MAXLINEAR, INC 10-K

ITEM 1. BUSINESS Corporate Information We incorporated in the State of Delaware in September 2003. Our executive offices are located at 5966 La Place Court, Suite 100, Carlsbad, California 92008, and our telephone number is (760) 692-0711. In this Form 10-K, unless the context otherwise requires, the “Company,” “we,” “us” and “our” refer to MaxLinear, Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiaries. Our website address is www.maxlinear.com. The contents of our website are not incorporated by reference into this Form 10-K. We provide free of charge through a link on our website access to our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K, as well as amendments to those reports, as soon as reasonably practical after the reports are electronically filed with, or furnished to, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. Refer to Intellectual Property Rights section below for a list of our trademarks and trade names. All other trademarks and trade names appearing in this Form 10-K are the property of their respective owners. Overview We are a provider of communications systems-on-chip (SoC) solutions used in broadband, mobile and wireline infrastructure, data center, and industrial and multi-market applications. We are a fabless integrated circuit design company whose products integrate all or substantial portions of a high-speed communication system, including radio frequency (RF), high-performance analog, mixed-signal, digital signal processing, security engines, data compression and networking layers, and power management. In most cases, these products are designed on a single silicon-die using standard digital complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes and conventional packaging technologies. We believe this approach enables our solutions to achieve superior power, performance and cost relative to our industry competition. Our customers include electronics distributors, module makers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs), which incorporate our products in a wide range of electronic devices. Examples of such devices include cable Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS), fiber and DSL broadband modems and gateways; Wi-Fi and wireline routers for home networking; radio transceivers and modems for 4G/5G base-station and backhaul infrastructure; fiber-optic modules for data center, metro, and long-haul transport networks; as well as power management and interface products used in these and many other markets. Our highly integrated semiconductor devices and platform-level solutions are primarily manufactured using low-cost CMOS process technology. CMOS processes are ideally suited for large digital logic implementations targeting high-volume and low-cost consumer applications. Importantly, our ability to design analog and mixed-signal circuits in CMOS allows us to efficiently combine analog functionality and complex digital signal processing logic in the same integrated circuit. As a result, our solutions have exceptional levels of functional integration and performance, low manufacturing cost, and reduced power consumption. In addition, our proprietary CMOS-based radio and digital system architectures also enable shorter design cycles, significant design flexibility and low system-level cost across a wide range of broadband communications, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market customer applications. 3 Table of Contents Industry Background Over the last two decades, ubiquitous internet connectivity has driven exponential growth in data content, delivery, distribution, and consumption. We expect this trend to continue owing to: • The rapid rise of social media and crowd-sourced real-time content; • The proliferation of on-demand Over-The-Top (OTT) video services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime; • Rapid growth in data center and cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Search and Apps, and AI/machine learning; • The “remote economy” accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift to work-from-home, and increasing dependence on video conferencing services such as Zoom; • The proliferation of “Internet of Things” (IoT), including internet-connected appliances within the home, manufacturing industries, and enterprises; and • The advent and growth of broadband 4G/5G wireless mobile internet connectivity. We expect a strong trend of continuous upgrade of network bandwidth and latency (i.e. the delay between sender and receiver) in order to keep pace with the exponential growth of network data traffic generated by the above activities. For example, cloud-based services increasingly require stringent low latency and extremely high-speed network connections between servers and storage within a data center. Also, IoT devices are generating an increasing amount of internet traffic and require low network latency. These IoT devices include smart speakers, smart lighting and other smart appliances in the connected home; commercial air-conditioning; video surveillance equipment; manufacturing machinery; and point-of-sale asset tracking systems. The reduction of speed and latency bottlenecks throughout networks is heavily reliant on wide spectrum or broadband, high-frequency circuits, and digital signal processing algorithms that can improve spectrum utilization efficiency. These trends are key drivers across many of our target end-markets: • Connected Home: Competing cable, fiber and other broadband video and data service providers are offering consumers bundled video, voice, and broadband data access and whole-home internet connectivity. These home data gateway modems or access devices are required to simultaneously receive, demodulate, and decode multiple signals, which are spread across several channels of frequency bandwidth over a wide frequency range and propagate on coaxial cable, copper, optical fiber or airwaves. Further, each gateway distributes content throughout the home using a broadband communication transceiver and network processor SoC based on Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Multimedia over Coax (MoCA) and other wireline home data connectivity standards. As a result, the number of transceivers required in each home, whether for wireless or broadband wireline access and distribution, is greatly increased. For example, cable multiple-system operators (MSOs) have ramped up deployments of multi-gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 home equipment and services, which “bond” multiple channels of frequency bands on a coaxial cable, to provide a higher aggregate “sum-of-the-channels” bandwidth to home subscribers. For example, within the home, Wi-Fi 6 uses wider bandwidth channels and channel-bonding, as well as more sophisticated means of wireless spectrum sharing by users, to provide seamless whole-home coverage. • Data Center Infrastructure: Inside hyperscale data centers operated by Amazon, Google and others, high-speed optical transceivers connect racks of servers and storage through a hierarchical network of switches and routers. Cloud services and machine learning are dependent upon the ability to interconnect vast numbers of servers and storage inside a data center with extremely low latency and highest bandwidth to enable the entire data center to act as a single computing or data processing unit. Consequently, the data traffic growth inside the data center has significantly outstripped the data traffic flowing to and from the data center. Currently, while server connections are transitioning from 10Gbps to 25Gbps or 100Gbps links, router and switch connections are moving from 100Gbps to 400Gbps speed interconnections. The physical limits and challenges of removing the heat dissipated by these optical transceivers and switches are the primary barriers to even higher interconnect speeds. For all these reasons, improving the bandwidth and power efficiency of data center networking technology within and between data centers remains a critical challenge for the evolution of next-generation data centers. • 5G Wireless Infrastructure: Expensive, finite, fractured and non-contiguous 5G wireless spectrum is being utilized more efficiently by aggregating or bonding multiple non-contiguous channels of spectrum with highly complex radio transceivers in a wireless base-station radio unit. These complex radio transceivers can also be configured in large antenna arrays to direct wireless signals more efficiently to specific users, also known as Massive Multiple-Input Multiple Output beamforming (MMIMO). Beamforming vastly improves coverage (range), maximizes data rates (bandwidth), and creates 4 Table of Contents spectral efficiency (data rate per unit spectrum). Densification, or increasing the number of wireless base-stations per unit area, also improves network capacity and coverage. In turn, the wireless and optical backhaul transport networks required to connect the higher number of base-station cells must have greater data capacity. As a result, microwave wireless backhaul and fronthaul transport links are migrating to millimeter wave operating frequencies where the availability of spectrum improves data capacity by more than tenfold. Implementing 5G access and transport functionality within base-stations requires radio transceivers that can process larger radio spectrum bandwidths; have expanded radio frequency range; compensate for signal distortion from high-power amplifiers; support beamforming in large antenna arrays; and have the ability to transport high speed data to and from the network, all in a low-cost, power-efficient design. • Industrial & Multi-Market: Increasingly, in the industrial world, manufacturing equipment and appliances are connected to each other and to the cloud to better optimize utilization, improve power consumption, and plant management. Legacy equipment and new installations need to communicate with each other via newer and older connectivity protocol standards. This, in turn creates growth opportunities for interface products, and interface bridge products supporting multiple protocols. We believe our interface product portfolio, which consists of serial interface, universal serial bus (USB), universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UARTS), peripheral interconnect express (PCIe) devices, data converters and power management integrated chips (PMICs), addresses a broad and growing servable market across communications, industrial and multiple other end markets. The development of broadband, low power, integrated communication systems-on-chip solutions is at the heart of competitiveness across a range of different businesses spanning broadband wireline access, mobile data services, hyperscale cloud data centers, and cloud computation and storage markets. Additionally, the proliferation of increasingly complex high frequency, high bandwidth and low-power applications has led to a rapid increase in the demand for systems that require multiple radio frequency, mixed-signal, and high-performance analog and digital signal processing transceiver SoCs. Challenges Faced by Providers of Systems and RF Transceivers and Optical Interconnects Designing and implementing high-frequency, high-bandwidth RF transceiver systems is extremely challenging owing to the high operating frequency ranges and wide frequency bands across which the communication signal is transmitted. As a result, system designers must contend with significantly more sources of interference and signal impairments than in the case of traditional narrow band, low-frequency communication systems. These narrow band single-channel RF transceivers often use conventional radio system architectures that require expensive discrete components, and are fabricated in costly special-purpose semiconductor technologies, such as silicon germanium, gallium arsenide, and RF enhanced CMOS process technologies. The key challenges of capturing and processing high quality broadband communications signals include: • Receiving single or multiple RF/digital communications signals spanning multiple frequency bands over a wide spectrum: Many of the advanced high-data-rate applications require the simultaneous RF reception of multiple channels or frequency bands in order to first aggregate, and then subsequently demodulate, the data signal, which is spread over discrete disparate frequency bands. Likewise, data transmission is achieved by disaggregating the user's data signal and transmitting it over multiple available frequency bands spanning a wide frequency spectrum. For example, in the cable modem and broadband gateway markets, it is necessary to support the simultaneous reception of multiple channels of high-definition video, voice, and data applications in many system designs. OEMs meet these stringent requirements via multiple narrow- or wide-band RF receivers, each of which is dedicated to the reception of a single frequency band. An alternate, but highly challenging, approach involves Full Spectrum Capture (FSC TM ) receiver SoCs, which can receive and digitize the entire available RF frequency spectrum in the transmission medium. They can then select and aggregate the relevant frequency bands over which the data is spread using analog and mixed-signal digital co-processing techniques. In contrast, use of multiple discrete conventional narrowband RF receivers is impractical due to increased design complexity, overall cost, circuit board space, power consumption and heat dissipation limitations. In addition, such narrowband receiver implementations suffer from signal integrity issues, reliability, and thermal challenges owing to the proximity of sensitive multiple RF receivers and discrete components in a limited PCB footprint. • Signal Clarity Performance Requirements: In communications systems, performance is limited by the quality of the received/transmitted signal that can be supported throughout the channel bandwidth. Signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio measures the strength of the desired signal relative to the sum of the noise and undesired signal energy in the same channel. High capacity 5G wireless cellular data networks operate across non-contiguous wireless spectrum bands, while wired coaxial cable and power-line networks require broadband RF transceivers supporting high SNR. Optical transceivers operate across the widest bandwidths available and must preserve the necessary SNR throughout their bandwidth. These transceiver systems must isolate the desired signals from the undesired signals that are invariably present in their wide operating frequency range. The undesired 5 Table of Contents signals not only include the noise generated by the natural environment, but also interference produced by home appliances, enterprise communications equipment, and other wireless networking systems. For example, in 5G mobile infrastructure applications, a radio transceiver receiving a channel at 1710MHz must cope with reflections in the environment as well as interference from a neighboring channel at 1660MHz picked up by the receiving antenna. The transceiver must also compensate for distortion introduced by the strong signals out of the transmitting antenna. Analog and digital signal processing is employed to improve SNR in the received and transmitted signals. Beamforming and MIMO of radio signals also significantly improves signal-to-noise ratio, but requires sophisticated RF, analog and digital signal co-processing, and software expertise. Broadband reception and beamforming of RF signals in mobile environments are extremely difficult to implement due to the stringent size, cost, and power consumption constraints. Also, higher order modulation of communication signals requires extremely high SNR to maximize data capacity in a finite spectrum, which greatly increases the difficulty of implementing broadband systems. • Power Consumption: Power consumption has become a major concern inside communication systems, including home access gateways, wireless base-stations and data center infrastructure applications. For example, inside the home, Wi-Fi capacity and bandwidth improvement require increasing the number of transceivers per access point with greater channel bandwidths. As a result, the home Wi-Fi gateway has significant heat dissipation challenges within the system due to the increase in power consumption. Likewise, within the data center, physical limitations in the ability to remove heat efficiently from network switches, and the optical transceivers plugged into them, are the main obstacles to increasing data center network bandwidth at and beyond 400Gbps speed per optical transceiver. These switches and transceivers now consume an increasingly significant fraction of total data center power. In 5G wireless access infrastructure applications, the cost of provisioning power to base-station antenna towers and the operating cost attributable to energy consumption is high. In many multiple-transceiver system designs, a majority of the system’s overall power consumption can be ascribed to radio transceivers. • Size: The size of electronic components, such as RF transceivers and digital signal processing SoCs, is a key consideration for system designers and the service providers that deploy them. In wired optical infrastructure applications inside data centers, rapidly increasing network server and switch face-plate density trends are aggressively driving reduction of the size of optical transceiver interconnects. In 5G wireless infrastructure, space on the base-station radio towers where the radios and modems are mounted, is highly constrained and is a significant portion of operating costs. The deployment of massive MIMO and antenna arrays, and cell densification for 5G wireless coverage and capacity, greatly increase the number of radio transceivers required in each base station radio tower and the number of base stations in a cell. As a result, there is a growing trend and an increasing need for highly complex integrated SoCs with greater numbers of transceivers per SoC. There are also challenges that are specific to the processing of high-speed optical interconnect signals in our target data center markets. ◦ Optical Fiber Channel Impairments: The inherent optical properties of the fiber material result in impairments to the optical signal as it propagates along the fiber. These impairments degrade signal integrity due to the loss of light intensity and other adverse modal, chromatic and polarization dispersion effects on the propagating light. Further, electrical signal impairments are introduced in the process of conversion of optical signals to electrical signals, which together reduce the maximum data throughput and limit the distance over which data can propagate over fiber. Therefore, communications SoCs present inside optical modules (often referred to as digital signal processors or DSPs) are required to correct both electrical and optical signal impairments at both ends of the fiber termination. ◦ Photonics Device Technology: Today’s state-of-the art in photonic device technology lags the rapidly increasing speed requirements of data traffic within cloud data centers and optical transport links between telecom data centers. This imposes severe limits to the high-speed conversion of electrical signals to optical signals, and vice versa, owing to the bandwidth limitations, nonlinearities, and noise properties in lasers, modulators, and photo detectors used in optical modules. ◦ Form Factor: Optical transceivers are required to conform to multi-source agreement (MSA) standardized form factors, which in turn determine the number of transceiver ports that can fit in the face plates of standard server, storage, and switch rack units. Standardization of transceiver form factors and rack unit face plates allows data center operators to upgrade network speeds of existing installations by simply replacing older optical transceivers and switches with newer faster ones, rather than having to overhaul installed fiber infrastructure and floorplan. The dimensions of the standard face plate impose a severe constraint on the amount of heat that can be practically removed from a rack unit. A major challenge facing optical transceiver SoCs is to support exponentially growing data rates within the standardized form factor and thermal constraints. 6 Table of Contents Our RF, Mixed-Signal and Digital SoC Platform Solutions We are a provider of communications systems-on-chip solutions for the connected home, mobile and wireline infrastructure, data centers, and industrial and multi-market applications. Our products exemplify our core integrated circuit design and communications systems engineering capabilities: • Proprietary broadband/RF, analog and mixed-signal transceiver front ends: Our analog and mixed-signal IC designers implement complex broadband radio transceiver front-ends and data converters in standard silicon CMOS processes, which enables single-die integration of a complete digital signal processing communication system. This results in state-of-the-art performance, highest energy efficiency or lowest power, smallest form factor, and the lowest manufacturing cost of a target function. For example, in cable DOCSIS3.1 data gateways, our single-chip Full Spectrum Capture (FSC) receivers digitize the entire cable spectrum and aggregate multiple frequency bands or channels using analog and digital signal co-processing to enable multi-gigabit data services. There is a 100-fold reduction in power per unit bandwidth while increasing the total data throughput by an even greater factor. Our high-performance mixed-signal design capability, which involves the high-speed conversion of signals precisely and efficiently between analog and digital domains, is core to all our products and market applications, including high-speed optical interconnect applications inside data centers, 5G Access infrastructure MMIMO radios, and millimeter wave and microwave wireless backhaul transport. • Advanced digital signal processing ASIC design and algorithms: Our signal processing algorithm and digital ASIC design expertise is at the core of our ability to employ digital signal processing to enable breakthroughs in CMOS analog RF front-end design and vice-versa. For example, impairments introduced by analog systems such as power amplifiers and photonics devices are canceled using sophisticated digital signal processing algorithms to achieve superior signal quality, reduce power consumption, and improve the speed of operation. Communication systems across a range of our current and future target markets share common signal processing functions, such as efficient error control coding, compensation for transmission medium or channel induced impairments, and digital processing of wideband signals. As such, algorithmic breakthroughs in one application are directly applicable to other product areas. • Embedded systems and software architecture: Our products contain complex integrated CPU subsystems. These subsystems typically include multiple low-power microprocessor cores, packet processor, bus and peripherals, memory controllers, and interrupt processing. In addition to signal processing and supervisory activity functions, we also implement multiple layers of real-time embedded firmware and protocol stacks on a single chip. We believe our expertise and track record of successfully developing widely deployed, reliable embedded protocols for networking applications are essential to the evolution of connected home products of the future. Our firmware design capability is critical to the ease of use of our products in end customer platforms. • Architecture and system design for highly integrated end-to-end communication platform solutions: Our novel design techniques tradeoff individual signal path circuit level performance to optimize the overall system performance. Our holistic platform and system level design approach eliminates costly, and power-hungry overdesign of individual circuit elements. It allows us to address more complex customer problems that require a deeper understanding of the customer’s end product. Our products not only integrate the entire physical layer (PHY), but also implement complete protocol stacks along with ready-for-use product level interface functionality and associated platform software. We also provide the most efficient and cost-effective platform level power management IC solutions that regulate and monitor the power consumption for our chips and other circuits on the platform. The integration of the entire system on a single-chip or utilizing minimal number of silicon dies reduces the number of external board-level components, decreases board space, improves performance, simplifies customers’ product design, and significantly reduces power consumption. • Low-power design methodology: The superior energy efficiency of our products reflects our years of cumulative experience and R&D investment in system architecture, semiconductor device modeling, and integrated circuit design expertise. At extremely high data rates, when electrical signals transit on and off the chip, there is a severe penalty in speed and power consumption. Therefore, significant reduction in power consumption of a device requires minimization of signal transitions between multiple chips. Our ability to achieve the highest levels of integration of all analog/RF and digital signal processing functionality on the same chip minimizes power consumption by eliminating such signal transitions. Our solutions disproportionately impact our end-customer’s product power dissipation, such as in cable modems, cable FDX fiber nodes, 400Gbps optical transceiver modules, and large 5G antenna radio transceiver arrays. Low power dissipation not only simplifies costly thermal design, but also eliminates the need for bulky fans and other cooling aids. This in turn improves end customer product reliability, increases the density of product features that can be supported in a compact footprint, and reduces overall system cost. 7 Table of Contents • Scalable Platform: Our products share common, modular components such as data converters, radio architectures, signal processing algorithms, and digital signal processing circuit architectures, which enables us to offer fully integrated broadband RF transceiver based digital communication SoC solutions across a wide variety of markets while meeting the stringent performance requirements of these end market applications and standards. This contrasts to legacy solutions that require significant customization to conform to the various regional standards, technical performance and product feature requirements. As a result, our customers can minimize their design resources required to develop applications for multiple target markets using our platform solutions. In addition, we are able to deploy our engineering resources more efficiently to both diversify and address larger communications end markets. Our Strategy Our objective is to be the leading provider of communications SoCs for the connected home, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market applications. We aim to continue to leverage our core analog and digital signal co-processing competencies to expand into other communications markets with similar performance requirements. The key elements of our strategy are: • Extend Technology Leadership in RF Transceivers and RF Transceiver + Digital Signal Processing + Embedded Processor SoCs: We believe that our success thus far is largely attributable to a combination of our RF and mixed-signal design capability together with advanced digital design expertise. We have leveraged this core competency to develop high-performance, low-cost semiconductor solutions for broadband communications applications spanning the connected home, wireless access and backhaul network infrastructure, and high-speed fiber-optic modules for data center, metro, and long-haul infrastructure markets. We will continue to invest in this capability and strive to be an innovation leader in this market. • Leverage and Expand our Existing Customer Base: We target customers who are leaders in their respective markets. We intend to continue to focus on sales to customers who are leaders in our current target markets, and to build on our relationships with these leading customers to define and enhance our product roadmap. By solving the specific problems faced by our customers, we can minimize the risks associated with our customers’ adoption of our new integrated circuit products and reduce the length of time from the start of product design to customer revenue. Further, engaging with market leaders will enable us to participate in emerging technology trends and new industry standards. • Target Additional High-Growth Markets: Our core competency is in RF analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design in CMOS process technology. Several of the technological challenges involved in developing RF solutions for video broadcasting and broadband reception are common to a majority of broader communications markets. We intend to leverage our core competency in developing highly integrated RF transceiver and RF transceiver SoCs in standard CMOS process technology to address additional markets within broadband communications, communications infrastructure, and connectivity markets that we believe offer high growth potential. • Expand Global Presence: Due to the global nature of our supply chain and customer locations, we intend to continue to expand our sales, design and technical support organization both in the United States and overseas. In particular, we expect to align our regional support to our customer base. We believe that our customers will increasingly expect this kind of local capability and support. • Attract and Retain Top Talent: We are committed to recruiting and retaining highly talented personnel with proven expertise in the design, development, marketing and sales of communications integrated circuits. We believe that we have assembled a high-quality team in all the areas of expertise required at an integrated circuit design and communications systems company. We provide an attractive work environment for all of our employees. We believe that our ability to attract the best engineers is a critical component of our future growth and success in our chosen markets. Customers We sell our products, directly and indirectly, to original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, module makers and original design manufacturers, or ODMs, and we refer to these as our end customers. By providing a highly integrated reference design solution that our customers can incorporate in their products with minimal modifications, we enable our customers to design cost-effective high-performance SoC-based solutions rapidly. A significant portion of our sales are through distributors based in Asia, who then resell our product. A significant portion of our net revenue has historically been generated by a limited number of customers. In the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, ten customers accounted for approximately 68%, 63% and 61% of our net revenue, respectively. In the year ended December 31, 2020, two of our direct customers represented 28% of our net revenue. In the 8 Table of Contents years ended December 31, 2019 and 2018, one of our direct customers, CommScope Holding Company, Inc., or Commscope, represented 14% and 18%, respectively, of our net revenue. Products shipped to Asia accounted for 82%, 84% and 81% of our net revenue in the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. Products shipped to Hong Kong accounted for 42%, 46%, and 43% of our net revenue in the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. Products shipped to China accounted for 17%, 14% and 19% of our net revenue in the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. Although a large percentage of our products are shipped to Asia, we believe that a significant number of the systems designed by these customers and incorporating our semiconductor products are then sold outside Asia. For example, revenue generated from sales of our cable modem products during the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018 related principally to sales to Asian ODM’s and contract manufacturers delivering products into European and North American markets. To date, all of our sales have been denominated in United States dollars. See Note 14 to our consolidated financial statements, included in Part IV, Item 15 of this Report for a discussion of total revenue by geographical region for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018. Sales and Marketing We sell our products worldwide through multiple channels, using our direct sales force, third party sales representatives, and a network of domestic and international distributors. We have direct sales personnel covering the United States, Europe and Asia. We also employ a staff of field applications engineers to provide direct engineering support locally to some of our customers. Our distributors are independent entities that assist us in identifying and servicing customers in a particular territory, usually on a non-exclusive basis. Sales to distributors accounted for approximately 49%, 52%, and 42% of our net revenue in the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019, and 2018, respectively. Our sales cycles typically require a significant amount of time and a substantial expenditure of resources before we can realize revenue from the sale of products, if any. Our typical sales cycle consists of a multi-month sales and development process involving our customers’ system designers and management. We generally receive purchase orders from our customers approximately six to twenty-six weeks prior to the scheduled product delivery date. Because of the scheduling requirements of our foundries and assembly and test contractors, we generally provide our contractors production forecasts six to twelve months in advance and place firm orders for products with our suppliers up to twenty-six weeks prior to the anticipated delivery date, in some cases without a purchase order from our own customers. Our standard warranty provides that products containing defects in materials, workmanship or product performance may be returned for a refund of the purchase price or for replacement, at our discretion. Raw Materials As a fabless designer of integrated circuits, we do not directly procure raw materials and instead, rely on third parties to manufacture, assemble and test, or supply, our products, as described in further detail under the below heading “Manufacturing.” To a lesser extent, we also purchase certain turnkey, or finished goods product, for resale. Raw materials used by third party foundries, assembly and test contractors and turnkey product vendors include silicon wafers, as well as lead frames or substrate materials, gold or copper wires, and molding compounds used in assembly/packaging and test of our products. We work closely with our vendors in providing a supplier forecast 6-12 months in advance to ensure they have an adequate supply of raw materials to cover our forecast. Manufacturing We use third-party foundries and assembly and test contractors to manufacture, assemble and test our products. We also rely on certain vendors to supply turnkey products, including, in particular, Intel Corporation for certain products we sell following our acquisition of Intel’s Home Gateway Platform Division in July 2020. This outsourced manufacturing approach allows us to focus our resources on the design, sale and marketing of our products. Our engineers work closely with our foundries and other contractors to increase yield, lower manufacturing costs and improve product quality while maintaining a socially responsible supply chain. Wafer Fabrication. We utilize an increasing range of process technologies to manufacture our products, from standard CMOS to more exotic processes including SiGe and GaAs. Within this range of processes, we use a variety of process technology nodes ranging from 0.18µ down to 14 nanometer. We depend on independent silicon foundry manufacturers to support our wafer fabrication requirements. Our key foundry partners include Global Foundries Inc. in Singapore, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation or SMIC in China, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation 9 Table of Contents or TSMC in Taiwan, and United Microelectronics Corporation or UMC in Taiwan and Singapore. We generally do not depend on a single source for the supply of our materials. Additionally, certain of the acquired products of the Wi-Fi and Broadband assets business are supplied to us under the terms of a supply agreement with Intel. Assembly/packaging and Test. Upon completion of the silicon processing at the foundry, we forward the finished silicon wafers to independent assembly/packaging and test service subcontractors. The majority of our assembly/packaging and test requirements are supported by the following independent subcontractors: Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, or ASE, Amkor Technology, Giga Solution Technology Co. Ltd., SIGURD Microelectronics Corp., Unisem (M) Berhad and United Test and Assembly Center, or UTAC Holdings Ltd. Quality Assurance. We have implemented significant quality assurance procedures to assure high levels of product quality for our customers. Our operations are certified under ISO 9001:2015 standards. We closely monitor the work-in-progress information and production records maintained by our suppliers, and communicate with our third-party contractors to assure high levels of product quality and an efficient manufacturing time cycle. Upon successful completion of the quality assurance procedures, all of our products are stored and shipped to our customers or distributors directly from our third-party contractors in accordance with our shipping instructions. Corporate Social Responsibility As we continue to expand our presence around the world, we are mindful of our responsibility to maintain a socially responsible supply chain, reduce our carbon footprint, and give back to our local communities. Socially responsible supply chain. We are committed to the use of a socially responsible supply chain to reduce the risk of human rights violations and the use of conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold, or 3TG) from the Democratic Republic of Congo and certain adjoining countries. Our efforts include maintaining a supplier policy which bars the use of forced or child labor and slavery and a conflict minerals policy governing the use and distribution of 3TG minerals, as well as conducting due diligence before allowing a potential supplier to become a preferred supplier. We request the return of reporting forms related to conflict minerals from our suppliers under the Responsible Minerals Initiative, or RMI, Conflict Minerals Survey. Further, we seek to remove any suppliers that continue to fail to meet our supplier and conflict minerals policies after being provided the opportunity to remedy non-compliance via implementation of a corrective action plan. We also conduct recurring internal trainings for all employees and certain select contractors on export compliance, anti-corruption and anti-slavery, and insider trading. Reduce our carbon footprint . We aim to reduce the environmental impact of our products. We provide products to our customers that use approved environmentally-friendly materials, prevent pollution by minimizing waste and promoting recycling of reusable materials, and provide customer satisfaction through compliance with global environmental regulations as they relate to our products and operations. Contributing to community. We encourage our employees to contribute to local communities. In 2020, the Company’s U.S. employees organized a fund-raising campaign to feed the hungry in local communities, which has increased as a result of closures and job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with a matching corporate contribution from the Company, the campaign raised in excess of $60 thousand, benefiting Feeding America, a U.S. hunger- relief organization. Research and Development We believe that our future success depends on our ability to both improve our existing products and to develop new products for both existing and new markets. We direct our research and development efforts largely to the development of new high-performance, mixed-signal RF transceivers and SOCs for the connected home, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market applications. We target applications that require stringent overall system performance and low power consumption. As new and challenging communication applications proliferate, we believe that many of these applications may benefit from our SoC solutions combining analog and mixed-signal processing with digital signal processing functions. We have assembled a team of highly skilled semiconductor and embedded software design engineers with expertise in broadband RF, mixed-signal and high-performance analog integrated circuit design, digital signal processing, communications systems and SoC design. As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 1,069 employees in our research and development group. Our engineering design teams are located in Carlsbad, Irvine, and San Jose in California; Boston, Massachusetts; Singapore; Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong in China; Taipei and Hsinchu in Taiwan; Bangalore, India; and Austria, Germany, Israel, Spain, and Canada. Competition We compete with both established and development-stage semiconductor companies that design, manufacture and market analog and mixed-signal broadband RF receivers, optical interconnects, high-performance interface, data and video 10 Table of Contents compression and encryption, and power management products. Our competitors include companies with much longer operating histories, greater name recognition, access to larger customer bases and substantially greater financial, technical and operational resources, as well as smaller companies specializing in narrow markets, to internal or vertically integrated engineering groups within certain of our customers. In addition, our industry is experiencing substantial consolidation. As a result, our competitors are increasingly large multi-national semi-conductor companies with substantial market influence. Our competitors may develop products that are similar or superior to ours. We consider our primary competitors to be companies with a proven track record of supporting market leaders and the technical capability to develop and bring to market competing broadband RF receiver and RF receiver SoC, modem, and optical interconnect products. Our primary merchant semiconductor competitors include Silicon Laboratories, Inc., NXP Semiconductors N.V., MediaTek, Inc., Broadcom Ltd, Rafael Microelectronics, Inc., Inphi Corporation, M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings, Inc., Semtech Corporation, Qorvo Inc., Texas Instruments Incorporated, HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd., Analog Devices, Inc., Renesas Electronics Corporation, Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. (which recently entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Analog Devices), Monolithic Power Systems, Inc., Microchip Technology, Inc., Ambarella, Inc., and Infineon Technologies AG. Because our products often are building block semiconductors which provide functions that in some cases can be integrated into more complex integrated circuits, we also face competition from manufacturers of integrated circuits, some of which may be existing customers or platform partners that develop their own integrated circuit products. If we cannot offer an attractive solution for applications where our competitors offer more fully integrated products, we may lose significant market share to our competitors. Some of our targeted customers for our optical interconnect solutions are module makers who are vertically integrated, where we compete with internally supplied components, and we compete with much larger analog and mixed-signal catalog competitors in the multi-market high-performance analog markets. The market for RF, mixed-signal and high-performance analog semiconductor products is highly competitive, and we believe that it will grow more competitive as a result of continued technological advances. We believe that the principal competitive factors in our markets include the following: • product performance; • features and functionality; • energy efficiency; • size; • ease of system design; • customer support; • product roadmap; • reputation; • reliability; and • price. We believe that we compete favorably as measured against each of these criteria. However, our ability to compete in the future will depend upon the successful design, development and marketing of compelling RF, analog, digital, and mixed-signal semiconductor integrated solutions for high growth communications markets. In addition, our competitive position will depend on our ability to continue to attract and retain talent while protecting our intellectual property. Intellectual Property Rights Our success and ability to compete depend, in part, upon our ability to establish and adequately protect our proprietary technology and confidential information. To protect our technology and confidential information, we rely on a combination of intellectual property rights, including patents, trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks. We also protect our proprietary technology and confidential information through the use of internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, business partners, consultants and advisors. Protecting mask works, or the “topography” or semiconductor material designs, of our integrated circuit products is of particular importance to our business and we seek to prevent or limit the ability of others to copy, reproduce or distribute our mask works. 11 Table of Contents We have 1,716 issued patents and 83 patent applications pending in the United States. We also have 349 issued foreign patents and 76 other pending foreign patent applications, based on our issued patents and pending patent applications in the United States. We are the owner of approximately 10 trademarks that have been registered and/or allowed for registration in the United States. We own foreign counterparts (including approximately 36 foreign registrations) of certain of these registered trademarks in Canada, Chile, China, the EU, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. We also claim common law rights in certain other trademarks that are not registered. We may not gain any competitive advantages from our patents and other intellectual property rights. Our existing and future patents may be circumvented, designed around, blocked or challenged as to inventorship, ownership, scope, validity or enforceability. It is possible that we may be provided with information in the future that could negatively affect the scope or enforceability of either our present or future patents. Furthermore, our pending and future patent applications may or may not be granted under the scope of the claims originally submitted in our patent applications. The scope of the claims submitted or granted may or may not be sufficiently broad to protect our proprietary technologies. Moreover, we have adopted a strategy of seeking limited patent protection with respect to the technologies used in or relating to our products. We are a party to a number of license agreements for various technologies, such as a license agreement with Intel Corporation relating to demodulator technologies that are licensed specifically for use in our products for cable gateways. The license agreement with Intel Corporation has a perpetual term, but Intel Corporation may terminate the agreement for any uncured material breach or in the event of bankruptcy. If the agreement is terminated, we would not be able to manufacture or sell products that contain the demodulator technology licensed from Intel Corporation, and there would be a delay in the shipment of our products containing the technology until we found a replacement for the demodulator technology in the marketplace on commercially reasonable terms or we developed the demodulator technology itself. We believe we could find a substitute for the currently licensed demodulator technology in the marketplace on commercially reasonable terms or develop the demodulator technology ourselves. In either case, obtaining new licenses or replacing existing technology could have a material adverse effect on our business, as described in “Risk Factors — Risks Related to Intellectual Property — We utilize a significant amount of intellectual property in our business. If we are unable to protect our intellectual property, our business could be adversely affected .” The semiconductor industry is characterized by frequent litigation and other vigorous offensive and protective enforcement actions over rights to intellectual property. Moreover, there are numerous patents in the semiconductor industry, and new patents are being granted rapidly worldwide. Our competitors may obtain patents that block or limit our ability to develop new technology and/or improve our existing products. If our products were found to infringe any patents or other intellectual property rights held by third parties, we could be prevented from selling our products or be subject to litigation fees, statutory fines and/or other significant expenses. We may be required to initiate litigation in order to enforce any patents issued to us, or to determine the scope or validity of a third-party’s patent or other proprietary rights. We may in the future be contacted by third parties suggesting that we seek a license to intellectual property rights that they may believe we are infringing. In addition, in the future, we may be subject to lawsuits by third parties seeking to enforce their own intellectual property rights, as described in “Risk Factors — Risks Related to Intellectual Property — We have settled in the past intellectual property litigation and may face additional claims of intellectual property infringement. Current litigation and any future litigation could be time-consuming, costly to defend or settle and result in the loss of significant rights ” and in “Item 3 — Legal Proceedings.” Governmental Regulation Our business and operations around the world are subject to government regulation at the national, state, provincial, or local level addressing, among other matters, applicable environmental laws; health and safety laws and regulations adopted by government agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; laws relating to export controls and economic sanctions; and the rules of industrial standards bodies such as the International Standards Organization and governmental agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission. We believe that our properties and operations comply in all material respects with applicable laws protecting the environment and worker health and safety. We do not manufacture our own products but do maintain laboratory space at certain of our facilities to facilitate the development, evaluation, and testing of our products. These laboratories may maintain quantities of hazardous materials. While we believe we are in material compliance with applicable law concerning the safeguarding of these materials and with respect to other matters relating to health, safety, and the environment, the risk of liability relating to hazardous conditions or materials cannot be eliminated completely. To date, we have not incurred significant 12 Table of Contents expenditures relating to environmental compliance at our facilities nor have we experienced any material issues relating to employee health and safety. We cannot provide assurances, however, that issues will not arise in the future or that applicable law will not require us to incur significant compliance expenditures. In addition to environmental laws, our business is subject to various rules and regulations and executive orders relating to export controls and trade sanctions. Certain of our products are subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), which are administered by the United States Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), and we are periodically required to obtain an export license before we can export certain controlled products or technology to specified countries or customers. In addition, the EAR imposes broad controls on entities listed on sanctioned persons lists, including the BIS “Denied Persons” list and BIS Entity list. If one of our customers is listed on the BIS Entity List, BIS List of Denied Persons, or other U.S. government sanctioned persons list, then subject to certain limited exceptions, we will, as a general rule, be precluded from doing business with that customer. We cannot guarantee that export control restrictions or imposition of sanctions imposed in the future will not prevent, or materially limit, our ability to conduct business certain customers or in certain countries. Any failure to comply with these laws could result in governmental enforcement actions, including substantial monetary penalties and denial of export privileges. Employees and Human Capital Our future success depends on our ability to retain, attract and motivate qualified personnel, especially our design and technical personnel, but also our senior management and support personnel. As the source of our technological and product innovations, our design and technical personnel represent a significant asset. We emphasize our core values of Excellence, People, Integrity, and Compassion (EPIC) in our hiring and human resources practices as well as our customer service. We have a diverse workforce that represents many cultures and we celebrate our diversity by fostering inclusion across our multi-national organization. We acknowledge that we, along with the semiconductor and technology industry as a whole, can do more to advance gender and racial equality by increasing representation of underrepresented minorities as well as females in leadership and technical positions including engineering and other roles. As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 1420 employees, including 1,069 in research and development, 200 in sales and marketing, 46 in operations and semiconductor technology and 105 in administration. We have employees across 18 countries: 38% are in Asia, 29% in the Americas, 19% in Europe and 14% in the Middle East. Our workforce is represented by the following race/ethnicities: 53% Asian, 40% White or Middle Eastern, 7% Latinx or Hispanic origin, with 36% Asian and 64% White or Middle Eastern in senior management. Females represented 14% of our outside directors, 9% of senior management, 10% of our technical roles, and 18% of our total workforce. Of our total employee workforce, 13% is represented by Work Councils in Austria and Germany. The Work Council groups, common to these countries, are comprised of employees elected by the general employee base. We consider our global employee relations to be good. In 2020, our employee voluntary turnover rate was 8%. Our human capital resources objectives include, as applicable, attracting and retaining talented and experienced employees, advisors, and consultants. We utilize multiple online search tools, specialized recruiting firms, employee referral programs and university hires to ensure a varied outreach approach for candidates. We aim to reduce the gender pay gap that is pervasive in our industry. We offer this via a combination of competitive base salary, time-based equity incentives and bonus plans linked to financial performance that are designed to motivate and reward personnel with annual grants of stock-based and cash-based incentive compensation awards to our employees, some of which vest over a period of four years, plus other benefits, in order to increase stockholder value and the success of our company by motivating such individuals to perform to the best of their abilities and achieve both our short and long-term objectives. We offer competitive benefits tailored to local markets and laws and designed to support employee health, welfare and retirement; examples of such benefits may include paid time off; 401(k), pension or other retirement plans; employee stock purchase plan; basic and voluntary life, disability and supplemental insurance; medical, dental and vision insurance; health savings and flexible spending accounts; relocation assistance; and employee assistance programs. Our global training and development program focuses on harassment-free workplace and diversity topics, as well as ethics and export compliance. Our executive compensation structure aligns executive incentives with the long-term growth objectives of MaxLinear, including long-term share price appreciation. In that regard, our executive compensation programs have tended to place a relatively heavier weighting on equity compensation than our peers and include a performance-based metric to executives’ equity incentives in addition to other forms of compensation offered to all employees. For more details regarding our executive compensation, refer to information incorporated by reference from the information set forth under the captions “Executive Compensation” and “Compensation Discussion and Analysis” in either an amendment to this Annual Report on Form 10-K or our 2021 Proxy Statement. 13 Table of Contents In 2020, our ongoing focus on workplace safety and compliance to applicable regulations has enabled us to preserve business continuity while ensuring a safe work environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, including work-from-home arrangements for a substantial portion of our workforce and reduced capacity for those that have returned to the office, adhering to local health authority guidelines. We also comply with applicable laws and regulations regarding workplace safety and are subject to audits by entities such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States. We rely on third parties to manufacture our products and require our suppliers to maintain a safe work environment, as described in further detail under the below heading “Manufacturing.” Seasonality The semiconductor industry is highly cyclical and is characterized by constant and rapid technological change, rapid product obsolescence and price erosion, evolving technical standards, short product life cycles and wide fluctuations in product supply and demand. From time to time, these and other factors, together with changes in general economic conditions, cause significant upturns and downturns in the industry, and in our business in particular. In addition, our operating results are subject to substantial quarterly and annual fluctuations due to a number of factors, such as the overall demand volatility for semiconductor solutions across a diverse range of communications, industrial and multimarket applications, the timing of receipt, reduction or cancellation of significant orders, the gain or loss of significant customers, market acceptance of our products and our customers’ products, our ability to timely develop, introduce and market new products and technologies, the availability and cost of products from our suppliers, new product and technology introductions by competitors, intellectual property disputes and the timing and extent of product development costs.