See also: Freescale Semiconductor plans investment, but sees consumer confidence falling

Freescale Semiconductor is not going to become an analogue company, but it's going to become more of an analogue company.

That was the message of Rich Beyer, chairman and CEO of Freescale, at last week's Freescale Technology Forum in Paris.

When Beyer was brought in by Freescale's private equity owners, led by Blackstone, to run the company, everyone thought Beyer would turn Freescale into an analogue company.

That's how he'd made a big success at Intersil, selling off the WiFi business where Intersil was the world No.1 player, and transforming the company into a pure-play, high performance analogue company.

Asked if he was going the same way with Freescale, Beyer replied: "The analogue business is a healthy, defensible, very good margin business which we'd like to be grow. We are the leader in embedded control which uses analogue componentry, power management and sensors."

Beyer's strategy has two parts to it: "We will continue to make investments targeted towards the industrial and consumer markets. Today most of analogue is in the automotive business."

"Second", added Beyer, "we will look for possible acquisition candidates in areas like sensors and networking."

"We would like to have more standard products in microcontrollers, analogue, power and sensors," said Beyer, "we have been increasing the number of analogue designers in Silicon Valley, in Toulouse and in India, Brazil and China."

How does he attract and, more important, keep such a sought-after resource? "We have products which are quite interesting," replied Beyer, "the turnover of people is below the corporate average."

The trend driving the move to more analogue content is the trend whereby customers require more and more functionality from their semiconductor suppliers.

"Customers ask for solutions, they insist on us providing more and more of the functionality", said Beyer, "the fact of the matter is that the number of digital engineers in the company will go down as a percentage, and the number of analogue and software engineers will go up."

See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.

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