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Intersil is getting the benefit of the experience which new CEO Dave Bell 
learned during more than decade spent at Linear Technology Corporation (LTC) where he was also the CEO.
"LTC is a great company. I learned more from Bob Swanson (founder and executive chairman of LTC) in my twelve and a half years there, than from anyone else in my career", Bell told Electronics Weekly at Electronica.
Asked if he was applying Swanson's thinking to Intersil, Bell replied: "Certain elements of it. Intersil evolved from the running together of many different companies so it is very open to taking new ideas from different sources, and putting them together, and using the experience of people from other companies. There's an open-mindedness here to consider other ways of doing things."
"There are some things that LTC does better than anyone else in the high technology industry", said Bell.
"First, defining highly differentiated high performance products - products that are unique and which customers value. LTC does this better than anyone else in our industry. Intersil is good at it and is getting better."
"Second, pricing discipline. LTC does the best job in analogue pricing and in persuading customers of the value in a part, and getting the value for it. I learnt that from Bob Swanson, and I'm introducing it into our culture."
Bell is looking to make Intersil "more forward-looking, more aggressive, embracing the best practices from a variety of sources, and building an analogue company better than anyone else out there."
He wants a more balanced product mix as between ASSPs and Standard Products. At the moment Intersil does 60 per cent ASSPs and 40 per cent standard, general purpose products, yet a higher proportion of the R&D money goes into general purpose products. Bell would like to see the mix at 50/50.
He's keeping Intersil's manufacturing strategy at 30 per cent in-house and 70 per cent from foundries. "We run specialized analogue processes in our fabs (in Palm Bay, Florida) but if we're pushing the feature sizes down it makes more sense to do it in a foundry", said Bell.
He's making a push on quality levels and has driven Field Failure Rates down to single figure parts per million.
He wants to grow the company both organically and by acquisition. "In the last three years we've outgrown our peers in the industry," said Bell.
"I'm surprised that there haven't been more companies taking advantage of the economic conditions in our industry now that companies' hopes of doing an IPO have gone, and the hopes of raising money from VCs are pretty gloomy. There are many analogue and mixed signal companies that are interesting at affordable prices. We are looking at strategic acquisitions which bring us leading technology"
Examples of the acquisition strategy have been D2Audio for Class 2 audio amplifier technology and Kenet for exceptionally low-power high speed A-D technology. "We will continue to look at other companies", said Bell.
The push is on to drive Intersil into the billion dollar sales bracket.
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