Thomas Wessel, vp of European sales and marketing, global head of automotive sales at Analog Devices, talks to Electronics Weekly about power efficiency, 4G mobile deployment, and the European semiconductor market.
1. ADI's Q2 results were well received by the market, so what is your view of the European semiconductor market at present?
In Q2, ADI's orders increased compared to Q1 and shipments have stabilized. While we are encouraged by this, as everyone knows our industry faces a very tough market in Europe and worldwide, and we need to be prudent. Our corporate priorities continue to focus on innovation as the source of our competitive advantage. We aim to improve our capabilities to be an ambidextrous organization, focusing on both our mass market customers and more integrated solutions for vertical markets.
2. Power efficiency is the industry watch-word right now. What are the main tools and capabilities ADI has to address this in its products?
Power efficiency may be today's "watch word" but for ten years it's been the dependent variable in design at ADI. Whether the key spec is sampling rates, precision, MIPS, or anything else, the spec value is not relevant until the customer understands the power consumption for the unit of work. For example, MIPS per milliamp. Of course, what's efficient spans a very wide scale. In a base station, there is obviously a different definition of power efficient than in a cell phone. ADI is designing for both ends of the spectrum and, in the case of our converter and amplifier portfolios; we are also designing for everything in between.
If we look specifically at power management products, you will see over the past 5 years, ADI making significant investments in developing digital power products, DC/DC converters, and OLED drivers. These products are aimed at applications that are key power consumption blocks within many designs. So making these blocks more efficient has a big impact on the system level efficiency.
3. Does ADI use its own fabs for both analogue and digital ICs?
ADI owns and operates its own fabs in addition to partnering with external wafer foundries for wafer supply. The primary focus of the engagement with external partners is to take ADI innovative designs and leverage commercially available fab processes (primarily CMOS) to produce a broad array of high performance products. ADI has capability for CMOS in its internal fabs, which provides supply redundancy, however the primary focus of these fabs is in proprietary fab processes supporting high performance analogue, mixed signal, and MEMS products. For analogue products there is a high interaction between the ADI proprietary fab processes and product design, which provides a superior level of performance.
4. What is the most exciting semiconductor technology right now?
You are asking the wrong company! At ADI, where 1 in 3 people holds an advanced engineering degree and our entire executive team (except the CFO) holds at least a BS in engineering... lots of different technologies excite lots of people in different ways. But broadly speaking if you insisted we choose something, perhaps RF and MEMS are hot technologies of the day. Both are user experience enhancing technologies. The untethered, always connected that RF enables. And of course, the seemingly endless possibilities MEMS holds in across everything from healthcare and automobiles to entertainment.
5. Will next year be the "take-off" year for 4G mobile deployment?
ADI sells technology to nearly all major infrastructure makers worldwide. The 4G contenders are generally understood to be WiMAX and LTE. When we look at the actual numbers shipping (CPE and Basestations) into WiMAX in 2009, they are nowhere near the forecasts made in 2005. WiMAX networks are deploying, and are very promising in developing countries. The LTE standard is at least two years behind WiMAX; so while we see increased WiMAX deployments in 2010, I wouldn't call it the take-off year for 4G. For 4G to takeoff, it requires LTE rollouts, and 2010 will mainly see trials in LTE, along with increased volumes for WiMAX.
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