‘We’re analog bridge to the digital world’

By Gagandeep Kaur

Norwood-based Analog Devices boasts of a wide range of products in signal processing and integrated circuits. The company has been operating in India since 1981 and is active in the aerospace, communications, industrial and automotive industries. Analog Devices also has a research and development center in Bangalore. Analog Devices also boasts of a huge R&D center in Bangalore. As the industry moves towards widespread deployment of LTE, the company looks to increase its presence in the telecom industry. Besides the adoption of Machine-to-Machine or Internet of Things, is one of the main growth drivers for its products. In this exclusive interview, the company’s Managing Director, Somshubhro Pal Choudhury talks about the company’s presence in India; its areas of focus and the future technologies they are working on.

Excerpts from the interview: Voice&Data: What are your main areas of operations?

Som Choudhury: Analog Devices is close to $3 billion company. This is our 49th year of operations. We are basically in analog-to-digital play. We are a semiconductor player but we are not in a typical processor domain like Qualcomm or Intel. We are a prominent player in signal processing. You can call us analog bridge to the digital world. We are basically present in three main areas. We are pretty big in industrial instrumentation…it contributes close to 40 percent of our revenue and that includes things like aerospace, radar systems, electronic warfare, etc. Second focus area is communication infrastructure. Base stations you have to sense the radio waves and process these radio waves, process it to make it digital and then route the call. We play anywhere between antennae to just before FPG. This is around 20-22 percent of our revenue. Third is automotive. We are focused on high-end cars. Then, we are present in security arena as well… MEMS. We pioneered the use of MEMS. Now our Bangalore center is involved in predictive safety.

Voice&Data: What is your presence in India?

Som Choudhury: We have around 30 design centers and India is the second largest outside of the US. First largest is in Ireland. We have around 350 employees in India. We started back in 1995 and we have developed it not as a outsourcing hub but as a desire to take complete ownership of that technology, which means anything from designing to testing the chip to supporting it globally happens out of India for that category of products. For instance, for processers and DSPs this is the center of excellence.

Voice&Data: Which business contributes maximum to your revenue?

Som Choudhury: Defense would be the biggest piece for us in India, followed by telecom infrastructure followed by process control and factory automation. Communication is a big piece for us in the Software Defined Radio arena. Now the market is moving towards LTE and we have a number of products in that as well. There is a lot of deployment in terms of small cells and pico cells. LTE deployment is a big problem in India because most of these deployments are happening in 2.3 GHz frequency band which means lesser range compared to lower frequencies.

Voice&Data: Clearly, you will be playing a big role in Internet of Things ecosystem. What is going to be your presence in Internet of Things?

Som Choudhury: There are four different plays in this. One is obviously the sensing piece. You need to get the right signals from the sensors. You need to do some amount of processing and get them to network. Thirdly, you need to get these signals to the cloud. Last piece is the data analytics. From our standpoint, we are playing in sensors piece and wireless sensor piece.

Voice&Data: What are the technologies that you are working on?

Som Choudhury: Research is fundamental to us. The challenge is to combine various components in a small form factor and secondly it has to be extremely low power because you cannot change batteries frequently. These are the major technologies that we are working on — how do we combine the signals, filters, sensors, convertors, etc… everything onto a single form factor. Second thing is we have to come up with something called energy harvesting. Howsoever little, the batteries do consume some amount of power… we are working on technologies to reduce the energy consumptions of these. Thirdly, we are investing in vibration technology. For instance, you have a sensor on bridge to monitor cracks and other problems based on the vibration on the bridge you would know what the problem is.