has just motivated us to do more with Sivers, right? We are in an advanced stage of a negotiation which, you know, all being well, will have a meaningful impact on our business, but also Sivers. Going beyond the first project. That demonstration, which was a world first, we relied completely on Sivers' existing ICs.
We hadn't made any adaptations to those beamformers. The skill set and the know-how that's been demonstrated from the team is outstanding in terms of design. This is a really important one. What we're doing right now for U.S. Gov and NATO, where we have supply contracts in both cases, is resilient path communications. The moment that Russia fired the ASAT missile and took out one of their low Earth orbit satellites, the U.S. recognized that its own satellite systems are now vulnerable. As policy, they've now enforced and mandated a requirement to have multi-orbit connectivity from as many endpoints as possible, Army, Navy, Air Force, and that's all managed within the Space Force, and NATO is following suit.
If Russia, as an example, were to jam one of our links that were pointed off to a particular satellite, it won't matter. Firstly, we're already tracking them as an interferer. That's what we will do, and we'll be sending that information back into the NATO forces network. They should think before they transmit because we're actually, unlike other antennas, we actually go out and look for that interference and localize it and send that information back. We will, in the case that we're interrupted, just simply pass the traffic straight through onto another link which is already active. Resilient communications will stay within NATO forces regardless of the levels of frustration that near-peer rivals are trying to take. It's strategically important and for obvious reasons.
Therefore, working with Civils has given us a roadmap that basically meets our obligation to make sure our supply chain sits within NATO countries. That means continuous supply, and this is becoming a significant selling point for the company. Since Ukraine broke, the number one question is where are your chips made? Increasingly you don't want to say Taiwan if you're talking about your core IP, your core chipsets that you rely on. That's been a key element for us. Then the technical capability that Civils have is second to none, and some of the performance figures that we've seen most recently are ahead of anything that we've seen even in the defense sector.
We are generating results that have exceeded our own expectations and, long may it continue. Recap. Only device in the world to have connected to all orbits simultaneously. It's an architecture that unlocks full access to all major data verticals. That means volume. That means a lot of health in the relationship that we have with Sivers. Stacked with innovation, so we have lots of competitive moats that are built around our core IP. It sets us up for a long-term relationship. As a point of note, our first year production capacity, which starts at the end of this year, is already sold out. We have commercial and defense customers, so we will be buying lots of wafers and chips en masse from Sivers. We've raised SEK 160 million to date.
We're actually right now in the middle of C round funding, which is SEK 75 million-plus, insider-led and well-subscribed. We're just closing out, working towards closing out the C round over the next several weeks. So far, given the level of subscription, I'm feeling pretty good considering the market conditions. That's it in a nutshell. Thanks. Any questions? Happy to take them.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, John. Is this working? Good. Thank you for coming here.
Thank you.
It's fantastic to see you traveling this far to see us. I guess we have some questions here. I have some from the audience, and I have some of my own. Could you just tell us. You seem to be so far ahead of your competition. Can you tell us about your competition and how far ahead you think you are?
Yeah. Well, touch wood. We think that our core IP is unchallenged, the ability to create multiple connections without driving up the cost or the real estate. It's what we call a single source of truth. But if that were ever encroached, the beauty of deep tech, if you think this way, is you have the time window to build competitive moats around the core IP, which is where the value-added software services, the cellular integration, and the modularity and the way that we've designed the architecture. As this project's rolled on, you start to think very clearly about revenue diversity. Because if one thing that COVID just alone has told us, let alone the geopolitical environment, is you never know what the next year looks like.
There'll always be a market that's in boom for different reasons. If you can have a company that does get across that ecosystem, you're able to average out the peaks and the troughs. You know, that's just generally speaking how we look at things. I think that breadth plus the way that we've built competitive moats does put us ahead. We are in the execution phase. We are scaling up into manufacturing. There's still work ahead. There's still, you know. It's in the realm of execution risk, not down at the fundamentals. I think we're in a strong position and, you know, we've signed contracts with multiple NATO forces and big satellite operators to supply immediately off the production roll.
With two NATO forces, we're going immediately into an operational role, so that gives an indication of how far ahead we are.
Could you say something about any market share that you're aiming for in the future? Any year that you
Yeah. We don't really sort of focus on market share, you know, in sort of percentage terms, but I can say the revenue mix for us, it really starts out with defense because, well, it's a customer that pays retail. We're at the low volume of our production ramp, and so, you know, it's margins that basically keep companies of ours in good condition in the early years of production. We moved to aero. We create incredibly high value there. You know, government and aero combined will be around 30% of our revenue mix overall. We move into the enterprise, so particularly land transport, commercial maritime.
As the ecosystem matures, as these LEO and MEO systems are also fully up and in operation, there'll be so many satellites to choose from that we intend then to go into the hyperscale markets, where we don't have to scan as far, we don't have as much electronics. We can get to cost points that will enable things like IoT, AgriSAT, so agricultural autonomous vehicles, connected car, starting from media but then going down into predictive maintenance, predictive analytics. There's a sequence in our roadmap, but the main point is the module, the one that has the Sivers beamformers in there. That is common across every single product in our roadmap.
Coming back to that, the Sivers beamformer. They wanna be at the heart of innovation. They are really in the heart of your product.
Yeah.
Did anyone else come as far as you have come using Sivers, or what is your relationship?
The breakthrough is really in the optics as far as being able to connect to multiple satellites at the same time. Having Sivers alone won't allow for that to happen. However, what Sivers provides us is a significant increase in the per link performance versus any conventional phased array because they have the lowest noise figures, the lowest power figures, and they have leading-edge technology, which, you know, I think really comes, a lot of that comes from the requirements for 5G that sort of feeds that. We were really impressed with the capabilities that MixComm at the time had, and now we're working to expand that relationship with Sivers.
There is one question from the audience on the internet. It's actually from two persons, and they're asking the same question. If what's happening in Russia has made interest for your products go higher? I guess we all understand it's a yes on that. Could you quantify it in sales or something? That is also a question.
It's probably best not to. We have the U.S. and U.K. government on our cap table, and we certainly wouldn't want to reveal the nature of the deployments that we'll be involved in or the suitability of our technology for some of the platforms that are being considered. You know, it can be anything essentially, whether it's autonomous or whether it's crude. But you know, just from the outset, you know, if you look from the outside in, frankly, every other antenna that's out there right now that's using a dish, you know which way it's pointing, and that is an inherent risk to troops. Large, bulky antennas pointing in a direction in the new world of Earth observation is like giving the enemy a map.
It's saying, you know, not only are we transmitting from here, but we're also transmitting there, and that is now vulnerable. With ours, we're pointing in many different directions, connected to many satellites, but they don't know where, and they don't know to whom because you, there's no orientation to the terminal. We guarantee that the traffic gets through in the critical moments that matter because of that multi-link resiliency, and then we give them operational intelligence, so things like tracking jammers, nulling jammers, sampling the waveform and then passing that information back. There's a lot of PNT, as I mentioned before. We're trying to ultimately create a lot of optionality, makes it a system within systems. Of course, new capabilities that outstrip the ones that China and Russia have ultimately are of very, very high interest to NATO defense.
China and Russia today has that original story that I mentioned, single link, phased arrays or parabolics. The U.S. government, the Space Force in particular, isn't in the mood to match what they have. They're in the mood to protect their assets, and that means the troops on the ground and the traffic that needs to be passed, the data that needs to be passed, even in a highly contested environment. That's the first big impact that we'll make on the launch of our product at the end of this year.
Any questions from inside here? Please go ahead. No? We have another perhaps a stupid question from the internet. Just to clarify, is ALL.SPACE seeking primarily to replace backhaul and large-scale fiber networks, essentially putting these into space, or is it primarily to provide access points that can move around freely?
Everything that we're doing is on the ground pointing up to space. Whether that's typically, you know, the first requirements are moving platforms because you can't put fiber optic onto a moving platform, and you never will. Therefore, it creates a requirement to satellite. Obviously maritime's a big example, but so is aero. But then in terms of backhaul, if we're talking about land, we're talking about these things, these commercial towers. What we're able to do is help operators get to the edge so they don't have to manage and own microwave infrastructure that has many, many hops and lots and lots of costs and lots of outages just to reach a village or a township that's far away in an emerging market.
The reason for that is not so much just because of our technology that lowers the cost of bandwidth by being able to pick out the cheapest ones. It is also because the new systems are adding so much satellite capacity worldwide that it's bringing down the cost of the megabit to levels which rival the alternative, which is building infrastructure, which whilst it's CapEx and it's a bought and paid for medium, it has a high long-term operating cost. Whereas the lease cost for satellite bandwidth at the new rates, which is really down into the tens of dollars per megabit, they enable the backhaul of cell towers all around the world for the first time in a profitable way. That means that rural communities will get 3G and 4G for the first time.
When we invite you to the Capital Markets Day here in five years, how do you see that things have developed between you and Sivers, and how has it gone for you as a company?
Well, I think, all being well, we will have issued products across every single data vertical. We will be seeing the high volumes of the smaller antennas, so think IoT, connected car. We will be on the start of that curve. We will be a strategic enabler in defense obviously, but also aero. With aero, you want the best of live TV, which is GEO. You want the best data, which could be Starlink or SES mPOWER, and then you want private cockpit. Every antenna on every aircraft in the world today is single link only. There's three links just to get going. By the way, with PNT, had our antenna been on MH370, I would tell you exactly where it was today. I would tell you within a number of kilometers where it would reside.
You know, that's an important capability and then on to the enterprise. We should have gotten across the entire roadmap by then, and that's when aligned to the development of the space ecosystem, all of these satellites now going up in multiple orbits, then I think the satellite industry will be back to a new golden era, and that will mean lots and lots of volume because we're opening up new markets with new economics for the first time. That can only be a good thing for Sivers 'cause that's lots of wafers, which is the business we're in.
This all sounds fantastic, almost too good to be true. You're now out yourself raising money. It's a tough climate.
Which are the toughest questions you get from investors about what is gonna break this for you?
Yeah, I mean, right now, for the stage that previously it's been the fundamentals, right? About the technology and proving that it's field proven. We've demonstrated this technology to 100 three-star and four-star generals through live tests, as you saw there, big satellite operators. We're overseeing our developments, overseen by the European Space Agency, the U.K. Space Agency. We've had outside due diligence from many technical authorities in defense, so we're extremely well peer reviewed. Those have gone behind. Now it's about scale up and into production, and that means, working back through to the supply chain. You know, I mentioned about, Sivers being able to give us a way to be able to say our core ICs are developed in NATO countries. That's critical to our future plan for defense.
Also, we were able to work with MixComm at the time, who had GlobalFoundries as an investor, and rather niftily for a small company, we were able to find a partner that could help us get assured access to wafers. You know, tiny ALL.SPACE compared to those that are really driving the IC demand as a pre-revenue startup. You can well imagine that the investors want to know how do we get certainty that we can get the ICs that we need to ship the products beginning of next year. That was a breakthrough for us, especially going into COVID when the IC supply chain issues kicked off. All other components are highly manufacturable in and around Europe.
I think we passed that first test, and then the rest is good old-fashioned execution, right? Scaling up your operations, doing it efficiently, making sure that you pick the right manufacturing partners, doing the right contract manufacturing. I think that's the story of our lives for any hardware and software provider.
Well, we're wishing you luck on that journey. Any questions from the audience here? It's gonna be a short break, and you can all talk to John if you want to, and then we're gonna be back at 3:30 P.M. after that short break.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, John.
Thank you.
Welcome back to Sivers Semiconductors Capital Markets Day. We now had a short break, and we are now doing the second part of the presentations, which will focus on our second leg within the company, the Photonics leg. Here to present this first piece here is Billy, our managing director for Sivers Photonics. Take it away, Billy.
Thank you very much, Anders. It's great to be here today to talk about the journey that we're on just now in the Sivers Photonics team, you know, as part of our bigger family, Sivers Semiconductors. Also today, I'm going to present an update on Silicon Photonics and one of our really exciting customers. From our labs, Charlie, the CEO, will basically present that. I'm really excited about that today also. You know, I've been in the industry for a long time, basically 30 years in the semiconductor industry, working mainly on scaling businesses up, both in, you know, worked for GlobalFoundries, Motorola, and several startups. You know, I've got the background that's needed to develop this business further, and I'm really excited to be doing that.
Next slide. All about us. Okay. Let me give some background about the Sivers Photonics business. We're based in Scotland, our manufacturing facility and research and development. We've been in operation developing III-V photonic devices for more than 20 years. In the last three years, we basically changed our tack to become a product platform business. We're still operating with the foundry model, and working with customers like Ayar Labs, et cetera, to basically bring their products into our technology. We have a 100 millimeter, that's a 4-inch wafer fab, which is state-of-the-art in indium phosphide. We have a facility which is 2,000 square meters, so we can basically produce excellent quality products on this current site.
We offer a full range of end-to-end chip solutions, where we design, create prototypes, and then go into volume manufacturing on those products. Currently have about 75 staff on site and we're growing rapidly. We also are an ISO 9001-certified business, and we're also transitioning right now to ISO 16949, which is the automotive standard that we need for the LiDAR business. Now, you know, we are working with several tier one big companies in the U.S. and also several exciting tier two startups. We have a very nice broad range of exciting businesses that we're working with. Next slide. In terms of our worldwide locations, the group headquarters are in Kista, which is where the Swedish Wireless team are.
We are based, as I said earlier on, in Glasgow, Scotland. We have a sales office in the U.S. in California, and we have our headquarters, U.S. headquarters, in New Jersey. Lots of, Geographically, we cover, you know, quite, you know, the whole globe. We have development operations in the U.K., and we have a business development in the U.S. From our technology expertise, we are integrated, our designs are integrated in manufacturing, to service for a broad range of photonic devices. SOAs, RA, RSOAs, detectors, but primarily, you know, lasers and detectors. We're a key player also in the Silicon Photonics system, and I'm gonna talk about that later on. Of course, all of this happens in our world-class indium phosphide 100 platform and facility. Next slide, please.
We have a full range of in-house design capabilities from design right through to qualification and volume production. We can basically take our customers' designs. We will then do design enablement on those designs, working out how to basically fabricate them in our facility. We then create prototypes of those designs. Basically, everything that we're working on right now is planned to go into volume production. Then we offer the full range of kind of qualification vehicles, GR-468, as well as sitting on our ISO 9001 platforms for quality. We also offer a full range of reliability tests here, so we can do the full gamut from design right through to volume production.
Within the facility, we have lithography, etch, deposition, capability as well as extensive testing capability. Okay, now on to our product roadmap. The product roadmap sets, touches all three key verticals the business is working on. Those are three main verticals: optical communications, optical sensing and sensors, and LiDAR, all of which are going through significant growth, up to 30x, from the current position into 2026. Sivers Photonics are involved in all of these three verticals with a range of different customers. Again, all going to volume manufacturing. Next slide. Now in terms of, you know, where do those three verticals, you know, what are the kinda areas within them?
In optical comms, we supply DFB laser chips and arrays of chips to transceiver and then into data racks right through to the subscriber. Sivers is at the heart of several applications within optical communications. It's the same for optical sensing. Here we're working with, you know, several tier ones, really, really exciting development that is again, all planned for volume within the next kinda year. Some of them are even shorter than that. That will go into a huge range of sort of exciting new applications in smart city, smart factory, and smart health. Of course, LiDAR, which everyone knows about with autonomous vehicles.
We supply the DFB laser chips that go into basically Silicon Photonics circuits, and of course, make their way eventually onto autonomous vehicles. Looking at the product roadmaps that we're developing, and you know, I've not written any specifications down here, but basically we're offering a different range of powers for both single and 8x16 arrays. We have a very extensive product roadmap that touches several of the markets I've just described, several of those verticals, and several tier one and tier two customers that are sitting behind those products. We're really excited about that. The roadmaps here, we're going through several key qualifications over the next six months to a year, and the team are really excited about developing these products.
On the optical sensing, which also includes LiDAR, again, we've got, you know, five key products that we're gonna be launching within the next year and a half into this market. Again, working with tier ones and across all three verticals in that space. Okay, next slide please. I've mentioned a few times about Silicon Photonics, and again, just to explain how important this is gonna be for the whole of the semiconductor industry going forward. Traditionally in the semiconductor world, we have limitations caused by the RC delay, right? Which is basically how we bring data in and out of the chip. The Photonics solutions that can be used for this really are a game changer.
What we're doing now is basically bringing data optically into the device rather than relying on copper. Charlie from our labs is gonna basically discuss this in a lot more detail later on. It really is a revolution that's taking place in the industry, and Sivers are right at the heart of that. Traditionally, optical has been for the kinda long haul business, which people understand, and semiconductors has basically been, you know, all about handling vast amounts of data digitally. However, as I said, the key issue with that is getting data in and out of the device itself. Silicon Photonics, where we basically bring both of those worlds together, helps solve that problem. You know, we're really, really excited.
Everyone who is involved in the semiconductor industry is actually working on this right now. If we go to the next slide to show the landscape. The landscape here, you can see the number of companies that are involved in this. Everyone who is working in semiconductors is involved in this right now. As I said earlier on, Sivers is providing a key solution in our Photonics lasers into that market. Again, everything from optical comms, such as direct laser chip I'm showing here. Biosensing, so this is where we're gonna be measuring toxicity both in the air and in your body, using basically our lasers to detect that. Then in LiDAR, self-driving cars, our chips are gonna be all over that. Again, this is all about Silicon Photonics.
To talk a little bit more about that technology, we actually have a huge amount of IP covering key parts of how Silicon Photonics works. We basically a flip chip integration of our lasers onto a silicon device, and basically we can then use our integration technique which we've developed that allows that to be seamless. Next slide. To give, you know, an idea of where that will touch, everything from AI to, again, self-driving cars, high speed interconnects, up to and beyond 2 Tbs per second, and Charlie's gonna talk about that later. Biosensing, data center components as well. You know, for those that are not aware, a huge amount of data is handled within these data centers without us actually seeing that.
We only about 15% of that data comes out of the data centers. The amount of data that's required right now in our modern life to support that comes from the solutions that companies like Sivers Photonics produce. Again, we're working with several tier ones to bring our lasers into that application. Talking more about the Silicon Photonics kinda landscape and a key part of that was basically creating the standard MSA. Sivers is one of the promoting members within the consortium that's putting together the MSA, and we're the pioneer and are the first ones to actually be working in this area with Ayar Labs to produce the first application that comes out of it. Really excited about that.
Okay, here's the actual chip that we're working on with Ayar Labs. It's called the SuperNova. Charlie's gonna speak about that in more detail. It's a multi-wavelength optical source that provides greater than 2 Tb of modulation rates. That's equivalent to having something like 20,000 100 megabit links. That's equivalent to basically one chip supplying 20,000 houses. This technology will significantly impact sort of data handling capability for Silicon Photonics. We believe this is the first product based on the CW MSA that I spoke about earlier on. We also just recently completed the demo ECOC. That was last week, and the interest was significant for that. We're expecting to see a lot more interest in this application based on those kinda demos. Okay, next slide.
So in summary, Sivers Photonics has completed in-house capability for III-V design test qualification and high volume manufacturing. We have the capability in the business to do everything from design right through to manufacturing. In fact, you know, over the next year, we're looking at new facilities scaling up our business significantly to meet the volume requirements. That's happening with several tier one businesses and tier two businesses. We will be using our indium phosphide platform to drive that and standardize how we do that, which will allow us to scale the business up even faster. Again, Sivers Photonics forms a vital part of the Silicon Photonics ecosystem. We're already seeing huge traction in our technology. With that, I thank you and ask if there's any questions.
I think we are holding the questions until Charlie has presented his piece. We'll take that after Charlie's questions. I think we're happy to now introduce Charlie's presentation, and he is with us. Please take over. Thank you so much, Billy, for your presentation.
Thanks, Anders.
Thank you. Can you see me here now? I've just turned my camera on.
Yes, we see you well. We see you.
Okay.
Thank you.
It's early morning here in San Francisco, so everyone's still asleep. I'm very honored to be here this afternoon, your time. Thank you, Billy, for the nice comments. You know, we've been working together with Sivers Photonics for over a year and a half now, bringing our technology to life. Of course, you know, as we'll explain the technology, without a laser or think of it as an optical power supply, you know, there is no solution. We're absolutely dependent on the technologies that Sivers Photonics has been developing with us. You know, Billy mentioned design enablement.
That's been a key function because we've got a very specific specification, and it is actually quite difficult, you know, to deliver to those specifications. You know, I'm happy to say that really on the first try, Sivers Photonics got it right, worked directly on our samples, and now we're working to scale up manufacturing. What I thought I'd do, and Jesper, do you have the presentation up on the slides? Because I can't see them here. Are you presenting my slides now?
We are on your second slide after your presentation and so you can go there and start introducing the company from 2015 and so forth.
Very good. Good. Okay. All right. Now we'll just kind of go from here, and I'll just ask to, you know, advance the slides as we go. A little bit about Ayar Labs, and what I thought I'd do is provide an overview of the company, technology, the market opportunity, and then some of the milestones we've reached and where we're going. I mean, one thing is that the work we're doing represents a large new TAM, market TAM for, let's say, Photonics, optics, fiber optic communication, and we've been working on this for some time. Just as an introduction, the company was founded in 2015, but actually the core research started back in 2010, with a, you know, multidisciplinary research team out of MIT.
It's been some time in the making, and we like to say that it takes 10 years to be an overnight success, and we're on that road. We have locations, two locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and now a new office in Boston. Today we're at 110 employees. 85% have advanced degrees. We've got over 40 PhDs today. We've been very diligent about filing patents across the breadth of our solution space. You know, I'm happy to say that we just closed a substantial new round of financing that I think has really set us up to you know through the next few years.
On the sort of investor side down below, just briefly, it's kind of on the left side is our financial investors, and on the right is our strategic investors. There's a reason we show this. We have both very, I think, you know, thoughtful, deep tech investors on the left, but then we've made a very conscious effort to, you know, tie ourselves more tightly to the major ecosystem players, because as an embedded technology, really, we need to have the support of the entire ecosystem to, you know, to succeed. We've got a nice cross-section. There are some more that'll be coming on soon, but this is what we have today. If you'd advance to the next slide, please. I'm sure, you know, you may have all seen or read of, you know, slides sort of like this.
This actually came from an NVIDIA presentation earlier this year, but it really shows the, you know, explosive growth in computational requirements. You know, I happen to show these artificial intelligence models, and without knowing too much about it, you know, it wasn't too long ago that, you know, 1 million parameters was sort of you know the problem space. Now we're heading into the trillions. You know, according to Meta, these models have been growing at 750x annually. Really though, the same thing is happening to a different degree with different measurements in telecom and radar. A lot of the work we've been doing has been sponsored by the U.S. government and DARPA. There are use cases across, you know, AI, telecom, radar, cloud computing, and defense.
Really it's how to solve these problems, and there are many different sort of techniques that people are using to try and, you know, sort of advance the computational science to address these growing needs. One of the fundamental problems that Billy referred to really is that the energy required to move data over copper will exceed the energy available to compute on the data, and we're already reaching that point today. The challenge and opportunity for us is that, you know, if we can break that bottleneck, and move, you know, more data more quickly at higher data rates, then there are huge improvements in computing performance that are capable.
One of our customers is building a system today, and of course we're a core component, but the anticipated performance improvement is in the range of 1000x over current state-of-the-art. That, by the way, is much greater performance gain than one might get from moving to, you know, a different semiconductor fab process, you know, that requires a $20 billion factory to, you know, to manufacture. Let's go to the next slide, please, number 5. This is a, you know, I think, what I call the inevitability slide. You know, I think it's well recognized across the industry that future, you know, innovations really we're going to require to break this bottleneck and, you know, do it with silicon and optics integration.
What the chart on the right really shows is that optical fiber communication has been replacing copper really for decades. First at longer long distance. You think of under-ocean fiber optic cables. As data rates increase, you know, optics has been replacing copper at shorter and shorter distances. Our market opportunity is really in the circle, which is the short distance interconnects, which today are largely copper, but we'll need to move to fiber optics here over the next, you know, five to 10 years. We've estimated the TAM at, you know, $40 billion by 2026 or $7 billion SAM. Of course, Sivers as a core partner, you know, shares a substantial portion of that TAM opportunity. If we go to the next slide.
We call it optical I/O, which sounds rather basic, but we design and sell optical I/O, and that means we're both designing the solution and then selling the products. This is not just an IT development effort. What I'm showing here in a couple, you know, sort of photos is that it's really accomplished with two primary products, let's say. One is the CMOS chiplet. You may have heard of chiplets now going into multi-chip packages for advanced semiconductor products. The picture in the middle shows four of our optical I/O chiplets, which we call TeraPHY or Terabit PHY, stands for physical layer, connected to, in this case, an AI processor in the middle that was manufactured at TSMC.
That's a very advanced packaging technology that you're looking at. It's coupled with the SuperNova light source, which is the next picture in the middle on the right. That's an external light source. You can imagine that, you know, think of that as an optical power supply sending, you know, multiple wavelengths of light into this, each of these chiplets. I don't show the cable, the fiber connection in these pictures, but think of it as a remote power supply. The reason we, you know, disaggregate the light source from the package is for, you know, replaceability, reliability, performance reasons, and also cost reasons. You know, if we showed this thing fully connected, you would have, you know, this optical source sitting somewhere on the motherboard solution feeding this in the package.
There's really these two parts that go into the solution. It's also important to know that this is an embedded technology. Those chiplets are actually installed inside one of our customer packages. Imagine that could be an Intel or an NVIDIA or an AMD, or you know, in our case for defense, a Lockheed Martin computing solution with our embedded silicon in there. It provides a great ramp in terms of sales because, you know, you're basically selling or providing the technology to our customer, and they're selling it through their entire distribution chain out to the you know, sort of many hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. If we advance to the next slide seven. You might think why is...
You know, what's the big deal? Why hasn't this been done before? One of the reasons is that you really need to be able to pack a lot of data, what we call bandwidth or data I/O within a very, very small space. Today's technology wouldn't be able to fit in those packages either from a size perspective or a performance perspective. I show a representation here of sort of the equivalency of some of the common sort of fiber optic cable building blocks that are in use around the world today, and as a comparison.
You know, our little chip here, which of course is accompanied by the laser, you know, is delivering, you know, 5x the data rate, 8x more power efficient, 10x lower latency, and a 90% cost reduction compared to current technologies. Now, cost reduction is an important one because you know, in some sense, we're competing with copper, which is, you know, very inexpensive, but copper is getting much more expensive, and it's getting much more expensive when you factor in all the things and tricks that people are trying to do to extend the life of copper. You know, this really is a game-changing technology. I joined the company from Intel when it was a mere.
I was leading the supercomputing division, and this has been a problem that has plagued us for, you know, for ages. I joined the company when it was much, much smaller, really on the promise of the technology. I hadn't seen anything, you know, that had gotten even close to this set of capabilities. If I go to the next slide, eight, you know, this actually maybe helps capture the essence of some of the benefits this technology provides. You know, what I'm showing here is a series of computing solutions, and everybody, you know, I think knows of a semiconductor computing chip, which I show in the 2018 box. That actually was a product that I was responsible for at Intel.
You know, a computing chip is really, you know, computational cores connected by a high-speed, low-energy fabric. If you can do it all in a single piece of silicon, it's great. But that's been challenged, you know, as technologies advance. You can't really fit any more computational power in a single piece of silicon anymore. What you see in 2022 are these multi-chip packages, and I show AMD as an example. You can see the dramatic movement in terms of, you know, 8 billion transistors on the first to now 40 billion transistors, you know, today. Part of the capability that's provided there is the ability to connect all those chiplets, let's call them, in a very low latency, high bandwidth interconnect, but that's all on that substrate.
Move to 2026, and this is where the industry is going and where our technology comes into play. This is actually an image of a project we're working with one of our customers. You know, using our technology, you can connect all of these. You can now connect multiples of these multi-chip packages in a way that provides the same energy efficiency, data movement, and cost really, but now doing that at sort of rack scale. You know, it sort of redefines what is a computing socket, if you will, or a CPU. You can now imagine that in the future, the CPU will be the entire rack, and we've estimated that you can now address. You know, put 100 trillion transistors in one computational solution through this technology.
If we go to the next slide, just a few milestones and achievements, and I'll kind of build on this in terms of what's here today. You know, up through 2018, a lot of the research and development work was on prototypes, and I show as an example the one of the core devices in silicon. You know, that's an electron micrograph, but that little guy there, the circle, is called a microring resonator. We're clearly the world leaders in developing that specific piece of technology. The important thing to know is that that's about 100 times smaller than the current state-of-the-art photonic devices. That's, they're tricky things to learn in terms of manufacturability and scale and performance and durability, but those are all part of our patent portfolio.
That enables us to get the small, you know, so the small size here. By 2020, we had started to do many public demonstrations of our technology, and we developed our first, let's call it, full chips, full solutions. We did a lot of this in the early days in concert with Intel. We actually demonstrated full integrated solutions. You're seeing that board from 2022 shows really an Intel processor with our chips embedded in it. Kind of see the little cables coming out the left side there. A full board demonstration. Where we are today is we now have many more customers. We've got really 20 in total that we're working with, and we've got another 40 behind that. Really starting to make first volume shipments.
Turning our first engineering samples into true sort of hardened, you know, production-worthy product, and working on the manufacturing and yield process and expanding our supply chain. That's actually part of where Sivers comes in terms of the work we're doing and ensuring that we're getting the right supplies of core technology. We believe that while we're shipping in the sort of thousands of units today and tens of thousands in 2023, the real production starts to ramp more in 2024, 2025, and even 2026. Part of the trick is we have to, you know, time our technology insertion with our customers' product roadmaps.
There's always a timing issue involved, and you may have to back up a few years typically, as we are, to get those design wins, you know, before you reach full production volumes. The ramp after that can be, you know, very, very quick. If we go to the next slide, just deep diving a little bit. You know, if you went to our website, you'd see that we've announced, you know, some new, strategic, you know, collaborations and investment with both, you know, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA.
I think it's kind of, HPE, NVIDIA, and Intel all have board observer rights, which for a small company like us makes it very you know very interesting board meetings, but it also you know creates a nice tension in the industry because it's well understood that you know this technology is coming. Another thing is recognition that you know that Ayar Labs is the leader in the space. If we go to the next slide, please. You know, just a couple quick points on commercialization milestones. I think I mentioned we completed our product validation and are now shipping units. We have, you know, a number now of what I would call high volume strategic customer partners.
We've expanded our supply chain partnerships, and Sivers Photonics is clearly, you know, one of those core partnerships that you know that we've been, you know, I think both working on diligently. Then Billy referred to the standards, the CW-WDM MSA. This is important because standards sort of underpin the ability for, you know, technologies like ours to, you know, to really expand. There really wasn't a set of standards for these short-distance interconnects in terms of, you know, the number of wavelengths, what they should look like, the amplitude.
Establishing a standard that can bring the rest of the industry around it is an important feature because that'll help, you know, create the you know, the ability for this to expand, you know, for the market to expand more quickly than it probably otherwise would have as a proprietary solution, a proprietary-only solution. If I go to slide 12, please. I just wanted to show a picture and of you know, kind of where Sivers comes in. This is a rendering, but I showed the real module, you know, prior. This is a rendering of our external laser light source. What you can see is that we're embedding the Sivers Photonics DFB laser array inside this module. It's the first industry standard compliant laser solution that's hit the market.
We actually have a number of customers now that we never expected who would like to try the laser only because they're working on different applications other than we're addressing. You know, it delivers 8x the number of wavelengths compared to commercially available products today, and it has a wide temperature operating range. I could go into a lot of other really kind of neat features here, but it delivers, you know, more bandwidth and more power for its size than any other solution in the market. It's not typical to have a laser DFB array as Sivers is providing us, you know, in an 8-wide fashion, which you're seeing here. Typically, they're provided as, you know, sort of single units or single laser, you know, wavelengths.
It's, you know, really quite tricky to deliver, you know, eight of these in one unit for reasons of, you know, yield and reliability and consistency across all of those. Each one of those little boxes is a different discrete wavelength of light that we consume and use. You know, it's a pretty fancy package and I think truly state-of-the-art.
If I go to slide 13, you know, I think this kind of speaks to a strong ecosystem that's developing and, we show this in the sense that, you know, companies like Ayar Labs, as small as we are, I think can make an outsize impact on the industry, and it's what excites me and what excites, you know, the team, and I think it's what excites our core supply chain partners as well. But you need to have an ecosystem to be successful, and we've been diligent about, you know, sort of developing the right partnerships, you know, kind of in a circle.
I could show others kind of on this list, but, you know, sort of the investor base, our technology partners, go-to-market partners, our supply chain partners, and then some of the sort of big emerging industry standards that underpin all of this, I think really helps, you know, establish Ayar Labs, and through Ayar Labs, I think, you know, Sivers Photonics solution, as a market-leading in a market leadership position. There are other, you know, sort of competitors out there, but nobody that's deemed to be within some years of achieving what we've achieved, and that's whether they're startups or actually some of the very largest companies who have been investing in the technology.
It's our hope that this becomes the pervasive technology solution for these short reach optical connections in the computing industry. If I go to slide 14, I'll end with a comment from the Chief Platform Architect at NVIDIA, Bob Ober, but really, the promise is, and NVIDIA as one has been very public about this, is the next million-x speed up will require advanced technologies like optical I/O to support future AI and machine learning workloads. I think it sums it up nicely. I mean, this is one of those must-have technologies for the future.
It's gonna be, you know, a big transition, and again, we think it's happening now, but, you know, the industry and society at large will start seeing the benefits, you know, around the 2025, 2026 timeframe really. Very excited about that, and I guess that's my last slide. Slide 15 is just my, you know, thank you, and I again appreciate the partnership that we've had with Sivers over the last year and a half and the opportunity to address you today.
Thank you very much, Charlie. Hi, I'm Charlotte, and I'm here to moderate some questions for you. Thank you for a very interesting presentation. It's funny that you ended with that quote from one of your owners, and you talked about the ecosystem within optical I/O. How certain are you that some of these, like NVIDIA or HP or Intel, aren't developing their own in-house that you will then be competing with?
That's a great question. In fact, when I'm often asked what the competitive landscape is like, I'm probably more concerned with that very fact than with any other startup that exists in the industry today. You know, to a more or less degree, all of the large companies are starting to invest in Silicon Photonics and doing research in this area. One thing in particular is that I think the industry and the large consumers of those companies' technology, let's say the cloud providers, want to have a solution that is truly, you know, sort of cross-platform independent and cross-industry. While, you know, it is possible this.
that we would see, you know, competing technologies, let's say from NVIDIA that would be, you know, suitable for NVIDIA products. If they can't interoperate with anybody else, then they're really, you know, more of a proprietary solution, and I don't think it unlocks the true benefits of this technology that would be achieved through a cross-platform, you know, kind of implementation. It's also the case that I think we just have to stay ahead of the industry, you know, and it as I mentioned, you know, that it's gonna take some years of effort to kinda catch up. You know, developing a laser solution like we have, you know, takes some years, just the turnaround times. Our silicon design has been, as I said, 10 years in the making.
This is not something that you can just step into, throw 200 engineers at, and then hope to compete, you know, adequately, and the demand for the technology is there today. I think there is probably a buy versus build, you know, analysis that's always being done. We believe that right now the market's moving in such a direction that really it makes more sense to work with Ayar Labs than to try and, you know, sort of independently build. It's not out of the range. It's definitely something we think about.
Okay. You talked about the ecosystem and Sivers being in that ecosystem, and you said that you were buying state-of-the-art DFB laser arrays from Sivers. What does the competition look like in that respect?
In terms of the, I don't know how I want to put it.
Could you use someone else except Sivers?
Well, we can use someone else than Sivers, put it that way. You know, it's always important, I think, to have a multi-supplier arrangement. You know, Sivers is, has been quite good to work with, and is our only European customer, or supplier, and I think that's important as well. What I was really thinking about there is that, based on the industry standard, the CW-WDM MSA that we referred to, you can build it with other technologies than DFB arrays. It's conceivable that someone like Lumentum, for example, could use a different technology that's their, you know, maybe they specialize in, to develop an equivalent solution.
Ours is all built around a DFB array solution, though. You know, you may see other, industry-compliant, you know, laser solutions emerge, but the one we're working on is really based on a DFB technology, and that's, you know, like I said, it's not the easiest thing to qualify a full array. Billy might have more detail on why, you know, you have the technology that, you know, why your team can deliver this and others have much more difficult time. We think it's actually, you know, a fairly specialized skill that's not easily replicated, so.
Okay.
Yeah, I can maybe just add to that. I mean, it's not straightforward to produce an 8x array that delivers that kind of performance. You know, the feedback that we got from certainly this initial work with Ayar Labs is pretty kind of groundbreaking. Other Photonics companies could certainly work hard and produce that, but while they're doing that, we're gonna be working on our next platform that I kind of alluded to in the product roadmap. This is just the first of many that we'll be launching over the next year and continue to develop Ayar Labs platform and the whole ecosystem around I/O input. We're really excited about that.
Yeah, Billy makes a great comment there I should make is that, you know, while today's solution is an 8 array, an 8 wavelength array, if you look at our roadmap over the next decade, it really moves to 16 and then perhaps 32. We've got, you know, I think the relationship we have is both one of manufacturing but also of co-design and co-development going forward. While one's coming to market, the next one has to be, you know, sort of in development, as we keep going. Very good point.
That is actually, a question from the web. Are there any alternative or competitive technologies being developed that you see for your roadmap in the future?
The whole reason behind this industry standard was to enable multi-sourcing, whether it's, you know, and our business model presumes that eventually our customers may want to go directly to the manufacturer for that laser solution. I think if we're, you know, ultimately successful as a platform technology, you'll see multiple, you know, laser solutions emerge into the market, but they have to be qualified, they have to be price competitive, and so forth. I think we're still with what we have, you know, kind of well ahead of the curve. The idea is that there will be other solutions that emerge over time to sort of, you know, compete with. I think that helps advance the industry adoption more quickly.
Not always a bad thing.
Good. Do we have any questions from the audience? No. I think we can thank you, Charlie, for being with us today. Now I welcome Sivers CFO, please.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay. All right. Good morning or good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in the world and whatever time zone it is. You're probably surrounded by semiconductors at this very moment. The amount of semiconductors that we surround ourselves with is remarkable and is fast-growing. Just take a simple coffee machine. Look under the hood. These days, it's packed with semiconductors, not to mention your cell phone or your vehicle. This all plays into the growth picture of this industry. The semiconductor industry has outgrown the general economy consistently over the last decades, 2 x the last decade and 4 x if you look over a 20-year period. Then remember, Sivers product has just started to hit the market.
I'll tell you a little bit about how we play into the bigger picture of the semiconductor space from a revenue perspective and from a financial perspective. I'll start by telling you a little bit of the business models that we apply within Sivers. This is a picture over the semiconductor ecosystem and value chain. As you know, there are several phases from design to fabrication to sales and distribution. Then you have variants of players in these ecosystems. As we've already said, the Wireless business unit is a fabless business unit, which means the focus is on design and on distribution, whereas fabrication is outsourced.
Photonics, however, comes from a foundry business model perspective, where the focus is on the fab, but it's also a very dynamic business which is adding intellectual property to its offer and moving into what is referred to as an integrated device manufacturing business model, or in our situation, actually, an integrated platform manufacturing model. What this means is that we have our own intellectual property on which customer can add their IP, and we take this product to market. Starting with Wireless, the Wireless business unit has essentially two revenue streams. It comes from the design phase and from the distribution phase. It varies depending on if we're talking about custom products or standard products.
The standard products that we develop for a broader market, in the initial design phase, we put this onto the balance sheet and which amortizes over the lifetime of the product. However, custom products that we add development services for to our customers, that is a revenue stream for us, which is very important. Obviously, as the products eventually hit market, we generate hardware revenue from both these type of products. Currently, within the Wireless business unit, this split is roughly 50/50, but in the short and midterm, we'll see the design revenue stream grow, and it will grow fast. Over time, however, as we mature as a company, the distribution part and the hardware revenue of the business and of the revenue will increase.
For Photonics, it's sort of a similar revenue model within the sort of original foundry business, whereas we add design and development services to our customers in the early design phase. Then when we manufacture, we generate hardware revenue. Also for the sort of extended Photonics business model, whereas we have our own IP for the standard products, again, similar to the Wireless, when we develop standard products, we put the investment onto our balance sheet, which is being amortized over time. When we distribute and sell and ship to our customers, we generate hardware revenue. For Photonics, which you will soon see is even sort of earlier in this stage, and again, the big hardware revenue uptick we have in front of us.
Going into first half year financial for Sivers, as Anders Storm has stated, we had a good first half year with revenues of roughly SEK 54.6 million, which is a revenue growth of 34%. The growth driver for us was NRE sales, which grew with 70% over the first six months. The hardware portion of the total is today some 30%, again, an indication of the early stage in which we're in. For Wireless, this trend was even more clear. We grew the business with 62% for the first six months, and again, the development phase revenues, NRE, non-recurring revenue, were the driving force behind this, with four times the growth over last year. Again, 50/50 split here. Going into Photonics, we had a slightly more moderate growth this first half year with 21%.
Again, NRE driving the growth. As you can see, Photonics hardware sales is only 60% of the total. 16% of the total. Going into cost and profits. Sivers today are not yet profitable. We had a controlled cost and profit development over the first six months. For Wireless, that actually meant that we decreased our EBITDA, our profit. The reason for that was that we added the MixComm acquisition to our business. This is sort of according to plan. For Photonics, however, we improved the EBITDA, we improved the profit, and we are on a path to profitability and to positive cash flow. EBITDA and cash flow will vary over the quarters, but the trend is very clear.
For the margin for these two business units, we improved the margins with roughly 20 percentage points for both of these business units. I'll now flip over, talk a few minutes about our shareholders. We are at Sivers very happy for our shareholders and for the support that you guys provide us with. The largest shareholder of Sivers is Erik Fällström. He has been supporting Sivers for many years, and he is also on the board since many years. We also, since February, have Kairos Ventures as the second-largest owner. Kairos used to be the majority owner of MixComm, and since the acquisition was a stock for stock deal primarily, Kairos now holds significant amount of Sivers shares. Kairos is also represented by Todd Thomson on the board.
Management and board outside of those two shareholders represent roughly 9%. Together with Keith Halsey, which is a partner of Erik Fällström, there is a sort of a 35% share which has more or less board and management representation. We also have a set of significant institutional shareholders which has supported us, Swedbank Robur among others. Then in total, 21,000 shareholders adding up the other 50%. Again, thank you for your support. To summarize where we are as a company and from a financial perspective, we do have two very sort of interesting and strong markets, both for the Wireless and for the Photonics market. We see strong growth projections. We have positive effects from the MixComm acquisition. Clearly, as you've seen today, both with customers and management, we have clear synergies.
A good start of the year, reduction in negative EBITDA, business unit on path to profitability and positive cash flow. Again, a very strong shareholder base that supports the long-term funding of the company. I can add to that, we also have very good bank and financial relationships that enables debt financing to the extent needed. With that, thank you. Again, thank you for your support. Questions?
Yeah.
Perfect. Thank you. Maybe we could start off.
Yeah. Maybe I can summarize today a bit first.
Yeah.
Sure.
We go into the Q&A. Today we've seen sort of everything from myself presenting the overview of the company, as well as seeing that both business unit and the manager for that, and then also two very interesting customers. We have to remember as well now in this sort of Capital Markets Day, we are looking a bit forward and that's why we brought in ALL.SPACE with their very, very interesting technology as well as Ayar Labs also with interesting future technologies. On sort of the bottom of this or like the foundation of the company, we still of course have all the other customers and all the things we haven't had time to talk about today.
All the 43 design wins we have in both 5G and SatCom, which we are now sort of waiting for the explosive growth we're hoping for from all of those different customers, one by one coming to finalize their products. We have talked to you before about everything from Cambium who was here the last Capital Markets Day and the Capital Markets Day before that, we had the CCS and Adtran here talking and so forth. There's a lot of those things happening in the future, as well as all the Fortune 100 customers we haven't talked about. For example, we have the one that we've been working with now for four years, I mentioned before.
All of that is still in the works and we are trying to capitalize on that and getting those out to the volume to move sort of away as much as possible from the only the development, but we also want to see sort of the hockey stick with the future in the hardware. I would like to thank all speakers and also Håkan here in the end presenting how it looks like in the finance part. It's been a very interesting day, I think, to see also what's happening in the future. I want to thank John and Charlie specifically for giving us this real look into the future and very state-of-the-art technology, which I am extremely proud of that we are part of as well, on top of the foundation we also have built over these years.
That was how I wanted to summarize things, and now we open up for Q&A. Charlotte, thank you for being here and keeping that going.
Thank you, Anders. I'd like to start with, you've talked about synergies, especially now with MixComm coming in, and we've seen some of that, but can you be a bit more specific on how much do you travel between these? How much customer interaction do you have together? Elaborate a bit on the synergies?
One of the things that I think is hard to see from the outside is you might have seen it, and you saw it also in Charlie's presentation, and you heard it from John. They're all saying the supply chain is important, and there is a small logo everywhere, GlobalFoundries. Why is this coming up, for example? GlobalFoundries was actually an investor and owner of MixComm when we acquired them and that is sort of our factory for the future when it comes to all the Wireless pieces, and also for the Photonics piece. If we look at the Silicon Photonics things that actually Ayar Labs is building off, it's actually GlobalFoundries. They have a second leg there, which we also have.
That is one piece of all the exciting technology that comes out in the market is how GlobalFoundries will be sort of more and more important for us. GlobalFoundries have fabs in Dresden, in Germany, where they're gonna have a big thing this week, actually, Wednesday, Thursday, with all customers, but they also have a lot of fabs in the U.S. Just being recently listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange as well. You can read more about what they're doing on the web and so forth. Maybe we can bring them here next year and tell you a little bit about what exactly they are doing. That is a very, very important piece of the overall working between Photonics and Wireless and all of those pieces. That's one thing.
We have the other thing of bringing in MixComm into this and that is, of course, connected to the U.S. market in general. One thing GlobalFoundries, but also all the local things we can do now in the U.S. with people there connecting into. You also have heard everybody talk about DARPA money or the CHIPS Act, where you can get funding for building up fabs and factories and all of that. Getting closer and closer to the, sort of, the U.S. and the Western side of things right now is more and more important, and also from a, sort of, Lockheed Martin or other type of defense companies that needs this kind of very high tech technology that they don't want to share with the East, Eastern part of things.
All of those things is very, very important for us. It connects in a very good way right now, I think.
Sivers is really happy about the MixComm acquisition. I think Mike is still on. Mike is now the interim CEO of Wireless, but he was the CEO of MixComm when you acquired MixComm. I'd like to ask you, Mike, if you have any comments on your first impressions and the synergies Anders is talking about, but also how MixComm has developed as part of Sivers.
Great question. I think the highlight is really, you know, what I pointed out in my first presentation, where now the combined portfolio of our technologies and products, you know, covers all of the requirements, you know, not only for 5G, but really makes, you know, Sivers the only, you know, company that, you know, has the essential front-end solutions, you know, the radios necessary to not only enable, you know, 5G licensed, unlicensed, but also make possible what, you know, John Finney talked about in their revolutionary platform for satellite communications. With...
This, you know, combined, you know, portfolio and really toolbox, you know, that the combination of MixComm and Sivers has is gonna allow us not only to make the most of the opportunities in 5G and SatCom with, you know, great partners and customers like ALL.SPACE, but also start to, you know, look at, you know, other adjacent and emerging markets like radar. I think, you know, this combination, you know, really positions, you know, Sivers in a unique way, you know, to make the most of this transformation when it comes to Wireless communications.
John is obviously a fantastic customer within SatCom, and that was actually when you talk about 5G and millimeter wave, and you have the breadth of the portfolio, that sounds really impressive. How important is that for your clients that you have can be so wide and that you don't have any competition that is as wide as you are?
Well, it is impressive and exciting, but most importantly, it really is, you know, crucial, you know, for our customers and partners. Because with all of these standards, it isn't just one frequency. You know, even Ka-band satellite that John talked about, you know, that spans from 18 all the way, you know, through 28. You know, having a very complete portfolio, but also the fundamental technology that can be, you know, not only addressing 5G, but then serve a dual purpose, you know, in this case, by having specifications and best-in-class noise floor that John talked about.
That's what you know this very complete and very we think you know the highest performance you know platform in the industry is gonna allow us to do. Also you know then make sure that wherever our customers you know need to go you know we have the technologies and the products that are gonna get them there. All underpinned by the robust supply chain that Anders was just speaking about.
Yeah, if I might add to that, I mean, one of the main thing is the integration with our key partners and customer solutions. If we can have a very wide portfolio, t hey can integrate and don't have to spend a lot of time integrating with different solutions. They will have the same interfaces to all of our technology. That is one of the main thing as well that helps us being wide in that perspective. As John mentioned, you know, different frequencies will come into his solution as well, and he doesn't have to redo everything every time.
We have a question from the web. The questioner is, "It seems like fixed Wireless access is taking longer to get traction than what we would have as expected previously. What can you tell us about the market development in,
Yeah. First of all, there's been a couple of things that has had effect on the overall rollout of the sort of fixed Wireless access stuff that we are talking about. First of all, we have had the pandemic, which had its effect, and the shortage in semiconductors in general that it hasn't been possible to build the networks that they wanted to. Another thing, if we look at the Mike presentation, we looked at sort of where in the world have they built out the millimeter wave stuff and U.S. was the earliest and was driving that from the beginning.
They got hold of sort of the mid-band coverage technology as well into the market and has had some sort of focus on that and which have taken off a bit of the focus on the other frequencies for a shorter time. On top of that, there's been something called the RDOF money, which has been a big funding thing in the U.S. where this has been driven anyway. And that money has been delayed for many customers. And there's been also things that went to court and so forth with. Starlink has been fighting for that kind of money to get them out as well. There has been a lot of things at the same time who sort of have delayed things.
As Michael showed you, there is a lot of things that will happen and we've already seen some of the volume orders, and we hope to see more of that in the coming end of this year and coming next year, of course.
You had a Tier 1 fixed Wireless access customer coming in with the MixComm acquisition.
Yes.
Can you comment specifically on that?
I mean, as I mentioned in the quarterly reports, we got the prototype orders. We're building prototypes with that customer and hope to see volumes from that customer still. Yes. It's working well. MixComm has a fantastic technology that they like and we're very happy to have them on board so far.
We had ALL.SPACE here, so they are an important SatCom customer. Are you seeing more collaborations with other SatCom customers?
Yes. I mean, we with this technology we have and so forth, there is some limitations what we can do and not do, of course, based on what we've signed with the sort of ALL.SPACE. But there is a lot of other opportunities, and I think that's some of the larger development NRE opportunities where we will see here near term and in the future. Just to understand sort of how this business works, I mean, if we go back five years, that was sort of the time of winning a lot of design wins in 5G and so forth. And right now, it's a lot of time to win SatCom deals and some of the 5G deals and so forth, which will then create the revenue going forward.
All of those things happen in different steps. We are now in a phase where we see more and more things happening on the SatCom things, but all the 5G things are sort of coming to fruition and getting into volume in the near term, and other things happening sort of in the medium term.
Great. There is a question, I guess it might be for Håkan. How do the payment terms and agreements with customers look? Do you need to finance inventory levels before volume ramp-ups yourselves, and are you able to do that?
Well, as I think Anders already had mentioned during the day here, so when it comes to the NRE part of the business, we're lucky enough to often have a pre-funding by customers, meaning that we sort of have positive cash flow out of that. But other than that is sort of a normal payment terms. We strive for 30 days, but as you know, sometimes we have to go for a longer period than that. That's very sort of natural for a supplier in our size. Well, when it comes to inventory, we don't really build a large inventory. Obviously, we will have to work sort of very smooth and just in time, so to speak, these days.
Hopefully the industry is working with us, and we look forward to delivery times being shorter as supply pick up here in the landscape. Yeah.
I mean, there will always be some working capital in this kind of business when we build up things. We're not getting prepaid in that sense, but we have-
For the hardware, of course.
No. For the hardware in the future, we need working capital in some way. I think that's a very positive problem to have when that happens, so.
Yeah.
A couple of years ago, there's a question from the web. Sivers' EBITDA was estimated to reach break even with a turnover of roughly around SEK 200 million. Now that you've increased costs and potential with the acquisition of MixComm, do you have any estimates for break even?
I mean, we don't share sort of that kind of estimate. Of course we have kept on investing, and as you're seeing today, in these markets where we're investing in things, I think Charlie talked about a $40 billion TAM and a $7 billion SAM. Of course, I think it is worth investing, and we have also acquired MixComm to even further build and broaden the semiconductor. If you wanna build a semiconductor company, you cannot just have one vertical and one chip. You need to have multiple chips, multiple sources, and multiple areas you work in, and that's what we're doing here.
So, but we are very positive in seeing that we can get to this sort of positive cash flow phase anyway in the sense of keeping on building on the company here.
Any questions? Yes, we have one here.
We have one here.
Please wait for the microphone.
Thank you. Johan Rosenqvist with Danske Bank. I just have a question regarding the Photonics business. After hearing Ayar Labs and your presentation, I'm wondering about Sivers Photonics strategy with regards to wafer size, and if 4-inch wafers will be enough to meet those potential future volumes. Also how much it would affect the CapEx needs if you go to, like, 6-inch or perhaps also 8-inch manufacturing.
Yeah. Very, very good questions. Billy might answer that as well. 4-inch today in III-V compound is quite good in that sense. If we look at things like the volumes we are at now and these very, very high-tech arrays that Ayar Labs is using, they are, of course, expensive and we can sell and use what we have today in the factory, and that will give us a very good sort of utility and usability of the fab we have. If we look at for the future, as we mentioned, for the Fortune 100 customers, for example, when we get into that kind of huge volumes, we need to look at 6- and 8-inch type of fabs and make capital investments on that side.
Again, I would say in that sense, it's gonna be a very nice problem to have when those volumes comes in and that kind of question comes in. Also in the current environment, I would say when we see investments coming from the CHIPS Act, coming from the European Chips Act and all of those things, to be in that phase where you can sort of grow Photonics into 6- and 8-inch and be even more leading, I think that will be something that we will see a very interesting development around that. I don't know, Billy, if you wanna add something.
Yeah. Just to follow up on this point, the state they are in Photonics is at 4-inch at the moment, and that's driven by basically the epitaxy capability that exists for. It's a very complex wafer substrate. We're in, you know, discussions right now with our tier one customers about, you know, what our new facilities will look like, what type of equipment we're putting in there, in a lot of detail. The equipment set that will go into that will be a 6-inch equipment set, which will be basically the first indium phosphide equipment set that will go into a fab in the Photonics business. We will then basically put a 4-inch process in there to start with on that 6-inch equipment set.
Now you have to remember the die size or number of die on a Photonics wafer is quite different from silicon. Typically in silicon you've got, you know, between like 400 to 1,000 die depending on the die size. Whereas in Photonics it's 1,000 up to 100,000 die. It's orders of magnitude different in die count. The investments required for Photonics in order to get into those large volumes are actually not even in the same ballpark. You know, between SEK 10 billion-SEK 14 billion for a new 300 millimeter line, whereas you're looking at, you know, SEK 100 million-SEK 150 million for a new Photonics line. The CapEx investments are significantly smaller even for a state-of-the-art facility. We...
As I said earlier on, we're in advanced stages right now in those discussions with our tier one partners.
Thank you. Any follow-up question?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe-
2 seconds. There is.
Yeah. Can you discuss the opportunity on base stations, both, I mean, with your existing customer and also if there are potentially to add other customers as well?
We have a couple of customers today, both in unlicensed and licensed, that make sort of base stations or sort of mesh nodes that you can see as base stations. The best example is probably the tier one, which is among those that you saw Mike present here today, which is sort of the top system vendors within 5G. I would say that the chance of winning market share and increasing SAM from almost nothing today into that business over the coming years is quite okay. Cambium, you had them. We had them here a year ago presenting what they're doing, and their products are now coming to market as well, more and more of them. Thank you.
Any last questions from the audience? No. I think, we're done here. Thank you very much, Anders, and the whole team at Sivers. Do you want to add some last words?
Now I would like to thank everyone who's been here physically and everyone listening in to this. It's been a pleasure having you all and let's look out for the future exciting technologies that we'll bring into the market, here, and thank you so much for coming.