Electronics Weekly puts its questions to an industry figure: Kevin Ritchie, Senior Vice President, Technology and Manufacturing Group, Texas Instruments.

Power efficiency is the industry watch-word right now. What are the main tools and capabilities a chip maker such as TI has to address this in its products?

Analog technology is the biggest, most important opportunity for TI, and we're focused on growing our analogue leadership. Innovation in analogue is helping our customers solve some of today's biggest challenges, including energy efficiency, more accessible health care and improved public safety.

We're making significant investments in advanced analogue process technologies and manufacturing to deliver a broad portfolio of differentiated products that help make systems faster, more precise, less power-hungry, smaller and with more functionality.  

An example is our BiCom3x high-speed bipolar CMOS process, which is allowing TI to introduce products such as data converters that provide twice the speed and signal bandwidth for applications where moving large amounts of data fast is crucial to system performance, such as medical imaging and test equipment.

How close are we to the theoretical limits of CMOS process technology?

The transition from one process to the next is definitely presenting more challenges than ever before. However, TI believes there is more mileage we can get from CMOS process over the next several process generations. TI made the strategic decision last year to partner with foundries for process technology development beyond 45nm, and we're very encouraged by the results of our collaboration and 32nm test chips. 

New materials, such as the use of high k, metal gates and full immersion lithography, will help us continue to deliver the smaller, higher performance and lower power products our customers require.  Several other techniques - including additional engineering at the channel or dielectric level, or even multi-gate devices - look very promising and should extend the roadmap well into the next decade.

Will TI always operate its own fabs for both analogue and digital ICs?

TI has a flexible model in place, and we'll adapt as needed to maintain a constant focus on quality, responsiveness and customer success. And today we believe our external and internal manufacturing strategy allows us to deliver the innovative, high-quality products that our customers need, when they need them.

TI is focused on analogue growth, and we're expanding our in-house analogue process technology and manufacturing capabilities. TI also offers thousands of analogue products, and many of them are simply required in volumes too low to shift to a foundry model. On the digital CMOS side, while we're certainly increasing reliance upon our foundry partners for manufacturing we continue to maintain internal capacity to insure that we can deliver high volume production of our customers' designs ahead of the competition.

If you had to name one key technology which will impact TI's business over the next 12 months what would it be?

TI has a deep understanding of power, and we're committed to helping our customers solve the challenges and deliver more power efficient products. Innovation at both the process technology and chip levels allows us to reduce power consumption and optimise performance across our analogue and embedded processing products, which is critical for today's applications where we're looking to do more for less. 

One example of how we do this is through SmartReflex technologies. SmartReflex is a holistic approach to power that in one of our OMAP products reduced active power consumption by over 65 per cent, and standby power leakage by up to three orders of magnitude. 

Another example is our LBC7 low-voltage dense isolated power technology, which makes possible power management chips such as a controller that enables safer, smaller battery chargers with faster charge time. 

If you had to name one key application which will impact TI's business over the next 12 months what would it be?

Texas Instruments is especially excited about the continued growth of portable applications. We have a long history of innovation in making systems smaller and more efficient, extending battery life while continuing to increase performance.

This expertise is leading us into exciting areas that are making a difference in people's lives - such as high precision medical where our technology is enabling portable defibrillators, portable ultrasounds and visual stethoscopes that act like complex cardiac machines.

Other examples include portable industrial applications such as metering equipment, or devices like National Geographic's Crittercam, a small camera that leverages TI technology that deliver HD images and long battery life to further research into the habits of animals around the world.

See also: Q5 - Interviews with electronics industry leaders
Read all the Electronics Weekly Q5 interviews. From ARM's chairman, Sir Robin Saxby, to touchscreen technology firm Zytronic's MD, Mark Cambridge, the business leaders share their particular insights on the UK electronics industry.

See also: Electronics Weekly's focus on microprocessors, a roundup of content on microprocessor technologies and developments not related to the x86 architecture (from ARM, Texas Instruments and MIPS).