Analogue chips have been doing well, with companies like Linear Technology Corporation making 78 per cent margins, and the market's set to get better this year, but where will the designers come from?
The demand for analogue chip designers is going to get even stronger this year as the analogue market is projected to show a sharp upturn in 2007 and outgrow the overall semiconductor industry.
Last year, analogue IC industry leader Linear Technology Corporation (LTC) could not recruit enough analogue chip designers.
“We have more new ideas than we have circuit designers”, says LTC’s CEO, Lothar Maier, “there is no shortage of new projects, and we believe demand is going to power ahead.”
Whereas analogue IC revenue growth was only 8.8 per cent in 2006, market analysts iSuppli expects it to grow over 11 per cent in 2007.
“We’re embarked on a programme to expand our design talent”, says Maier, “it’s difficult to recruit in Milpitas (LTC’s HQ) and we opened three new design centres last year in Arizona, Munich and Dallas.”
Unfortunately, China is not an option at the moment, reckons Maier. Whereas skills shortages can be made up in other areas by going to China, Maier reckons: “The skill-sets are not available there yet. Most of the 100,000 engineers or so they graduate every year are digital related and don’t have the analogue skills we need.”
Maier adds: “A significant amount of our shipments go into China, but the amount of design-ins won in China is relatively small.”
About half LTC’s new recruits came from other analogue IC companies. Asked how he hangs on to them, Maier replies: “Design engineers like to test their talent and as we only make high performance circuits that means they only do what they like to do.”
In addition there’s a bonus scheme which pays out between 30 and 60 per cent of earnings.
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