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Follow UsBANGALORE: US-based high performance analog solutions provider Intersil is beginning to reap the benefits of its investment into an Indian development center two years ago.
The small core team of 15 analog engineers at the company’s Bangalore facility has developed products aimed at the industrial and communication market.
Speaking to CyberMedia News, Richard M Bayer, CEO, Intersil, said that the company is also moving some of the development into the high precision medical instrumentation products to India.
The company plans to add ten more new hires (including engineers and customer support staff) to the team in India. Bayer said that it is difficult to find engineers with experience in analog design in India.
“The analog domain needs experienced people and compared to the DSP space, it takes a longer time in terms of training and experience for an analog engineer.”
Intersil provides analog solutions for the computing, space, consumer products, communications and industrial segments. Bayer said that the company is focusing on high growth market segments such as handhelds, notebooks, MP3 players and LCD players, and is growing at a significantly higher rate compared to other analog peers.
The company’s handheld revenue more than tripled during 2005 and the company now has over 400 handheld customers. The company’s competitors include players like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices and Bayer feels that the $15 billion high-performance analog market is big enough for all these companies.
The $600 million company has fabs in Florida in the US that manufacture some of the company’s low volume high margin products. “We follow a “fab-light” strategy. Around 45 per cent of our requirements are met by our own fabs while the rest is outsourced,” said Bayer. He is pleased with the importance that the Indian government is placing on the semiconductor industry and is hoping that the semiconductor policy would offer good incentives for fabs. “Who knows, we may use some of the Indian foundries to design our chips in future,” he said.
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