Competition We believe that competitive performance in the marketplace for signal processing products depends upon multiple factors, including technological innovation, strength of brand, diversity of product portfolio, product performance, technical support, delivery capabilities, customer service quality, reliability and price, with the relative importance of these factors varying among products, markets, and customers. We compete with a number of semiconductor companies in markets that are highly competitive. Many companies have sufficient financial, manufacturing, technical, sales and marketing resources to develop and market products that compete with our products. Some of our competitors may have more advantageous supply or development relationships with our current and potential customers or suppliers. Our competitors also include both emerging companies selling specialized products in markets we serve and companies outside of the U.S., including entities associated with well- funded efforts by foreign governments to create indigenous semiconductor industries. Our competitors include but are not limited to: We believe that our technical innovation emphasizing product performance and reliability, supported by our commitment to strong customer service and technical support, enables us to make a fundamental difference to our customers’ competitiveness in our chosen markets. Our sales are subject to a varying degree of seasonality. Historically, sales to customers during our first fiscal quarter may be lower than other quarters due to plant shutdowns at some of our customers during the holiday season. In general, the seasonality for any specific period of time has not had a material impact on our results of operations. In addition, as explained in our risk factors contained in Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, our revenue is more likely to be influenced on a quarter to quarter basis by cyclicality in the semiconductor industry. We believe that a number of factors should be used to assess future customer demand, including backlog, macroeconomic trends, customer insights and current customer bookings as compared to billings (book-to-bill) ratio. We define backlog to mean firm orders from a customer or distributor with a requested delivery date within thirteen weeks. However, backlog may be impacted by the tendency of customers to rely on shorter lead times available from suppliers, including us, in periods of depressed demand. In periods of increased demand, there is a tendency towards longer lead times that has the effect of increasing backlog and, in some instances, we may not have manufacturing capacity sufficient to fulfill all orders. In addition, as is customary in the semiconductor industry, we allow most orders to be canceled or deliveries to be delayed by customers without significant penalty, while also allowing certain distributors to receive price adjustment credits and to return qualifying products for credit, as determined by us, in order to reduce the amounts of slow-moving, discontinued or obsolete product from their inventory. Monolithic IC components are manufactured in a sequence of semiconductor production steps that include wafer fabrication, wafer testing, dicing the wafer into individual “chips,” or dice, assembly of the dice into packages and electrical testing of the devices in final packaged form. The raw materials used to manufacture these devices include silicon wafers, processing chemicals (including liquefied gases), precious metals laminates, ceramic and plastic used for packaging. We utilize, develop and employ a wide variety of manufacturing processes, primarily based on bipolar and complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors, which are specifically tailored for use in fabricating high-performance analog, DSP and mixed-signal ICs. Devices such as MEMS,  i Coupler® isolators and various sensors are fabricated using specialized processes, which typically use substantially similar equipment as bipolar and CMOS processes. Our IC products are fabricated on proprietary processes at our internal production facilities in Wilmington, Massachusetts; Milpitas, California; Camas, Washington; and Limerick, Ireland and also on a mix of proprietary and non-proprietary processes at third-party wafer fabricators. We currently source approximately half of our wafer requirements annually internally and the other half from third-party wafer fabrication foundries, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and others, typically where deep-submicron lithography capabilities and/or large manufacturing capacity is required. In addition, we operate an assembly and wafer sort facility in Penang, Malaysia, and test facilities in the Philippines and Singapore. We also make extensive use of third-party subcontractors for the assembly and testing of our products. 7 • Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. • NXP Semiconductors N.V. • Texas Instruments Inc. • Broadcom Inc. • Infineon Technologies AG • Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. • Microchip Technology Inc. Seasonality Production Resources