Welcome everyone to the Lattice Semiconductor second quarter 2021 conference call. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Rick Muscha, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Muscha.
Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. With me today are Jim Anderson, Lattice's President and CEO, and Sherri Luther, Lattice's CFO. We'll provide a financial and business review of the second quarter of 2021, and the business outlook for the third quarter of 2021. If you have not obtained a copy of our earnings press release, it can be found at our company website in the investor relations section at latticesemi.com. I would like to remind everyone that during our conference call today, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. We wish to caution you that such statements are predictions based on information that is currently available, and that actual results may differ materially. We refer you to the documents that the company files with the SEC, including our 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and 8-Ks.
These documents contain and identify important risk factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those that are contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. This call includes and constitutes the company's official guidance for the third quarter of 2021. If at any time after this call we communicate any material changes to this guidance, we intend that such updates will be done using a public forum, such as a press release or publicly announced conference call. Some financial information that we present during the call will be provided on both a GAAP and a non-GAAP basis.
By disclosing certain non-GAAP information, management intends to provide investors with additional information to permit further analysis of the company's performance and underlying trends. Management uses non-GAAP measures to better assess operating performance and to establish operational goals. For historical periods, we provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures that can be found on the investor relations section of our website at latticesemi.com. Let me now turn the call over to Jim Anderson, our CEO.
Thank you, Rick, and thank you everyone for joining us on our call today. We're excited to be at the beginning of a new growth phase for Lattice, fueled by an expanded product portfolio in multiple growth vectors across our key end markets. Let me start by covering a few highlights from Q2 of 2021. We grew revenue 25% year-over-year and 9% sequentially, with double-digit year-over-year growth in each of our key market segments. We expanded non-GAAP gross margin by 80 basis points year-over-year to 62.1% as we continue to execute on our gross margin expansion strategy. We achieved record non-GAAP operating profit of 29%, while non-GAAP net income increased 49% year-over-year. We also expanded our product leadership with the June launch of CertusPro-NX, our new advanced general purpose FPGA.
Let me now provide an overview of our business by end market. In the communications and computing market, revenue increased 7% sequentially and 15% on a year-over-year basis. As we discussed at our recent investor day, our key long-term growth drivers in this segment are data center servers, client computing, and 5G infrastructure. In servers, growth was driven by expansion of both attach rates and ASPs as we continue to drive an increase in our dollar content per server with each new server generation. Client computing is a significant greenfield opportunity for us, with multiple programs ramping and multiple ways to bring new innovation to our customers. 5G infrastructure growth is driven by our higher content in 5G systems versus 4G systems, and the continued worldwide build-out of 5G infrastructure. Communications and computing continues to be a long-term growth opportunity for the company.
Turning now to the industrial and automotive market, revenue increased 15% sequentially and was up 47% on a year-over-year basis. Our business grew across multiple applications such as industrial automation and robotics, where Lattice solutions provide significant competitive advantage and differentiation for our customers. We continue to deliver strong growth in the industrial segment, and our product portfolio is well positioned to drive sustained long-term growth. Turning now to consumer, revenue was flat sequentially and was up 13% year-over-year. The quality of the revenue stream in consumer has improved over the past two years as we've targeted higher value multi-generational designs that better leverage our FPGA portfolio. We believe our consumer revenue has stabilized and has the potential for modest growth over the long term. I'll now provide some product roadmap highlights. I continue to be very pleased with our team's overall execution.
With the June launch of CertusPro-NX, we have now launched four device families based on the Lattice Nexus platform since the platform was introduced in late 2019. We're excited about the CertusPro-NX family, which relative to the competition, offers 4x lower power, best-in-class system bandwidth, and industry-leading reliability. Each of these advantages provides meaningful differentiation of value for our customers' applications and systems. Our first two device families, CrossLink-NX and Certus-NX, are in production and ramping with customers. The third device family, Mach-NX, is on track to generate revenue by the end of this year. We continue to be very pleased with the broad adoption of our Nexus platform across our market segments.
On our software roadmap, we continue to invest in tools, solutions, and software stacks to make it easy for our customers to adopt Lattice products and get to market quickly. During the quarter, we launched Lattice Automate, our solution stack focused on factory automation and robotics applications. Automate is the fourth installment in our application specific solution stack portfolio and another proof point of our continued roadmap execution. Lastly, at our recent investor day, we announced our new Lattice Avant platform, which will double our addressable market and will allow us to address mid-range FPGA applications.
Execution is going well, and we remain on track for launch in the second half of next year. We've engaged with over 100 customers on Avant and are pleased with customer reception and momentum. In summary, we continued to execute well in Q2, and we're excited to be at the start of a new growth phase for Lattice, driven by our leadership product portfolio in multiple growth vectors across our key end markets. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Sherri Luther.
Thank you, Jim. We are pleased with our strong Q2 financial results as we continue to execute to our financial model. We drove sequential and year-over-year revenue growth, continued to expand gross margin, and delivered record profitability while continuing to invest in our leadership product roadmap. We drove strong cash generation, increased our net cash positive position, and continued to return cash to shareholders. Let me now provide a summary of our results. Second quarter revenue was $125.9 million, up 9% sequentially from the first quarter, and up 25% year-over-year. Revenue grew double digits year-over-year in our communications and computing and industrial and automotive market segments, with strong sequential growth as well. Revenue from our consumer market segment was also up double digits year-over-year and was flat sequentially. IP revenue was down both year-over-year and on a sequential basis.
Gross margin on a GAAP basis was up 30 basis points to 61.3% in Q2 compared to the prior quarter and was up 110 basis points compared to the year-ago quarter. Our non-GAAP gross margin increased 40 basis points to 62.1% in Q2 compared to the prior quarter and was up 80 basis points compared to the year-ago quarter. Both the sequential and year-over-year increases in gross margin continue to be driven by our margin expansion strategy as we benefit from pricing optimization and product cost reductions. Q2 GAAP operating expenses were $53.9 million compared to $49.9 million in the prior quarter and $48.1 million in the year-ago quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, operating expenses were $41.5 million compared to $38.9 million in the prior quarter and $36.6 million in the year-ago quarter. Our R&D expenses increased sequentially as we continue to invest in our product portfolio.
SG&A expenses increased slightly on a sequential basis, while declining to 14.6% of revenue, which is below our target model. Q2 GAAP earnings per basic share was $0.16 and $0.15 per diluted share, compared to $0.14 and $0.13 in the prior quarter, and $0.08 in the year-ago quarter. Q2 non-GAAP earnings per basic share was $0.26 and $0.25 per diluted share, which increased from $0.23 and $0.22 in the prior quarter and increased from $0.17 in the year-ago quarter. This represents 47% year-over-year growth for non-GAAP earnings per diluted share. Driving cash flow generation continues to be a key focus area for the company. We generated approximately $71 million in cash from operations in the first half of 2021. This is up over 90% compared to the cash generated from operations in the first half of 2020.
In Q2, we repurchased approximately 525,000 shares or $25 million in stock under our buyback program. This brings our year-to-date total of stock repurchase to $40 million. Finally, our cash balance increased to $188 million as we further increased our positive net cash position. Let me now review our outlook for the third quarter. Revenue for the third quarter of 2021 is expected to be between $124 million and $132 million. Gross margin is expected to be 62% ±1% on a non-GAAP basis. Total operating expenses for the third quarter are expected to be between $42 million and $44 million on a non-GAAP basis. We are focused on continuing to drive revenue growth and profitability expansion through the strength and differentiation of our leadership product roadmap. Operator, that concludes my formal comments. We can now open the call for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you, at this time, please press star, then the one key on your touchtone telephone. Again, that is star one. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question is from Matt Ramsay from Cowen.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. I guess, Jim, it's great to see the progress in the business, so congratulations. It's been a couple of months now since you guys announced at the investor meeting the Lattice Avant program, and you mentioned a couple of things in your script. I wanted to revisit that and see what the initial engagements and customer receptions have been like. The second part of the question is, as you guys think about moving into mid-tier FPGA products over time, any thoughts as to the sensitivity or restriction on potentially shipping those into markets like China?
I know some of your higher-tier competitors have had some challenges there. You guys have been largely immune to some of those challenges in the lower tiers of the market. Any initial feedback from regulators as to how much flexibility you might have in those mid-tiers to go after some of those markets that your competitors can't? Thank you.
Thanks, Matt. Yeah. On Avant, first of all, we're really pleased with the progress on Avant. I know you asked about customer momentum, but let me give a shout-out to our engineering team for continuing to do a great job executing on that program. We're really pleased with the progress on execution, we remain on track for sampling and launching the device in the second half of next year. On customer momentum as well, really pleased with the progress on that. As we shared at the investor day, we had engaged with over 100 customers on Avant. We continue to have very strong engagement, growing customer momentum. Also, if you recall from the investor day, I shared that actually it was the customers that encouraged us to build Avant.
When we introduced Nexus to our customers, we got great reception on Nexus. The customers also asked us, "Hey, can you do more? Can you expand the portfolio? Can you bring your power-efficient architecture to mid-range?" It was really at the customer's behest that we went ahead and started working on Avant back in 2019. Yeah, customer momentum continues to be good. Our sales team is very happy right now having all sorts of discussions with Avant with our customers. On the second part of your question on export controls. Of course, we always adhere to all U.S. regulations on export controls.
We would of course, do that for any new products, whether those are Nexus or Avant. Now, we've done extensive market research. We believe that there's a tremendous market opportunity for Avant. We believe it'll be a very competitive product. As we shared at Investor Day, we believe that'll open up about $3 billion of additional SAM for us, additional addressable market, which will roughly double our addressable market when Avant launches. Yeah, once again, really pleased with progress on Avant, and just really excited to launch it next year.
Thanks for the color there, Jim. As my follow-up question, it's no secret that most companies in the semiconductor industry right now have a lot more demand than they have supply. I would assume that you guys are in that position to some extent. Maybe you could talk a bit about what the supply-demand gap is, and are you maybe in a better position to supply more of that demand given your sourcing from SOI-based platforms versus some of the bulk CMOS that is a lot more tight at foundry? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Definitely I think that our supply chain team has done a great job over the past year of navigating the tightness in the overall semiconductor supply chain that we're seeing across the industry. I think our supply chain team has done a really good job of proactively figuring out how to navigate. Just to mention a couple things that we've done is, number one, of course, we've been working very closely with our customers to understand their needs, and their forecasts, and really long-term multi-quarter forecasts. We understand exactly what they need. Then turning around and working with our key strategic suppliers to make sure that supply is in place. That's number one. Number two is we've proactively and strategically built inventory on especially high-volume products that will last for years and years.
We started that inventory, that sort of strategic inventory building program, back in Q2 of last year. We built inventory beginning in Q2 of last year, we built more inventory in Q3, Q4, and ended the year in 2020 in a very good inventory position. Again, from Q1 to Q2 this year, we built inventory sequentially in the most recent quarter. I think we've done a good job of getting inventory there to help support our customers. I want to do a thank you to the supply chain team for the great job at executing. Yeah, I think we're doing a good job of meeting our customers' demand. There certainly can be localized combinations of silicon and packaging that might be a bit tight here or there, but as a whole, I think we've done a really good job supporting our customers.
I think our customers would say exactly the same thing, and I think that will benefit us moving forward because the customers certainly see that, they recognize that, and they do take that into account as they decide on new designs for new systems. We're certainly seeing some benefit right now in terms of additional new designs because we've executed really well on the supply chain. I hope that answers the question, Matt.
No, thanks very much, Jim, and congrats, guys. I'll jump back in the queue. Appreciate it.
Thanks.
Your next question is from Alessandra Vecchi from William Blair. Your line is open.
Thanks, everyone. I also extend a congratulations on another great quarter and for helping make us all look good. Just on the revenue by end market breakout, maybe Jim, if you can just talk to us a little bit more about how those segments tracked versus your internal expectations going into the quarter, and then maybe a little more granularly on the industrial side. Obviously, there's been an acceleration on robotics and automation coming out of COVID. Can you maybe hone in a little bit on how much of it really is market growth versus share gains versus some of the incumbents that maybe have neglected the industrial customers in particular?
Sure. Thanks, Alex. On the first part of the question on revenue by end market, certainly our Q2 came in better than we had expected on the top line, which we were quite pleased by. In particular, we saw strength in communications and computing. That was up 7% sequentially and 15% year-over-year, also industrial and automotive, which was up 16% sequentially and 47% year-over-year. Industrial and automotive in particular came in much stronger than we had expected. Consumer kind of performed as we had thought in the quarter. Those two segments of comms and compute and industrial and auto, those have really been our lead strategic growth segments. Certainly last year, both those segments grew double digits, those are really the segments that we look to in the future of driving the majority of the company's growth moving forward.
We have multiple growth vectors in each one of those markets. Comms and compute, we have growth in servers, growth in client computing, 5G infrastructure, of course, industrial and automotive, a number of places as well. I think you asked in particular where are some of the sources of strength in industrial and automotive. In that market, it's really around new design wins, new programs around industrial automation, industrial robotics, automotive electronics as well, although automotive is still a relatively small part of that segment. We are seeing just really solid growth in industrial automation and robotics applications. What we see there is our industrial customers really accelerating their plans around automation and robotics, that has helped lead to new design wins for our products and certainly stronger demand. Our products are just a great match for those types of applications.
The power efficiency, the flexibility, the software, the tremendous amount of software content we provide. We just launched our Lattice Automate software stack, which is specifically for industrial automation and robotics to help those customers get to market quickly, to design in our products really easily. That's a tremendous area of strength for us. In terms of how much of it is end market versus share gain, I would say there certainly is some portion of it that is end market. Certainly, the industrial and automotive segment have recovered significantly since Q2 of last year. I would say a good portion of that is also share gain, new sources of revenue. That's certainly a big contributor to that as well. Yeah, we're quite pleased with the industrial auto segment and continue to expect that to be a long-term growth area for us.
Great. That was extremely helpful on a color front. As my one follow-up, as we sort of think about R&D spend going forward, I think you guys have an internal target of about 20% of revenue. It's been tracking a little bit below that for the last few quarters. Is that just a function of the timing of tapeouts, or how should we think about that? It's just a little bit surprising given all the new product launches and Avant coming up.
Yeah. Thank you, Ales, for the question. You're right. Our target that we did put out at our investor day back in May of this year was 20% as our R&D spend target. During the quarter, we came in at about 18.4% of revenue, so below our target, but I will point out that in absolute dollar perspective, that we did increase our R&D spend, to your point, to really increase our investments in our product portfolio for the long-term growth of the company, and we'll continue to focus on that.
If you look at the midpoint of our guide for Q3, you see that that's up, and that's also a reflection of continuing investments that we want to make in our product portfolio. At our investor day, we talked about our Avant platform, as well as our CertusPro-NX product that we launched. We'll continue investing for the long-term growth, and you'll continue to see that in our financials.
Yeah, the one thing I would add, Alex, is certainly as Sherri said, we're continuing to invest in the product portfolio, continuing to expand the portfolio, get great products to market. When we look to continuing to invest, we also want to do that in a controlled and disciplined way, in a disciplined way that we know we're getting the ROI on that additional investment. We will continue to invest, but we'll do that at the right rate and pace and in a disciplined way.
That makes a ton of sense. With that, I'll jump back in queue.
Your next question is from Tristan from Baird. Your line is open.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you, Tristan.
Okay. Sorry. Just a quick follow-up on the earlier question about shortages, and you've mentioned that it's actually helping you as some customers know that you're managing the supply chain well in terms of new design win qualification. Given the notable extension of lead times in microcontrollers, and that's a type of architecture that you're really targeting going forward in terms of share gain, are you seeing designs or an acceleration of design shift away from MCU to your product because of the improved availability, or is it not really the case yet because obviously, it takes time for customers, they have to redesign the product to requalify. In the scheme of that supply shortage, are you seeing an acceleration in terms of your TAM expansion against MCUs?
Yeah. Thanks, Tristan. I would say we're definitely seeing new opportunities and accelerated opportunities against microcontrollers. Certainly no secret that there's a supply shortage on microcontrollers. Also we've been quite clear that we are targeting parts of the microcontroller market. We're obviously competing with our traditional FPGA competitors in the FPGA market, but we're also going after portions of the microcontroller market as well. We're already in a good position to displace microcontrollers because of the nature of our products, the power efficiency, the ability to do parallel processing for artificial intelligence algorithms at a much higher performance, much better performance per watt than microcontrollers, and all the software content and flexibility that we bring. We're already seeing conversions of microcontrollers to FPGAs.
I would say the supply shortage and the fact that we've been able to support our customers very well, that's certainly something that our customers have noticed. They've taken that into account, and we do have examples of customers accelerating their plans to switch to a Lattice device. We're seeing that across a couple different market segments, industrial being one of the particular market segments that we're seeing that. You're right, it does take a little bit of time to redesign the systems, but we're seeing customers very motivated to do that as quickly as possible in some instances. Yeah, we're certainly benefiting from that, Tristan.
Okay. That's great feedback. A question for Sherri. Obviously, we know your gross margin, longer-term target. In the near term, next few quarters is kind of this 62% gross margin stabilization something we should expect for the next few quarters as well. If you were to comment on what you think is going to be the key catalyst for gross margin to continue stepping up from current levels.
Sure. Thank you, Tristan, for the question. I'll point out, though, that our gross margin has improved nearly 500 basis points from 2018 to date. We're really pleased with the progress that we've made on improving our gross margin as part of our gross margin expansion strategy for pricing optimization and product cost reductions are our two key elements of that strategy. When you look at the current quarter, the 40 basis points improvement that we've shown sequentially, and then the 80 basis points improvement year-over-year, again, you can see that pricing optimization strategy kicking in there. I'll also point out that we exceeded our 2019 target that we put out at our Investor Day in 2019 of greater than 62%.
Q2 exceeded that target, and as you pointed out at our Investor Day this past May, we raised our target to 65%. The elements of that gross margin expansion strategy continue to be pricing optimization and product cost reductions. We have a number of initiatives that we continue to work on and put in place, and some are near term and some are longer term. We expect to continue to be able to execute on that strategy to get to our long-term target model of 65%.
That's very useful. Thank you.
Again, as a reminder, star one to ask a question. Your next question is from Chris Rolland from Susquehanna. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Given that supply doesn't seem to be a huge constraint for you guys, would that mean that typical seasonality is a bigger driver in the back half? Traditionally, you guys have been more flat sequentially in the back half there, or just given your strong product ramps here, would you expect to grow through that? Thanks.
Yeah, Chris, I think, other than the consumer segment, we haven't seen strong seasonality patterns over the last couple years. The consumer segment, we still see kind of normal consumer cycle patterns, but that remains now a relatively small part of our overall revenue. Certainly, we've provided the guidance for Q3. We're not providing any guidance beyond Q3. We do have throughout this year a number of new product ramps that continue through the second half, and we certainly look forward to having a strong second half, just as we had, we believe, a really good first half as well.
Okay. Great color there. Thank you. One thing I noticed in your report is distie as a percentage of total was up. I know a lot of vendors have actually been shorting distie given their supply constraints. That may not be the case for you. But any updates there on the channel, why distie was going up as a percentage, and then inventories that you have there, How robust do you think those are, and would you expect these trends to continue? Thanks.
Thanks, Chris. I wouldn't read too much into that sequential increase. Our percentage of disti versus direct can fluctuate quarter to quarter. I'll also note that a number of our large strategic customers actually prefer to go through distribution because it makes it operationally easier for whatever reason. Although we're happy to support our large customers in either a direct or a through distribution mode.
We do have a number of large customers that prefer to go through distribution. In terms of disti levels of inventory, we do have very good visibility into our level of disti distribution inventory. We finished Q2, I would certainly say, on the leaner side of what we've historically seen. I would call disti inventory lean. We, of course, have very good visibility into what ships out of disti into our end customers as well. Again, back to the first part of your question, I wouldn't read too much into the sequential fluctuation in percentage disti.
Great. Thanks, Jim, and nice quarter.
Thanks, Chris.
Your next question is from Hans Mosesmann from Rosenblatt. Your line is open.
Thanks, guys. Congratulations. Hey, Jim, just a question, just on customer activity in the design cycle. Are you seeing the design cycles accelerating or shortening?
What I would say is, it's a little bit market dependent. I would say that we're certainly seeing a very high level of customer activity in general in terms of in customer engagement, new design wins, design-ins. We're seeing a tremendous amount of activity. I would say the level of customer engagement and activity is certainly the highest since I've been at Lattice, and I think if you ask a number of our sales employees who have been with Lattice for many years, they would say it's the highest they've seen in their many years at Lattice. I think that's really a testament to the strength of the product portfolio, the Nexus platform. We've now launched, in June, our fourth family of devices based on the Nexus family. That's four device families that are in our customers' hands. The first two are already in production and ramping.
The third, which is Mach-NX, we expect to ramp into production at the end of this year. The fourth, which we just launched, we would expect to start to see revenue next year. We're seeing a tremendous amount of activity around Nexus. Then, of course, as you can imagine, Avant as well, the new platform that we announced at our investor day in May, and that'll launch in the second half of next year. There's a tremendous amount of customer activity around that, too. I would say, definitely great customer momentum. In terms of the design cycle shortening or accelerating, there are some instances we've seen of customers accelerating their design cycles.
It's more for customer specific reasons. In some cases, for instance, in industrial customers, it's where they're having some supply issues with their existing microcontroller customer, and so they're driving a faster, accelerated pace to switch to our device. We're seeing instances that are kind of supply constraint driven that's driving a faster transition to Lattice. Again, in general, very good customer activity right now.
Great. Just a quick follow-up, and just to make sure that it's clear, your lead times have not changed, right?
Yeah. When you look across the full set of Lattice products, generally, our lead times have been relatively stable. There are particular instances, there may be like a particular silicon package combination of one device that we may have, to some tight supply that may have a longer than normal lead time. As a whole and generally across our broad range of products, our lead times have been relatively stable.
Great. Thank you. Congratulations.
Thanks, Hans.
Your next question is from Sam Peterman from Craig-Hallum Capital. Your line is open.
Hi, Jim. Hi, Sherri. This is Sam. I'm for Richard. Thanks for taking my question. I guess first I want to follow up on the question that was asked about your distributors and channel inventory. I guess, could you talk about how those channel inventories compare to levels you saw in the first quarter? You said they were lean. Is that kind of across segments, or are there certain spots that are more lean than others?
Yeah. Thanks, Sam . Channel inventory in Q2 was sequentially down versus Q1. If we look at where we ended in terms of channel distributor inventory at the end of Q2, and we look at, say, the last three to four years, it's at certainly the lower level of what we've seen over that time span. We see very lean levels of inventory within our distributors. We have also, as we said, tried to maintain a very good level of inventory within Lattice.
Lattice inventory is at a very healthy level, and we've strategically built inventory to allow us to build parts and allocate the inventory or allocate the parts to the right markets and make sure that we're supporting the customers very well. I think part of your question was also about, are we seeing differences in inventory levels across different market segments? No, I would say the inventory levels in the distributors is, we're not seeing any significant variance across, say, different market segments.
Okay. Thanks for the color. That's helpful. One more quickly. I'm just curious on the industrial auto segment. The last four quarters have been pretty strong as that started to pick up. 2Q last year, I think it's been growth rates of about 8% or higher quarter-over-quarter. Wondering, as you head into the back half, if we should expect kind of the rate of change or the rate of growth there to slow a little bit.
Yeah. I can talk about Q3. If you look at the midpoint of our guidance for Q3, you see that it's sequentially up from Q2 to Q3. We would expect our two big growth segments of comms and computing and industrial and auto to track that midpoint and we'd expect both of those to be sequentially up as well. Yeah, we're certainly expecting industrial auto to be sequentially up in Q3.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Sam.
Again, as a reminder, that is star one to ask a question. Your next question is from Derek Soderberg from Colliers Securities. Your line is open.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Jim, I was just kind of curious on the various end markets, what you're seeing on the progression from Q2 to Q3. Just unpacking third quarter guidance from a revenue perspective. If you could sort of provide any directional commentary on that'd be helpful.
Yeah, certainly, Derek. Q2 to Q3, we expect Q3 to be sequentially up. We expect comms and computing to be sequentially up. Within comms and computing, we have three really good growth drivers within that segment. We have data center servers, which we continue to expand our dollars of content per server, and we're expanding that through a combination of higher ASPs as we bring more value to each server platform and higher attach rates as well. We had shared at our investor day that with the new generation of servers that's ramping, we're expecting a significant increase in our dollars of content per server, driven by one of the things that's driving that is attach rates that we expect to now exceed one, meaning we're shipping more than one Lattice device per server. Client computing, 5G infrastructure, also growth areas for us in comms and compute.
In industrial auto, we certainly saw a very strong quarter in Q2. We're seeing just very good strength in some of our new programs that are ramping in industrial automation, robotics, as I had mentioned earlier. We expect to see sequential growth there as well. Consumer, we would expect to be flat to slightly up from Q2 to Q3. Hopefully that's a little bit of additional color for you, Derek.
Yeah, that's great. Then as my follow-up, just curious about any incremental competition on low power. I think there's some new FPGA players listing on the market. Seeing anything incremental in terms of competition there? Are there any interesting companies out there for you guys to buy to maybe build on your hardware or software platforms? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Derek. I think on the competitive landscape for the part of the market that we're addressing today with our products, I think the competitive landscape has been pretty stable. We haven't seen any dramatic changes. We believe we're absolutely leading the market in terms of our product portfolio for small FPGAs that are very power efficient, very flexible, easy to use. We definitely think we're leading the market. We have a significant advantage, especially with our Nexus devices. We've shown a number of competitive comparisons. If you remember, at our investor day back in May, we provided quite a bit of competitive comparisons and data there. We think we're still in a very good spot with respect to competitive landscape and our positioning in the market. I think the second part of your question was about potential M&A opportunities.
I would start by saying, first, we're never confused about what job one is, and job one is to drive growth in our organic business. That's always top of mind, and that's always priority one. Certainly in parallel, we're always scanning the landscape for any potential inorganic options that would be very adjacent, very complementary to our existing product portfolio. That could be either from a hardware or a software perspective, but they would be very additive in a way that would accelerate our organic strategy and again, be very complementary. That's kind of the way we approach looking at inorganic options.
Perfect. Thanks for the detail.
Thanks, Derek.
I am showing no further question at this time. I would like to turn the call back to Lattice Semiconductor CEO, Mr. Jim Anderson, for closing comments.
Yeah. Thank you, operator, and thanks again for everybody for joining us on the call today. We're really excited to be at the start of really a new growth phase for Lattice, and again, driven by our leadership product portfolio and multiple growth vectors across our key end markets. We look forward to updating you on our continued progress on our next earnings call. Thanks, operator. That concludes today's call.
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and have a great day.