EONEWS: What are your opinions regarding the major trends for this market (slowing, growing, booming…)?
BECKEMEYER: The analog interface market continues to grow. The growth is seen in markets such as smartphones, tablets, data networking, cloud computing, industrial and wireless infrastructure where there is a constant demand for higher bandwidth.
EONEWS: What are the key strategies adopted by your company in the short/medium period to address (or to better address) the needs of the market?
BECKEMEYER: Texas Instruments takes pride in key strategic areas to meet customers’ needs. We are heavily focused on the development of reference designs that customers’ use as a blueprint for implementing high data-rate applications. TI also takes a comprehensive approach to support the growing bandwidth requirement by developing process technologies and circuit design techniques that insure increased signal reach at a reduced system cost, while ensuring the lowest power consumption in the industry. Partnership with eco-system vendors (CPU, FPGA, microcontroller, peripheral controllers etc) to develop system-level solutions helps to reduce development time for our customers.
EONEWS: What are you doing in order to implement your strategies (partnership/agreements, new acquisitions, investments in activities like R&D, people….)?
BECKEMEYER: TI is focused on developing key intellectual property in the interface market to stay in front of the technology trends. One example of this is in the high-speed interface market for applications that implement 10GbE, 40GbE and 100GbE. As these standards come to full maturation in their respective markets, the need for low-power, highly-integrated and cost-effective solutions will greatly influence development strategies where process, architecture, and IP become very tightly coupled.
EONEWS: What are the most important application?
BECKEMEYER: TI has a broad portfolio of interface devices spanning many applications. The company is focused on the automotive and industrial markets, with key applications including automotive infotainment, driver assist systems, programmable logic controllers, sensor systems, CAN and RS-485. Texas Instruments’ FPD-Link III family of automotive video serializer and deserializer chipsets provides a comprehensive solution for video transport and distribution in the car. TI’s newest ISO71xx family are the industry’s first digital isolation devices to offer the highest isolation rating, at 2.5 kVrms.
In addition, the most important applications for communications interface inculde: optical modules (10GbE, 40GbE, 100GbE, SONET), LTE wireless infrastructure equipment, data center networking, and vectoring-based access networking.
EONEWS: Which are the key factors that set your company apart from the competition?
BECKEMEYER: TI is able to provide the entire signal chain solution for a given space including support and development tools while competition may only be able to provide point solutions or devices at the company level. Interface today is more than just providing an IC to a customer. It’s also about providing the tools, references, and support that enable a customer to achieve their interface implementation at the target performance, power, cost, and density points for winning in their market.
EONEWS: And in the middle/long term (if you have a crystal ball!)?
BECKEMEYER: The secular trend of higher data rates at lower power with greater density will drive interface IC development for the foreseeable future. As applications such as 100GbE, 4K television, and Advanced LTE become common place, interface IC vendors will need to invent novel approaches to solving high-speed data transmission challenges.