Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the 25th Annual Needham Growth Conference. Today is day three. It's a virtual day. Joining me here is Synopsys' management team. I'm thrilled to have here Dr. Aart de Geus, a Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Synopsys. Well, we also have Miss Lisa Ewbank, Vice President of Investor Relations, who's staying in the background. Welcome, Aart, Lisa. Thank you for joining us today. I'm excited for the next 35-ish minutes to hear your great insights on a range of topics about the semiconductor industry, EDA, and more importantly, about Synopsys. Well, thanks for having us. All right. Let's get right in. I wanna start with the topic of China. Well, I'm sure you have answered this question probably way too many times recently. I keep getting this question still often when a piece of geopolitical news really breaks. Allow me to frame the question this way. Based on the team's conversation... I mean, your team's conversation with the investment community, especially after the August ban of gate-all-around EDA tools to China. There was the October ban that isn't quite specific to EDA, but it restricts China, the Chinese semiconductor industry in arguably kind of like unprecedented way. What do you think, well, there's a disconnect, I would say, that a part of the investment community think that's probably gonna be some material impact on EDA, on Synopsys. What you see actually, based on your releases, it's not as material, and it's probably more limited. Where is the disconnect between people's perception and what you actually see, from, by operating the company? Okay. Well, for starters, I hope it's not a disconnect between investors and Synopsys. I say that because it's just barely six weeks ago at our earnings release that we gave guidance for the year, and we made very explicit that we have obviously studied with great attention, what had happened in terms of restrictions, what may happen, put some risk factors on that. So the guidance that we gave was in full understanding of, A, the situation and some degree of understanding what different scenarios could be. I would note that while the gravitas of these restrictions, is important, it is especially important to the people in manufacturing, because that's really where the hard restrictions are. In the design side, you're absolutely right, the gate-all-around, which is a very advanced form of FinFET, has restrictions, and that's sort of a topical restriction. The other restrictions is something that's not new, which is called the Entity List, which is certain companies that you cannot ship to because for whatever reason, the government has decided that they may be connecting to military needs or something like that. That list evolves over time. It doesn't evolve particularly fast, but whenever it happens, it has some impact on us. I would not say there's zero impact, but I would also say that, you know, our business in China has remained strong over the last years, and we expect that to continue while we pay attention to the changes. Of course, you know, if there's one thing that's even less predictable than the weather, I guess, it's the political ups and downs. Unless something drastic happens, I think the guidance that we gave you is on the mark. Yeah. How should we, well, speaking on China, how should we think about the business outlook, I mean, a little bit beyond this year, I mean, the mid to long-term, three, four, five years, your business outlook in China? Are you still optimistic and bullish? If yes, if no, please, give us, why you think so? Yeah. Well, you know, yes, I'm fundamentally optimistic. I'm obviously fully aware of the world tensions around this. I said, you know, political turns can happen without anybody understanding that it certainly would happen. In the interactions I've had with the government people, I must say there's some extremely bright people that understand the difficult balance between, you know, defense protection, competitiveness, but also the super value of open markets. They're surrounded by people that at times can be vibrant. We'll see where that goes. In general, though, I would say that the market of semiconductors is notwithstanding the ups and downs from a geopolitical point of view or the ups and downs from, you know, the inflation recession, growing markets, and so on. The semiconductor market is unbelievably powerful and central, and it's been interesting that this is highly recognized by the very fact that there were shortages. Suddenly, you pay a lot more attention not only how important these pieces are, but also that the supply chains are extremely complex. Of course, in many ways, accentuated by the political pressures, the whole supply chains are being redesigned as we speak. Of course, you've seen some of the investments being made in manufacturing in the U.S. and also other countries. There's a reason behind that. The reason is that if you look at the end markets, they've all not come to the discovery, but come to the point of saying, "Hey, this is important for us," which is massive amounts of data multiplied by AI can suddenly make things smart. You take any of the big verticals, it could be automotive, it could also be agriculture or finance or health. A small percentage of improvement to a vertical has enormous economic value. The reason it has arrived now is because computation has just passed this threshold. We actually get fantastic results. Yes, it's sort of almost crazy that you can go to an app and say, "Hey, give me a little poem on the Needham conference." Before you know it, something actually comes out. That's sort of the crazy aspect of AI. The fact is that this AI impact is everywhere. Suddenly you get now a pull from the vertical markets at the moment that there's a push from technology that says, "Oh, we are gonna do another breakthrough," which is we're gonna move from one chip to multi-chips or multi-die, it's called. While the one chip is still becoming more complex and more transistors, if you can put a billion transistors on that, well, if I had two chips, I would have two billion. If I had three, I had three. You can see it opens the door for an enormous opportunity space of more complexity. Of course, for us, it opens the door or the necessity to support our customers and to enable them in actually making that work, which is very complex. Great. I'm sure we'll further touch upon what you just mentioned, but I wanna go back. Well, maybe this is not exactly geopolitical, but it's a trend in the industry in terms of localization of the manufacturing. Yes. I wanna specifically ask you about the effort, made by the U.S. Aart, I saw you were at the CHIPS Act, signing... Yep -ceremony at the White House. Uh-huh. Well, you were also at the TSMC Arizona Fab ceremony not too long ago. Both are, well, important events as the U.S. rebuilds domestic semiconductor manufacturing supply chain. Don't forget the Ohio Fab from Intel, right? Oh. Oh, yes. Yeah. That's also a big, big investment. Yeah. Yes, yes. Sorry, I forgot about that. Well, I know the U.S. effort is well, primarily focused on manufacturing. I mean, as it sounds like so. From your perspective, I mean, you being a participant, and a, and a witness of this industry from very unique vantage point, right? For 30 plus years, I believe. What does semiconductor reshoring means to the global semiconductor industry and specifically to EDA? I always think the semiconductor industry is highly globalized, right? It, it grew along with the globalization. Yeah of the world. Well, probably from press, I certainly read, well, Dr. Morris Chang, I heard you're good friend with him, and thinks globalization is turning a direction, well, doesn't look so great right now. What I'm trying to ask is, besides CHIPS Act, TSMC Fab, Intel Ohio Fab, how do you think the industry will revolve within that context of potential de-globalization front? Yeah, what's your best guess? Well, you know, it's not necessarily de-globalization. It is really making sure that there's more diversity. You can have a very globalized industry and have all the tasks A in one place and the task B in a different place, and task C in some different place, right? Well, that is very global, but it's not very diversified. Because if something wrong goes wrong in place A, you have no chain. What we're seeing, I think is that tasks specifically in the manufacturing side of things are being distributed among a larger geography. You know, TSMC investing in the U.S. visibly so and has announced to do more. Actually, I think just yesterday or today in the news, TSMC was talking about, are they gonna do something in Japan and talking about Europe. Others are essentially in the same space. Samsung, for example, has invested around Austin substantially and planning to do more. I think while economically, and Morris is the first one who says, "Hey, it makes no sense because now you have to duplicate all these sub-supply chains and so on." Diversification is fundamentally risk reduction. The question is risk reduction for whom? Well, for the people that want to have it closer, typically, but also for the entire market. There is a cost attached to that. Simultaneously, as mentioned, I think that what we're going to see is that there will be a tremendous amount of push for more chips in pretty much every aspect of life. While it may create temporarily sort of a glut of capacity, we've seen that in our fields, and memory has always been the prime example. You know, too much, too little, too much, too little. Price becomes essentially the arbitrage mechanism for that. The general direction is absolutely, you know, up to the right. From that perspective, I think it will cost money. This is where, you know, people are pleading, you know, to governments, you know, "Help me, help me." You know, all these handouts are essentially at the same time a realization that chip technology is absolutely essential to the development of mankind, where many very much bigger problems need to be solved with new technologies, and they require everything that we have to offer. Great. Okay, enough about geopolitics, those kind of stuff. Now back to the business. Synopsys guided fiscal 2023 to be up by, well, mid-teens. I think you guys once again is demonstrating that what a true reliance story is, looks like. As the company did... Well, you actually did something, similar, quite resilient through the past down cycles, right? Wanna just to throw some numbers here to make a point. In your recent 10-K filing, I think your largest customer, well, we certainly don't exactly know who that is. I don't want to name the name, but. Yeah, yeah, sure. They spend over 30% more on Synopsys product I mean, in your fiscal 2022 compared with your fiscal 2021. While I think if I guess who that is correct, well, that customer has been going through a rough patch for sure and compounded by, obviously, the industry down cycle. There are always some customer specific issue involved that we don't wanna talk about. Is the kind of spending trend that one particular customer has showing up in your filings actually be representative of what the rest of the industry may be going, may be doing in a downturn? Many comments on that. You realize that we never go specific on customers, and we disclose what you have to disclose, which is any customer that's 10% of our business. Customers go through ups and downs, every one of them. The economy goes through ups and downs. Generically speaking, when there's a tougher patch in the economy, our customers actually do invest, because if they don't invest, they know it's gonna get a lot worse when the economy goes up and their products are not ready. It's never great to be in a downturn, but it's really bad if you're an upturn and you're not part of it, right? Interestingly enough, during downturns in our fields, because we precede the release of new products by about a couple of years, in terms of, you know, providing the tools, the IP, the support, we are somewhat immune to these terms. You correctly mentioned that in the 2008, 2009, that was quite a downturn. We managed to literally every year eke out a little bit of growth. On the graph, you could see that it looked sort of flat, and it was sort of flat. We had that, and we have the benefit that our business model is, to a large degree, also ratable, meaning we do multi-year transactions and then recognize the revenue over time as we deliver things or as the contra passes. Think of it as, you know, renting the tools for three years or something along those lines. There's a, a stability not only to the field that we're in, but also to the business model that Synopsys specifically has. Now, at any point in time, customers sometimes do decide to really go to the next generation of things. That's when investments tend to go up, also the challenges of executing, and we share those challenges. What I think is particularly interesting is that from a design, from a technology point of view, we are at a semiconductor inflection point. I mentioned, I think earlier a little bit, that this notion of going from super complex chips that are still continuing. Moore's Law technically is not dead. Moore's Law economically is not delivering just massive more for less money. That's not the case. It's more like the same money and still, capabilities. The discontinuity, positively so, is this notion of if we can harness how to bring really complex chips really in close proximity, maybe even stacking them on top of each other. Actually, that is what the whole notion of multi-die is. You take a very large chip, and you put other chips on top of it. Now you connect it with the highest possible speed, the highest number of connections and bandwidth that's possible. Suddenly you have now essentially a massive system, right? Designing those things will be complex, will be expensive. They are not easy to test and verify. You know, the word's not easy. It's just a challenge for the field that we're in, right? Those have always been our middle name. It is because of that I think there's so much opportunity both in the semiconductor industry itself and in us that are the key supporters or enablers of that. We are very much in duality to the foundries. If our tools and our IP is not ready, doesn't matter how good their node is, nothing's gonna work, and vice versa, of course. It is very much a tight ecosystem that has to play together. The outputs that this will provide is gonna be fabulous. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I think we keep referring back, I think, Art, you call it a system of chips, right? That we're moving away from System on a Chip to system chips. Plural. Plural. Yeah. Plural. Yeah. Well, that could be another 30 minutes discussion. Unfortunately, our time-. Yeah, yeah. I still have a few more things. Go for it. High-level things I wanna hit. Maybe let's move on to the next topic. I wanna look a little bit beyond 2023. Well, I recently very equally thrilled to have heard a presentation from one of your team members, well, at an industry event. Actually that was one hosted by Samsung. He talked about three thingsThat EDA can add value to the semiconductor industry. One, of course, managing the design complexity you just mentioned, right? Yeah. Also, the energy consumption of chips. I think last night TSMC also mentioned why we're moving to N2, N1.4. It's not just about us shrinking the size. A lot more important is energy consumption. Meeting the need for workload optimizer chips. I really like that term, workload optimizer chips. That's what the custom ASICs is all about. Three, I think I like this point. Three is about adding value to the talent and productivity issues for the industry that is facing. I really wanna pick this one and get your thoughts on talent and productivity. We've heard you talk about implementing artificial intelligence to do chip design, which may be a great way for the industry to improve the productivity of chip design teams when, well, quite honestly, we still have a shortage of design engineers as last time I checked. Well, also accelerating the time to market. My question really is this: I understand the history of EDA is all about improving productivity. That's where the name comes from, right? The design automation. What do you think is new this time, and what really excites you this time when it comes to, like, implementing AI into chip designs? Is this an evolutionary step in the history of EDA, or this is something really revolutionary, maybe some of us may have failed to see yet? Actually, I love the way you've closed the question, because I've always been asked, you know, is EDA revolutionary or evolutionary? The way I would answer is, we do revolutionary things and package them in evolutionary adoption. The reason you need the evolutionary is, if you forget a single lesson learned in the past, no chip will work. It's accumulation of everything we've learned, and don't screw that up, and then some big leaps forward of automation or new ways of doing things. Yes, I am super excited about this because, as of two years ago, suddenly we saw the breakthrough of AI having major impact on the overall productivity, the way you defined it, of design. You know, as a personal anecdote, I wanna give you the sense that when starting Synopsys literally 36 years ago, we had that exact same feel with synthesis. You could take some design, and in a matter of few hours, make it 30% better, 30% smaller. Faster and smaller. Initially, people couldn't believe it, and the graphs looked exactly the same. You know, the algorithm would work, and the results would get better and better. Here we are now, 36 years later, or actually, 34 years later, because it started about two years ago. For the first time, I saw graphs of progress that looked exactly the same in terms of better, in a fraction of the time, in a fraction of the effort time, right? I instantaneously realized, hey, we finally have sufficient computation, the right algorithms to make it happen. What the first goal will be is can the design be as good as what a human can do, but can we do it in, and in this case, gonna turn out to be a third of the time. three months turn into three weeks. Right? That's sort of the, the effort. The second thing is, well, if we can do that, can we also make the results a little bit better? The answer is yes, we can also do that. Better means mostly two things, which is faster speed, lower power. You mentioned power. Power is gonna be the variable for mankind in every which way you can think about it as a challenge. That push is gonna be very hard. What is fascinating is that we are applying this not to individual tools. We are applying this to entire pieces of design flow, that's why it does have impact on how much leverage can you get out of your engineers. Just like 35 years ago, there were, like, 3% of the engineers say, "Hey, you're taking my job away by automating." The other 97 said, "Now I can do so much more." We have the same reaction now. I can substantiate that by the fact that we have now a large number of people have already adopted it, and some that have already put it into massive production use because the benefits are so big. Still, I think we're just at the beginning of a couple of decades of advances. That's pretty exciting. Oh, okay. Revolutionary, well, pro-progress, you know, that looks like a revolutionary over decades. I agree. like revolutionary in a short period of time. let's not forget about. Yeah. -the small steps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think there are a few emerging opportunities for EDA that you have talked about over the past few years, quarters. Well, hyperscalers, automotive, AI startups, among others, which are very interesting new verticals for EDA. I wanna ask you about something else. I wanna ask you about silicon photonics. Right. I was formerly a fab guy. I worked at Applied Materials. I know you're a board member. Yeah. sitting on forward. I mean, I have a little bit bias towards the more traditional ICs, more silicon ICs. I can use a little bit help here from you on silicon photonics. For one, I think that last year you formed a JV called OpenLight with Juniper Networks, Photonics IPs, and you also got your foundry partners, right? I realize. I know your team said it's probably not material to your financials in the near term, but well, you just said, well, revolutionary progress probably look a little bit evolutionary but at the beginning, right? I wanna know what do you think the trend on silicon photonics is here? Well, there are lots of speculations on this. I mean, over the past year, including some articles claiming that NVIDIA, I believe it's one of your top customers, they may be working with TSMC on some silicon photonics-based multi-GPU kind of solution. Well, that's another kind of systems of chips, right? Compare with, compared to, like, traditional silicon ICs, what is Synopsys' role here? What role does OpenLight play in your overall strategy on silicon photonics? Okay. Well, the first, you know, perspective is, of course, why is silicon photonics of any interest? Because, you know, photonics has had fundamentally the capability of transmitting data at very high speeds, right? This is not new. The word silicon photonics makes it new because the attempt is to say, do the computation or the regular silicon task, and on the same silicon, see if one can get a photonics device so that the communication can go out at high speed. You say, "Well, why don't you just do that?" Why you don't just do that is because each one of those require different manufacturing steps, and bring those together have been economically and technically difficult and economically not satisfactory. As we now go to a whole next generation, where I mentioned earlier, big data is truly big data, and the speed of connectivity is absolutely the issue between chips or between racks or between in the space of a whole compute environment. There are a lot of efforts to bring these things together. You can say, well, you know, put them on one of those multi-die things. Then, you know, do you want the dies to be connected at a super high speed? These are all somewhat open questions. When I say open, I always mean Techonomic. Is it technically feasible, and is it economically viable? While we don't really give any specifics out on what OpenLight is doing, it's all part of an effort to drive these technologies forward so that when the moment comes, we have, and we have that, I think, already today, the EDA tools, some of the IP pieces ready to go. You know, silicon photonics has proven to be one of those, next year it's gonna take off. Next year it's gonna take off. And the thing is, the regular silicon world has really kept up very well with speed. In the long term, there's no question that it will matter. Maybe if I can broaden that statement to the next level, which is, I think with the multi-die, you're gonna see not just digital, you know, memory, compute, and stacking happening, but you're gonna see other pieces come into the picture. Analog Mixed-Signal, maybe some sensors, maybe some power devices. It's all about how much can you cram together. Connectivity is one of the pieces of that equation. Anything that can at some point in time revolutionize things, meanwhile, needs to be evolutionary prepared so it fits. Great, great. I think I really want to make sure we have time to talk about Software Integrity. Well, if I'm completely honest, well, again, I was a fab guy. That's right. Really had a tough time to understand EDA before I started covering Synopsys. On top of that, I mean, SIG, Software Integrity Group, it's a slightly more difficult topic for someone like me with a STEM background, so maybe I should have done more homework. I did hear wide range of views from investors on SIG, from someone who really, well, who may question whether it's a distraction to your core EDA and IP business or to someone who love that you guys have the optionality and the very distinctive growth vector relative to your peers. I mean... To someone who really admire you, I mean, I did hear and think, you're creating a new industry here, and it's just like you did over the last 30, 40 years, to EDA. Well, mind if you kind of walk us through the strategic rationale here over the years, since we know that this business was kind of established around 2014 when you acquired a company called Coverity. Over the near term, and I have a near term question on SIG as well. Why don't we start with the strategic rationale question? Okay, let me give you the historical rationale and then the evolved rationale. The historical rationale was that already by mid-2000, 2006, 2007, I diagnosed that in semiconductor companies, they have more than half of their engineers were software engineers. You'd say, "Well, that may be surprising," but what it told me a couple things. A, with some slowdown of Moore's Law, more of the functionality was in the software, plus software had the benefit of being more flexible, make changes than hardware had, right? Secondly, it told me that, hey, better watch out because there's an extremely high discipline on designing hardware, because if you make a mistake, and that you would know well, you have to pay a mask set and remanufacture. That's expensive, takes a lot of time. Whereas software, we just can send out a patch. That works, but it's not a great approach because if the software is of poorer quality than the hardware, then you keep iterating. When we acquired Coverity, it was in the full knowledge that, by the way, half of their business was semiconductor related, it were embedded software, and that this was a pathway towards higher quality discipline in software. That was their first focus. At the very moment that we concluded that, something else happened, which is, security came into the picture as a rapidly growing catastrophe for so many situations. And the biggest vulnerability was, surprise, actually the software. Quality and security were sort of de facto becoming the same. That had an other benefit in our vision, which is that we had already recognized with the smart everything, what the semiconductor industry would provide would actually go into all of these different vertical segments. Pretty much all of them have need for security, but some of them it's security moving to safety, right? So if you can hack a car, you say, "Well, you know, bad luck." Now you can say, "That may be extremely dangerous." So fields where safety was important, they in turn started to focus onto security of the software. It is only a matter of time where the security of the software and the security of the hardware are interwoven. Actually, already today, Synopsys has actually a quite active slice of business in our IP collection to actually embed security modules, roots of trust, and things like that in there. Now you can start getting a sense of the long-term perspective. It was a move up that value stack, where at the end of the day, everything is connected to everything else. Being able to measure things all the way in the hardware or all the way in the software on the other one is absolutely imperative. Now, the SIG business, Software Integrity Business, meanwhile has grown beyond semiconductors substantially because all these other companies also need security, and there's a ton of companies developed a lot of software. It's been actually quite intriguing to suddenly interact with companies that we would never have anything to do with. You know, shopping stores, Shell Oil, financial, entities, health companies. In that context, while it is a TAM that is sort of removed traditionally from semiconductors, over the long term, I see that there will be gradually also more connections between the two. Hopefully, that gives you a little bit holistic, perspective. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's great. I think, we probably have a little bit time. Unfortunately, I have to throw in some near-term questions. That's always, very- That's fine. That's fine. ... interesting from investors and, probably, well, to satisfy their need, I will ask you a near-term question on SIG. I know you sort of said on your last earnings call, you expect all segments of your business to grow similarly, at mid-teens, into your fiscal 2023. Mm-hmm. SIG business, there's a concern that maybe SIG is not as resilient in terms of, the keeping up the growth rate as the EDA IP part of the business. Is that right or wrong? Any thoughts on that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. The comment came from both an observation and an understanding of markets, which is that the market that we touch with SIG is very, very broad, with many, many companies all over the spectrum of what companies are. Anybody with software sooner or later has some of these issues. When you have economic uncertainty, and certainly, I would say the fall was maybe a little bit more pronounced, now it goes up and down, but at that point in time was inflation, inflation, right? Then the question, does that bring a recession or does that just mean a readjustment of the market because certain people will play pricing, which makes it worse. What is clear is that when there's uncertainty, top managements of company says, "Okay, what do we absolutely have to have and what is nice to have?" Any investments that tend to go towards long-term quality and so on, would be viewed as prophylactic, right? It's sort of like, you know, it's really hard to sell vitamins when people are not yet sick and they have no money. If you have a headache, it's really easy to sell an aspirin, and anybody who's ever had that knows that, in an airport, single aspirin is $4.50, right? Why am I bringing that up? When you're in the business of prophylactically help people design better software, of course, economically over time has a big impact. In the moment, people can just say, "Well, let's slow that down." Initially, during all these discussions of the market may be softening, we saw a little bit of that. The way you see it's mostly that the closure of transactions takes a bit longer. They still close. I don't think that the market has changed. I think the opportunity is just as rich as before. It's more, what are the things that are a little bit more time sensitive than others in the decision-making? By the way, in, we have made that business already much more solid because we're in multi-year agreements there. The rest of Synopsys or the EDA part of Synopsys has now, for quite a number of years, have a very strong ratable business, and gradually SIG is becoming like that, too. That was just full disclosure in the context of the question marks at that time, and we'll see how it works, but so far there's no indication that there's an issue. Thank you, Art. We got three minutes left. I think, let's pick one question from the audience. There's an interesting one. Well, I think, I can tell that, people really look up to you, Art, and, try to ask you about things, at a very high level. The question is, what are the hurdles to really get to a system for chips world? I mean, a true, a system for chips world. Is the manufacturing side advanced packaging the hurdle? Or what's your, what's your view here? Well, so my view is that, you know, we have entered a very different phase of the industry because from the tradition, what I would call scale complexity, which is more transistors, more transistors, more transistors, we're now in systemic complexity, which is different problems intersecting. The minute you have multiple chips, you have a whole different world, which is how do you connect them? Can you stack them on top of the other? Stacking sounds good, right? That's as close as they get. Except if the one underneath is a heater, the guy above may not like that, right? Okay, so now you have to deal with that issue. How do you deal with the fact that when you have multiple chips on a super chip together and something doesn't work, which chip is it? Whose fault is it? Is it the same technology? Is it different technology? We've entered an age of systemic complexity, and I would argue, we've seen visible notion of that or just the supply chain is systemic complexity, but now building these things is also the next level of systemic complexity. Therefore, our main mission at Synopsys is, in simple terms, make it all work. That means we need to understand testing, verification, connectivity, heat transfers. Make it all work. That's a fabulous assignment, and I think we're well positioned because we have many of the pieces to do exactly that. We'll make it happen. Yeah. Great. I think that's a great way to close today's fireside chat. Well, I think that the answer you just provided, well, I kinda feel like, well, complexity is EDA's friend. I mean, you love complexity. Well, time really flies. I mean, we probably want end our session right now, I really want to thank Art, and thank Lisa, who's in the background, for your time with us today. Really appreciate all the insights, especially coming from Art, I look forward to catching up with you again after your fiscal Q1 earnings call. That's a wrap, everybody, enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you, Charles, for the very interesting questions. Thank you.