2024 Outlook with Justin Endo of Mixel

Mixel is a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) company that we have been working with for 4 years with outstanding results.  Mixel’s focus is on developing mixed-signal IP, which includes analog and digital components. These IP cores are often used in applications such as mobile devices, consumer electronics, automotive systems, and other embedded systems where both analog and digital functions are required.

The company provides a wide range of IP cores for various interfaces and standards, including MIPI cores (Mobile Industry Processor Interface),  Multi-standard IP Cores,  and LVDS (Serializer and Deserializer). Their IP solutions aim to enable efficient and reliable communication between different components within electronic devices.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.
Mixel is a leading provider of mixed-signal interface IPs. We offer a wide portfolio of high-performance mixed-signal connectivity solutions. Mixel’s mixed-signal 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 2023 for your company?
2023 was a big year for us. We celebrated our 25^th anniversary as a company. We hosted many of our partners, customers, and employees past and present at our global HQ in San Jose. It was great to reconnect with familiar faces and celebrate such a significant milestone with those who made it possible.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2023?
Like many in our industry, there was a noticeable slowdown in the first half of 2023. While we are somewhat insulated as an IP provider, we still saw how dramatically things can change in a short period of time. Many of our customers pushed off their decision-making to later in the year. Thankfully, unlike many companies, small and large, that went through reduction of force, we increased our overall headcount. Last year was a good time to hire high quality talent due to the slow down, and a great time to focus on new product development.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge?
The best decision we made was to not slow down IP development during the downturn. After a slow first half of 2023, the second half was stronger than we expected. We are hoping to leverage this momentum coming into 2024 and we believe it will pay off in the coming months and years.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2024 will be, and why?
As a leading provider of MIPI PHY IP, we have seen major growth in MIPI in automotive and AI enabled applications. As the number of sensors, cameras, and displays increase in cars, we see a corresponding increase in demand for automotive ICs on both sensors/display-side and processor-side. MIPI is seen as the de facto standard in many of those applications, particularly MIPI CSI-2 for low-power cameras and sensor.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth?
To meet our automotive customer’s requirements, we are ISO 26262 and ISO 9001 certified. Our process is certified up to ASIL-D and we have multiple IP configurations certified up to ASIL-B. We continue to develop for the latest MIPI specifications and having our ASIL-D certified process already in place allows us to provide automotive-grade IPs with functional safety documentation to support our customer’s safety critical applications.

What conferences did you attend in 2023 and how was the traffic?
As an active contributor to the MIPI Alliance and the development of its specifications, we attend all three face-to-face meetings each year. In addition, we sponsor many industry events including foundry exhibitions 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 showcase our customers who have integrated our IP into their product, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 and NXP’s i.MX7ULP applications processor. Attendees at these events really enjoy interacting with the technology and in terms of traffic to our booth, 2023 was the highest in recent years for several events, even surpassing pre-COVID numbers.

Will you attend conferences in 2024? Same or more?
We are aiming to attend the same events as last year and are actively looking to add others, particularly those outside the US, such as in China and Europe.

Additional questions or final comments?
Hope to see you at our next event!

Automotive-grade MIPI PHY IP drives multi-sensor solutions

MIPI D-PHY IP brings images on-chip for AI inference

MIPI bridging DSI-2 and CSI-2 Interfaces with an FPGA