2025 Outlook with Justin Endo of Mixel

Justin Susumu Endo, Mixel’s Director of Marketing & Sales, oversees marketing strategy and customer engagement from Mixel’s headquarters in San Jose, California. He holds a bachelor’s degree with a double major in economics and French from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MBA from The University of Melbourne – Melbourne Business School.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

Founded over 25 years ago, Mixel is a leading provider of mixed-signal interface IP. We offer a wide portfolio of high-performance mixed-signal connectivity solutions. Mixel’s IP portfolio includes PHYs and SerDes, such as MIPI PHYs (MIPI D-PHY, MIPI C-PHY, and MIPI M-PHY), LVDS, and Multi-standard SerDes I lead Mixel’s marketing and sales strategy and implementation.

What was the most exciting high point of 2024 for your company?

2024 was an eventful year, filled with multiple tape outs and our customers’ first-time silicon successes. The highlight was the establishment of our new engineering office in Da Nag, Vietnam. They are a talented group of people and are a great fit for the Mixel. We also had a big win with one of the Magnificent Seven, and started work in the most advanced node going to production in 2025.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2024?

There have been lingering challenges in our industry with uncertainty around investment due to external, macroeconomic factors which directly affected many of our customers and their decision-making processes. This, in turn, resulted in some of our customers pushing project starts out during the first half of 2024. In the second half of 2024 we saw noticeable improvement and increased bookings.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge?

We consistently make decisions based on long-term strategic planning, considering our vision of where we believe growth opportunities are, that are aligned with the direction of our substantial number of strategic customers and partners.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2025 will be, and why?

We expect that in 2025, we will continue to see major growth in automotive and Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications. In automotive, there are many opportunities as the number of interconnects increase proportionally with the number of increasing sensors, cameras, and displays increase in cars. In VR/AR, we see increasing adoption of MIPI interfaces for sensors and displays due to the strengths of MIPI PHYs including low form-factor, low power consumption, low EMI, and high bandwidth. We expect that 2025 will be the year where we will see increasing revenue from IPs beyond MIPI for Mixel. This is very exciting for us, since this is an important goal, we have been targeting for a while now.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth?

We have grown our engineering teams in the US, Egypt, and opened the new office in Vietnam to address our customers growing demand for mixed-signal interface IP and expand our global presence.

What conferences did you attend in 2024 and how was the traffic?

We attend all the MIPI face-to-face meetings as an active contributor to the MIPI Alliance. We took part in MIPI’s demo day at Taipei’s meeting last year, which was open to contributors, adopters, and non-MIPI members. In addition, we sponsor many of the largest foundries’ events such as TSMC Technology Symposium & TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum, GlobalFoundries Technology Summit, Samsung Foundry Forum & SAFE Forum, and Tower Semiconductor Technical Global Symposium. At these events, we highlight our customers who have integrated our IP into their product. Our most recent demos include Teledyne e2v’s Topaz CMOS image sensor for industrial IoT applications and Hercules Microelectronics HME-H3 low-power FPGA which has been integrated into dual display smartphones such as the foldable Blackview Hero 10. Traffic overall to events in 2024 is better than 2023.

Will you attend conferences in 2025? Same or more?

We will be exhibiting at the same events as last year and will look to add others, particularly those outside the US.

Additional questions or final comments?

Hope to see you at our next event!

Also Read:

MIPI solutions for driving dual-display foldable devices

Ultra-low-power MIPI use case for streaming sensors

2024 Outlook with Justin Endo of Mixel