Analog Devices to grow India strength by 20% in 2015

Analog Devices (ADI), the Norwood, Massachusetts-based semiconductor company specialising in data conversion and signal conditioning technology, is this year celebrating its fiftieth year of founding and twentieth year of its presence in India.

During this time, ADI’s design centre in Bengaluru grew from a small 10-member team to a 300-strong group of researchers doing cutting-edge work in some of the most advanced technologies rolled out by ADI worldwide.

The Bengaluru centre is now Analog’s third largest design centre after the US and Ireland, and employs close to 20 per cent of its total design population.

So important is India for ADI that besides the hundreds of products rolled out from the centre globally, it is also the base of its digital signal processing (DSP) vertical with its head Karthik Sankaran (director, processor and DSP tech group) entrusted with profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities for the same. The DSP business contributes 8 per cent to ADI’s total revenues ($2.865 billion as of 2014).

ADI’s senior vice president, and chief human resources officer, William Matson told Deccan Herald that the company is looking to grow its India strength by 10-20 per cent this year. Besides Blackfin processors (convergent applications) and five generations of SHARC processors (DSP), engineers at the Bengaluru centre — including 60 software professionals — work on customised integrated circuits or ASICs for micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), advanced analog, and mixed signal products.

Software expertise

Matson said MEMS or mechanical semiconductors are a combination of mechanical and electrical engineering. “They are very, very intricate in sensing motion. They can do everything from stabilise your drone that you want to control and take pictures of the neighbourhood, to help with very sophisticated safety systems in cars. The fundamental nature of the technology can also help with image stabilisation in cameras.”

In his view, “You don’t think of a semiconductor company being all that involved in software. But increasingly, software is helping to take the fundamental technology you developed in the silicon and extend it to broader applications. A lot of that software expertise exists here in Bengaluru.”

Joe Lazar, ADI India’s Director (Human Resources and Operations) said the parent’s automotive business unit relies on the automotive software work entirely done out of Bengaluru by a team of about 30 people.

Globally, ADI employs around 10,000 people. Nearly half of them are into manufacturing and testing at the company’s fabs at Wilmington, Massachusetts in the US, and Limerick, Ireland, and its testing centres in the Philippines. Both Matson and Lazar, though, said the company is right now not thinking of setting up a fab in India.

Matson said one of the toughest things to do when you are in semiconductors is to describe the products you make. “Because they are not things that are front and centre. Most of our products are not necessarily things that you would see as household names. But in anything and everything you do, I would say dozens of times a day, you are touched by our technology.”

To illustrate, he referred to a typical phone call. “When you make a call on your mobile, more likely than not the thing that helps that signal get from your phone to the base station, and from that base station to some other base station, and magically to whoever else’s phone you called, is our technology. There’s nothing exciting about that, it’s just a little chip. But the sophistication of that technology...is kind of the magic of what we have been for about 50 years.”