Intervista a Don Macleod, National Semiconductor president and chief executive officer
The company wants to take advantage of the economic recovery, capitalizing on the value of its Ip and optimizing the production in the existing wafer fabs
The economic upturn seems to be near and National Semiconductor believes to have all the qualities to grab this opportunity. The company’s president and chief executive officer Don Macleod said that the semiconductor business is capital intensive and, particularly, the analog sector requires strong capex investments. So, today, National wants to leverage on its best strengths, working on gross margin and focusing on a rapid growth, adding value to the existing solutions and addressing emerging markets with the core competencies in the analog world.
After so-called ‘National 3.0’ strategy, launched two years ago, now the goal is to better develop the business in some key marketplaces with strong expansion, like mobile phones, telecommunication infrastructures, industrial equipments, Led-based lighting systems, and technologies for the utilization of renewable energies, especially solar energy.
The company will focus the attention particularly on empowering design activities, capitalizing on its Ip value in power management sector. The idea is to work closer with the system engineers, to win the new design challenges and to realize cutting-edge products at worldwide level.
Another important aspect, underlines Macleod, is to meet the users needs providing products with a better usability, in order to reduce the design times and improve the time-to-market of the solutions, also using online tool design suites like Webench. For instance, Webench Visualizer is a powerful comparison and selection tool that draws from 25 different switching power supply architectures and a parts library of 21,000 components. This tool, National declares, allows to navigate billions of power supply design alternatives in seconds. It is possible to modify design criteria and observe the effects on the project, to decide the required balance of system cost, footprint and efficiency.
Macleod also emphasises the strategy around the growth of the Simple Switcher products portfolio, focused on a very large market. The key goal is to provide building blocks, reference platforms and effective design solutions also to non-expert system power designers. From a production capacity point of view, after the closure of the wafer fab in Arlington, Texas, the active fabs now are in the Unites States (South Portland – Maine), in UK (Greenock) along with other facilities in Malaysia (Melaka). In addition, these facilities are currently working at 50-60% of their capacity. But, despite these facts, Macleod thinks that the company is still in a good position. In fact, he believes that the under-utilization of the fabs can be seen as an advantage, considering that the incremental cost to increase the production in these facilities could be very low.