Analog Devices vs Texas Instruments Positioning

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It sounds like you have a lot of experience at that company in both sales and product development; that’s perfect. The first question is that Analog is particularly well known for being very strong in converters and seems to have a good position in the signal chain. Then with Linear, you establish a good base in power. I'm curious about what makes a converter or a power management chip high-performance. How hard would it be to design a comparable chip? How long would it take, and what kind of expertise would be required to do it?

Good question. The answer is very hard. I don’t know what the number is now, post-Linear Technology acquisition and Maxim, but when we were just Analog, we had a 52% market share on the A-to-D and D-to-A markets. When we move customers, we’d usually go up against Texas Instruments; sometimes, Linear Tech was the higher-priced, more niche player in the converter space. But with things like resolution, jitter, and true resolution, TI has a huge marketing machine behind them. They would market and advertise converter chips with a higher resolution, but that doesn’t mean a lot to an engineer. It’s how true the resolution is. You could be 24 bits but are you really only accurate for this application up to 14 bits? We were always known as the conservative company, and if we said it was X resolution, it was X resolution. Apologies for the analogy here, it's not the best, but it's the only one I can think of. BMW always understates its horsepower rating; it's kind of like that. So, it’s very difficult because many factors make a good A-to-D good; you’ve got jitter, noise, signal-to-noise ratio, resolution, cost, size, and channels. There is a lot to it, and there are a lot of different permutations.

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Got it. ADI has talked about how they're moving up the stack and creating these more complete and comprehensive systems. You touched on it earlier with the glucose monitoring example. Can you help me understand, and use any example you want, how the different pieces come together to create a more optimized solution? You’ve made some software acquisitions in recent years, and TI hasn't done that. How do those pieces work together to create a better, more optimized product?

That’s also a complicated answer. I’m not going to be able to explain it fully; we have specialist engineers for this, and they often have to refer to certain other subject matter experts for certain use cases. So you're specialized, and if one analog-to-digital converter specialist can't answer a question, the other can because of a certain use case. The simplified answer is always to look at it from the lens of, I'm receiving an analog signal; the world is analog. There's an infinite amount of sampling you could do. Let's say you have one second of audio. Because it's analog, there's no discreet start/stop. Digital only operates in discreet. There are certain complexities, like measuring the impedance of blood glucose and how it changes under specific temperature and resistance measurements, and there's a huge variation. It's easy to get it wrong because your measuring is so small. In this case, you're measuring the smallest amount of impedance changes for the blood glucose strip.

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What are your thoughts on the Maxim acquisition? The Linear and Hittite acquisitions make clear sense to me. They got power with Linear, and they got radio and some GaN capabilities with Hittite. What does Maxim bring? It sounds like Maxim was rounding out some of the products that ADI already had. Any thoughts on the Maxim acquisition?

That was a tough one for me. I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with some old teammates who expressed a lot of discontent with that whole thing. It's a peculiar decision for a lot of us. What I think happened was that there are very few broad-market semiconductor companies; broad market is a requirement. We're not buying, no matter how valuable they are, NVIDIA is too big, and ADI would have no idea what to do with that technology. Very few other companies are big enough to be attractive and small enough to be acquired that are even somewhat complementary to your portfolio. There’s a lot of overlap, in both good and bad ways. The team was even expressing that to me recently. I think Vince bought a book of business, and semiconductor wins are very sticky. You could shut the lights off and stop answering customer phone calls tomorrow, and you'd still have a long tail of revenue stream coming because many designs last 10, 15, 20 years, if not longer. That was another advantage to ADI, by the way.

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