All right, let's go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, and again, welcome to the first day of JP Morgan's 51st annual Technology, Media, and Communications conference. My name is Harlan Sur, I'm the semiconductor and semiconductor capital equipment analyst for the firm. Very pleased to have Thomas Caulfield, President and Chief Executive Officer of GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries is the 3rd-largest semiconductor foundry in the world, leader in specialty and mature manufacturing technologies targeted at segments such as analog, power management, RF, wireless, wired networking connectivity, targeting the communications infrastructure, mobile, IoT, automotive, and industrial markets. Team reported strong results just a couple of weeks ago. Tom, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you, Harlan. Appreciate, the invite.
Sure. Maybe a good place to start off with is, given some of the cyclical headwinds that we're seeing across the industry, clearly we are in the midst of a cyclical downturn. You overlay that with a weaker global macroeconomic environment. Maybe you could just share your thoughts on the current state of the semiconductor industry and the impact on GlobalFoundries' recent earnings results.
You know, we went into this year, you know, listening to, you know, our customers view what they saw ahead. They saw a weak first half, strong second half. Remember, most of these customers and the products we built for them were under Long-Term Agreements. You know, we felt if that if they thought there was a strong second half, we had to be ready for that. The same token, in fourth quarter of 2022, we took some actions to get ready in case, you know, there wasn't a strong second half. We committed to take $200 million of cost out of our business. Here we go.
We get into Q1, we start to see that inventory is not coming down as fast as we thought. We actually saw in Q1, as many customers had inventory going up that had going down, which kind of told us we were at the peak of inventory, which is the bottom of the market. Remember our business was built more on a growth through the year. How we see the rest of the year is until we start to see real change in the macroeconomic condition, we think we're at a bottom that we'll have a slow recovery too. We'll have quarter-on-quarter and quarter growth through the rest of this year.
Until we see a real catalyst, we're not gonna be more bullish than to do a modest growth of revenue. You know, that may push till 2024 before we see a real, you know, bump in demand.
Do you see your customers, I feel like one of the distinguishing features every cycle is semiconductor customers, your semiconductor companies, your customers continue to get more disciplined every single cycle. Pulling back sooner, pulling back deeper, trying to flush out those excess inventories. Is that something that you observe over the past number of cycles?
Look, I think there's discipline is an important part of every market. Typically it starts with rational behavior.
Mm-hmm.
Rational behavior is, you know, you don't chase dreams. You don't, for a foundry like GF, you don't build speculative capacity and hope someone fills it. You do it, like we do it. You know, we have a criteria, it's called, certainty, durability, and profitability. If we don't have CCD, that's not charge-coupled device, that's committed customer demand, we don't build capacity. We're not a product company. We're a manufacturing services company. We make capacity for our customers' needs. Durability, that it's capacity that we put on that has legs to it, that it's in market segments and technology nodes that have a long run. The profitability is about we need competitive returns on our investment. Our return on invested capital should not be, you know, less than anybody else's.
With that as the premise, it's about rational behavior, right? I really feel in many ways, the foundry industry had to get the kind of consolidation we're sitting at now to get that more rational and disciplined behavior. What does it drive? It drives our customers to be that way too.
Mm-hmm.
When all they needed to do was to give a forecast and not be committed to it, but have the foundry actually committed to that capacity, even if, you know, the customer wasn't committed to it created odd dynamic.
Right.
It actually was easy not to be disciplined because you weren't liable for that capacity. When you're in a long-term agreement, you're gonna be really thoughtful about what you're gonna sign up to. You wanna protect your business with certainty. You don't wanna overstretch because then you may create capacity that's for your use that you don't need. I see a lot of discipline in the industry, and it's all driven in the fact that we're on partnerships in creating capacity, both of our businesses benefit from that certainty we create.
As a follow-up to that, you know, the team has done a really good job at navigating through the current industry downturn. You had one quarter of sequential declines. You anticipate your full year revenues being down mid to high single-digit percentage points when your peers are down low to mid-teens, your customers are down 10%-20%. You've also managed a better utilization profile than peers, and you have strong end market diversification. I believe it's really the, as you mentioned, close partnerships you have with customers, you know, via your Long-Term Agreements or LTAs, right, that have helped position you better through this cycle. With a Long-Term Agreement, LTA in place, it seems like customers are more responsive, potentially enabling you to reallocate capacity, wafer starts, maybe reallocate them more efficiently.
Help us understand the benefits of the LTAs in helping the team weather this down cycle and what other dynamics are helping the team sort of cushion this blow?
I'm gonna be really long-winded on this. I think it tells a really important story because it's always about, you know, what you commit and then what you deliver. The investment thesis at our IPO, it'll be over a year and a half into our IPO. We started our roadshow, you know, August of 2021. The investment thesis was, look, GF will grow with the market maybe a little bit better, but more importantly, improve its profitability multiples of that. GF has certainty in the business because we signed these Long-Term Agreements that gave us the visibility we needed to make these investments and get those returns. The believers in the sector invested. The non-believers say, "Yeah, that's always good in an upmarket.
Let's see what happens in a downturn." No one wants a downturn, but at least this downturn is proving the investment thesis holds. You talked about, you know, our revenue's down, not down as much as others. A lot of that is the LTAs, we'll get back to that in a moment. A lot of that is the broad range of end markets we play in. You know, our automotive business in a down year for the industry is growing two and a half X.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Offsetting some of the softness in other end segments. The way you win in this industry is in the downturn, you hold the line on your profitability, and then you can build up from there. LTAs are holding up. Our business is holding up. The people that said, "Let's see what you do in a downturn to perform," are now seeing what we do in a downturn. A big part of it is the LTAs, you know, where it sounds like such an interesting concept, a novel concept for this industry, any other industry would've seen this as like a normal practice.
If one company is making investments specific for another company, because like GF doesn't make products, we make a manufacturing service, why wouldn't both companies be obligated to make that investment in a way where we create certainty for one another? When we were doing Long-Term Agreements, our customers wanted those Long-Term Agreements as much as we did. They needed to know that the capacity was there for their growth.
Mm-hmm.
They needed to know that when they do show up for that capacity, someone else didn't come in and say they outbid them, and all of a sudden, they're paying 30%, 40% more for it. In a downturn, that same certainty that we wanted in the upturn has to be there for it. Our customers have found many ways to discuss and work with us. Some of them have actually decided to take underutilization charges. "Hey, we'll take some of that liability, and we'll just pay for it not to use that capacity." No one wants to put more inventory into a channel that's already. No one wins in that. It just prolongs the inventory correction.
Some of them said, "Look, let's add a couple years to this agreement and preserve the economic value, the net present value by adding." There are a lot of different ways we can flex to work with our customers so we both get the intent, the economic and business intent of the LTAs. By the way, in situations where we have capacity one customer reserved doesn't need as much of it, and another customer needed more-
Yeah.
You know, we don't look to double dip. If we can find other uses of that capacity, we'll work to go do that. The premise of the LTA, once again, was to create balanced partnership to make investments with that level of certainty and in performing against those contracts.
Let's talk about the manufacturing footprint. You know, in terms of your capacity ramp, you're on track to increase your capacity, about 2.8 million wafer starts this year, with an annual capacity reaching 3 million wafers in 2025. Walk us through the capacity expansion across your fab network, timelines to get to your targets, and has the recent end demand weakness pushed out your CapEx or expansion plans a bit?
A lot to unpack there. Let me start with, we have a global footprint. One of the things that is really, I think really makes us special is we create supply chain, economic and sovereign security in being able to build products around the world for our customers. You know, anytime you have high concentration, you create single points of failure that, for a lot of good and bad reasons could, you know, could cause issues. We manufacture in Dresden, Germany. We have a partnership to grow capacity over time in with STMicroelectronics in Crolles, France. We have fabs in Upstate New York, in Malta, New York, and Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, and of course, our Singapore facility. That's our global footprint. How do we invest? To invest in Greenfield is hugely expensive.
It has higher CapEx, it has longer time to profit. You have to create a whole ecosystem of an enablement around it. I know this firsthand. When I joined GF, I was the executive brought in to go ramp Fab 8 in Malta, New York, and it was 3 years of a lot of economic pain. What our strategy is, we build out where our footprint exists. We already have a global footprint. We don't need to create a global footprint. We need to leverage that and add capacity in a very modular way. Think about it, if we build a factory next to an existing factory, the first tools we put in the new capacity are relieving pinch points in the existing factory.
We get time to market or time to revenue is much faster and high level of capital efficiency. If you go in a greenfield, you have to put some 6,700 tools just to get one wafer out. The time to create, spend, you know, money in to money coming out is much longer. How do we invest? We invest with, with customer commitments to that supply. You talked about 3 million wafers. If you take our ASP that we talked about in Q1-
Yeah.
Consider that stays flat, that's about $3,000 a wafer. Three million wafers times $3,000, that's $9 billion.
Yep.
That's just wafer revenue. We typically do 10%-12% non-wafer revenue. You can argue that by the time we're done investing this year, $2.25 billion, that we have positioned the company to grow to $10 billion. High sevens-
Mm-hmm.
Kind of the guidance we gave, growing to 10, with very little capital investment required beyond what we're doing this year. Going back to the investment thesis, 40% gross margin long-term model.
Mm-hmm.
25% income, and get to $10 billion in revenue and become a free cash flow business because now you have enough scale to spend 20%-25% of revenue on CapEx, still have money left over for free cash flow. Well, where are we on that? Free cash flow starts this year.
Yep.
As soon as we ramp to that $10 billion, we'll continue to be free cash flow positive and beyond that. That's where are we on our 40%? We're holding the line on gross margin in a downturn.
Right.
That coupled with the scale we're gonna get to grow to $10 billion, coupled with nearly two years of design wins since we started to contemplate going, IPO, every one of those design wins in aggregate are accretive to our long-term model, not to where we sit today. High confidence that we will deliver our long-term model of 40% gross margins, that type of net income, and once we hit $10 billion, be free cash flow positive, which means it starts now since we've already at the end of this year, we're done with our investment to get to $10 billion. Very long-winded, wasn't it?
No, it was great. It was a great answer. You the team just acquired some more land, right, in Malta?
Yep.
Talk to us about the timeline for building out that part of your Malta fab network.
That's Upstate New York.
Yeah.
We acquired the land required to build that extra capacity. You know, it's more than just the footprint of the fab. You need to have extra land for the staging and the materials build. You need a certain amount of buffer around your building for effluence. It's gonna allow us to at least double the scale of that facility. You know, what's important is, again, back to our model for how we invest with certainty, durability, and profitability. The U.S. CHIPS Act is an important element of closing that economic gap. As we work with customers and start to think about the demand going forward, when we'll be ready to go put a shovel in the ground and create that capacity.
Before we even get there's still room within our fab to expand within that brick-and-mortar to add some more capacity, and that's the first thing we'll fund first.
Yeah.
In fact, that's the first part of what when we, you know, our CHIPS application will look at, a 2-phase approach to expansion of Malta, New York. 1 to fill out what we already have brick-and-mortar for, and then a 2nd investment to grow. For me, that's something that will take place 2025 and beyond.
Yeah.
Right.
That's a good segue into my next question, which is, you know, the team has a very strong government relations team. We saw that the EU and French government recently approved the grant funding in relation to your partnership with ST, right, in Crolles. Would you mind just maybe giving us an update on that program and more broadly, the opportunities for GlobalFoundries that you see under the CHIPS Act that you mentioned here in the US, and when we might expect to hear, you know, further announcements on these initiatives?
Well, you know, the CHIPS bill is in kind of full throttle right now, applications and the like, and they really wanna kinda keep that quiet. you know, suffice it to say, we have plans and ambitions to continue to grow our global footprint. we're an important player in the US, and there's no reason we shouldn't, under the right conditions, you know, expand that capacity. With respect to our program in France is, it was very important for President Macron and Minister, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire to create more economic supply chain and sovereign security through having semiconductors manufactured in France. They saw GF as a great opportunity for that, but GF was not going to do a greenfield for all the reasons we spoke about.
In partnership with STMicroelectronics, who has a facility in Crolles, beautiful place in the Alps, what was in it for them was to create even bigger scale to get better economics. What's in it for us is to leverage their scale. We partnered with STMicroelectronics and the French Government to go create, you know, a profitable set of capacity that we'll build as customer demand comes along. There's really no timeframe in that. It's gonna be tied to the market condition. That capacity plus anything we do in New York.
Mm-hmm.
that we just spoke about or even building out our footprint in Dresden is beyond that $10 billion type of revenue number. You know, it's our job for GF to grow with this market. This industry should double in the next 8 years or so, and there's no reason GF shouldn't double. We're gonna need that capacity to do that, but we'll need it at the right time under the right economic situation.
You know, this sort of went under everybody's radar screen, but we had the approval of the National Defense Authorization Act, right, the NDAA, I think it was in mid-December. You know, people tend to think about the NDAA as, yeah, it's the defense budget authorization, right, for the following fiscal year. It actually did place further restrictions on China-based semiconductor content in U.S. government applications and equipment, and it seems that this, combined with all of the supply chain disruptions that we've had over the past three years post the COVID reopening, is really motivating your large U.S. auto OEMs, industrial OEMs, and so on, right, to diversify their manufacturing footprint away from Asia-based suppliers.
given the announcements you made with large-scale customers such as General Motors, Qualcomm, I mean, how are these dynamics playing into the decision-making amongst the customers to drive more and newer engagements with these constituents?
Yeah. In a phrase, I'd say we're the early innings of that dynamic. It's really inconvenient for a supply chain that's been developed and honed and made efficient over the last three decades to immediately disappear overnight. There is a recognition that for security reasons, for the inability to maybe operate, that more balance is required. Here's what we're seeing. Western companies are still thinking through how they wanna change that dynamic. They're certainly not gonna go back and redesign old part numbers into a different global footprint like GF's. They're certainly thinking about future designs. None of that is really baked into, you know, our model going forward. It doesn't mean we don't think it's gonna happen. Until we see it.
The other end of this is there's this worry that maybe China is overinvesting, and it would, you know, hurt the, you know, foundry players like GF because there'll be overcapacity. I'll tell you one thing I am seeing. You know, our customers may not be designing fast.
Right
China. They're certainly not putting more into China.
Right.
There, there'll be capacity in China, and maybe excessive, but it's not gonna hurt a foundry like GF because our customers are not gonna do more volume there. The other thing we're seeing that surprised me at first, but then when I thought about it made a lot of sense. The customers that are the most anxious to move out of Taiwan and China are the Taiwanese fabless and the China fabless companies. Taiwanese fabless say, "Look, if there's some kind of geopolitical dimension that blockades our ability to use Taiwanese foundries, we could service our customers in the Western world through GF's global footprint." They're moving, and we'll start to see some design wins just based on moving products from Taiwan...
Yep
into the U.S. Same thing with some of our Chinese customers. I think you'll see more of the Western companies figuring out how they're going to go deal with this inconvenience of East versus West. Look, it's not going to happen overnight. Doesn't matter the investments that China's putting in. For the real endgame of this industry, it could be there's a Western and Eastern supply chain for semiconductors.
Mm-hmm.
Two different ecosystems. Highly inefficient, it is probably what it's gonna be, but it's gonna take a decade. It's not gonna happen overnight.
Let's talk about some of your end market and some of the diversification strategies, customer-wise and market-wise. I'd like to focus on the automotive business 'cause you touched upon it in some of your answers here. You know, the team more than doubled the automotive business year-over-year in the first quarter. You're on track to drive $1 billion in revenues this year in automotive from $375 million, right? 2.5 times growth, as you mentioned. GlobalFoundries is a, you know, broadly engaged with most of the auto OEMs, tier one auto suppliers, auto semiconductor companies, so the entire value chain, right? You've secured $2 billion of Long-Term Agreements last year in automotive.
Based on the current design win, ramp profiling, how should we think about the revenue trajectory for automotive and, you know, what do you think the revenue mix in auto looks like over the next three to five years?
Yeah. The beauty of the tyranny of small numbers, you could look like you have really high percentage growth rates, but, you know, you're starting in 2020 with, like, $75 million of revenue. It's substantial this year.
Yeah.
$375 last year, we're gonna bump our head on $1 billion. We think it's an important market for us, and I'll give you the answer to where I think it's going in a moment.
Mm-hmm.
Because it's a market that requires where we play. It doesn't need a lot of high-speed digital computation. It needs a lot of analog, mixed signal-.
Right
... high frequency, whether it's connecting the car or autonomous driving the car. You know, this transition from internal combustion to what we call ACE, autonomous connected electrified car, plays to all the technology nodes that GF invests in. It's an important market because it's accretive to our business. It typically commands higher price because it has higher reliability because of the mission-critical applications. If we stopped any activity today in automotive and just, you know, harvest it for the rest of the momentum we have going into it, that business easily doubles from.
Yeah
... the $1 billion today. We're not stopping there. We're gonna try to double down and continue to build out that platform because the technology requirements in that space really align well with what GF does. Whether it's, you know, RF for radar, whether it's low power for electrification of cars-
Yeah
... precision battery management, or microcontrollers for, you know, intelligent and secure functionality. That's the place we play in.
Help us understand, though, because when the announcement about the signing of the GM Long-Term Agreement, we got a lot of questions from investors. What is GM doing securing capacity? Are they designing their own semiconductors? You know, GF is already engaged with the top automotive semiconductor suppliers in the world. Help investors sort of understand the dynamics around why is it that you're signing and inking these deals with the auto OEMs directly, but yet you also have pretty strong partnerships with all the semiconductor suppliers.
Yeah. At first, it's a great question and once you understand what's at foot there, it makes sense for why it might've been a first of a kind deal, but certainly not a last kind deal.
Mm-hmm.
What is it Company first need to do. It's a little like electronics snuck up on them.
They started putting more and more electronics in cars till they wake up one day and find out, "My God, we have 80 different SKUs of a microcontroller when we need maybe 4 different types." The first thing all the automotive companies are doing right now, and this was the end of the realization through 2021, is, "Hey, how do we harmonize and rearchitect the electronics of the car so we can be more, you know, balanced and have a more efficient use of semiconductors?" Once you have that, you say, "Okay, how do I go out, create the supply that I need on the technology nodes that have the durability and legs and get it at the best economics?" The GM deal does all three of that. You know, it's 40nm embedded non-volatile memory for microcontroller technology.
It's a winning platform. It will be here for a long time. They wanted capacity in the U.S. They could have asked for it in Germany or Singapore. They want it in the U.S., and they wanted the best economics. To create that capacity in the U.S., we'd have to make an investment. To make that investment, we need a return on that investment, so that'll be an extra cost on their wafers. Let's take an imaginary number. Just say that cost to get a return is $1,000 in every wafer. If we took that $1,000 and passed it over to a fabless company who does the design, they don't just pass through cost, they margin it up.
They'll pass it on to a tier one who creates some functional anti-lock brake, you know, an airbag or some function, and they'll mark it up. Something that should cost GM $1,000 for that investment on top of the manufacturing service to create the wafer is now $2,500. How do you get the best economics? You work a three-way deal. You work with the fabless company, what that product's gonna cost. You work a deal with GF on how much, you know, we want to for every wafer we ship to return on an investment. You pay us directly for that investment. You pay the fabless company their, the value they've created in the design, and GF charges the fabless company for the wafer without that investment. Best economics.
Yeah.
Capacity where they want it on the technology they want. The reason why it's not the last of a kind is because it makes economic sense. You know, I think you'll see more of those come along in different variations. By the way, GM could have easily said, "You know what? I'll use my own capital.
Mm-hmm.
I'll make the investment," then no one has to mark up anything. They chose a better use of their capital was to, you know, to build their automobiles and their capital investments and chose to use GF's. You can imagine a world where, you know, other companies would say, "No, I have a big balance sheet. I might as well use my balance sheet to help my gross margins.
Yeah. Perfect. On the last earnings call, you called out strength in your aerospace and defense business through this weak period in our industry. It's the first time I've heard the team mention aerospace and defense as a part of your mix. I do know that GlobalFoundries has what we call ITAR and Trusted Fab certification by the US Department of Defense. What types of programs are you engaged in? Did the NDAA that was signed that we just talked about in December, did that motivate more of your aerospace and defense customers to redirect programs to GlobalFoundries?
ITAR, Trusted Foundry, this enables GF to make the most sensitive components for U.S. military applications. The NDA kind of created awareness. There wasn't really a policy that talked about where parts can be sourced other than when they were super sensitive and it required Trusted Foundry. A lot of, you know, the Defense Industrial Base who serves the Department of Defense and the military, you know, took note. You know, we need to get a better understanding of what are the uses of semiconductors-
Yeah.
in our systems. Many of them give a specification and have a box made to them. It's kind of a black box that delivers a certain function. They were surprised to find how much content was not U.S.-based or even Western-based.
Yeah.
It's creating a sense of awareness. I think it was no different than the auto companies in 2021 when semiconductors was an afterthought until they left about $100 billion of auto sales, you know, on the sidelines because they didn't have enough semiconductors to create awareness. They started to think about the industry differently. I think we're in the early innings of the aerospace and defense to think about, "Hey, where are we getting our chips from?" There's real risk to them. There's reputational damage if something goes wrong in that supply chain. There's risk that the U.S. government will want, you know, more proof points.
Yeah.
What they're sourcing. It creates opportunity for us to work in partnership with these, with our existing customers and maybe new ones in the Defense Industrial Base to create opportunities for them to leverage our technologies.
Well, let's talk a little bit about differentiated technology because the metrics that you guys throw out, you know, 90% of your design wins are sole sourced to GlobalFoundries, two-thirds plus of your revenue, so it'll gradually approach that number. Two-thirds of your current book of business is sole sourced to GlobalFoundries. You know, we cover 20 semiconductor companies, and one of the biggest trends in the market, especially high-performance networking, is all of the big guys are moving to co-packaged electro optics. More often than not, when we ask them, "Who is your manufacturing partner?" They'll say, "GlobalFoundries." To that point, I mean, you were, you know, one of the first to market in terms of developing a manufacturable, and the key term here is manufacturable, silicon photonic solution for next generation data center connectivity.
I think you guys said that you have 16 customer tape-outs on your new 45nm CLO silicon photonics capability. I guess the question there is how much revenue is the team driving today? Have you seen any customer pull-ins on some of the technology roadmaps? Because of all of a sudden there's this big focus on accelerated compute, artificial intelligence, and this is really driving some of your customers to really step it up in terms of higher data rates. silicon photonics is gonna help them achieve that.
Yeah. I think, the catchphrase, it's certainly like around, you know, the chat IGBT. These are the technologies that are kinda overhyped in the near term and underhyped in the long term. silicon photonics is an important play for us. We're the first to monolithically integrate CMOS, RF, SOI and photonics on a single chip, so it creates great functionality at the best cost of ownership and integration. It's a technology that takes a while to deploy because of how special it is. You know, we see this, these design wins and these tape-outs are really important.
Yeah.
They're really more teaching our customers how to best leverage it. This is a story that's in early innings for us. I think it really ramps in the 2026 timeframe. It could be a, you know, a market that grows to over $1 billion, and there's no reason we shouldn't have 50% share in that. It's very good margin business for us because it's so special and differentiating, creates value. This is gonna be something that's gonna take time to get that-
Yeah.
that deployed into the industry and with our customers.
Well, we're just about out of time, but I did want you to maybe hit on several of the key factors influencing the growth opportunities ahead for GlobalFoundries, particularly in the face of some of the near-term headwinds that we're seeing across the industry. I guess against this backdrop, you know, are there any other remarks that you'd like to maybe leave us with today?
Yeah. I think, kind of the new news is, given the investment profile we made and how it can grow our company from where we are today, we're probably running ahead of schedule to our free cash flow positive for our business. We needed to invest to get to that $10 billion, and now we have that investment in place, so we can be free cash flow positive. I think from an industry perspective, the way I look at semiconductors, it's always been a series of golden ages, some called the different epochs of computing, right? It started with the mainframe PC, networking, handsets, and now IoT.
Mm-hmm.
In each generation of technology, it wasn't replacement, it was additive. We still sell, you know, 300 million of PCs a year...
Yeah.
on top of 1.2 million handsets. Now we're gonna have 15 billion of IoT devices additive. The thing about IoT, it's the first time in the history of this industry that the technologies that service that next generation of compute is not leading edge Moore's Law.
Yeah.
It's where GF plays because it's about compute at the edge. It's about taking data at the edge, using it for inference and action, parsing it, compressing it, send it to the cloud, 'cause it's impractical to send every piece of data collected to the cloud for a decision and come back. Sensing devices at IoT, you know, are now have to become intelligent devices. We have the technology for that because we have the three important features that make that a winning play. The first one is like real estate. It's not location, location. It's about power and power. The second one is best RF connectivity wins, the third one is secure intelligence, which means digital processing with embedded memory. Those are the key features that we've embed in our platform, we win in the space.
Give important application. Think about a camera, a surveillance camera you want to be able to work on the edge for you. You want it to be pasted up in a remote spot 2 to 3 years on 2 double A batteries. You're not gonna get that if you don't use GF's 22FDX technology, so that it delivers the performance and power that lets the battery life. How does it do that? Any kind of device that's not tethered spends most of its time in the idle mode. In this particular case, there's 2 microcontrollers in the design. The first one wakes up 10 milliseconds, every 1,000 milliseconds to look around to see if anything's going on. If it does, it wakes up the big microcontroller and the data and action takes place.
What's really important is the minimization of power when the device is kind of in its sleep mode that fits to our technology we've developed to be not only power efficient when our devices are running, but super efficient when our devices are sitting in idle state. We talk a lot about our automotive growth. A huge opportunity.
Yeah.
-for GF is to be doing at the surface of the edge, the kind of AI and compute through the inference. Let the edge do the inference, let the data centers do the machine learning, then teach one another.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's the big play for GF as we participate in this new era of AI.
Great insights, Tom. Thank you for your participation today.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thank you.