BENGALURU, India -- The core growth engine for Texas Instruments could be high-performance analog, in the opinion of its president and CEO, Rich Templeton. Furthermore, India might well be a growth engine for all semiconductor companies, in light of its growing hunger for electronics.
It is against this background that the first review meeting of TI's high-performance analog (HPA) meeting held outside the U.S. appears so important. The recent three-day meeting of about 25 top executives from TI's HPA business, managers of business units, finance, operations, manufacturing and regional marketing teams from Asia, Europe and the U.S. is also among the first semiconductor company meetings of this scale in India.
Because the TI's HPA portfolio comprises as many as 17,000 products of the total TI product portfolio of about 40,000 products, the meeting was held in India in order to find out first-hand what market opportunities exist, meeting existing customers in order to discover and fulfill their demands.
Good reason also existed for holding the meeting in Bengaluru; the TI ADS5281, a product for the medical ultrasound market, had its moorings here when Indian medical equipment companies provided the initial input to TI about a product for this market segment. This TI product is now being evaluated by medical equipment companies, including GE Medical Systems.
"We wanted to meet customers here, as we see India as a great market for our products because of the growth happening here in the medical and industrial applications segments. We also wanted to see what we can do with regards to future generations of our products. About a hundred engineers in TI India work on HPA, and we wanted to meet them to update them on our vision and hear from them about what they think," said Arthur L. George, senior vice president, HPA, TI, Inc.
During the team's visit here, it met with 'teacher' customers, customers whose opinions TI solicits in order to jump-start the design and fabrication of products for the global market. "We take the initial specifications or inputs, talking it over with our global team of analog application engineers who meet customers worldwide. We then polish the definitions, meet the needs of these 'teacher' customers and then make the product with several variations so as to meet the needs of as many customers as we can," George said.
The visit was also important, according to George, because some of the best IP the company has in HPA was developed in the Bengaluru center. TI has about 50 members under its Independent Design House program in India, and these member firms and many other design houses in the country are all potential partners for TI's HPA line of business in light of the growth predicted for analog products in the country, he added.
The Indian market is largely made up of many industrial segments, communications- and energy-related business and a growing line of medical equipment, said Arun Jain, TI India director of sales and marketing. TI, according to Jain, is buoyed by the growth possibilities in India; the India Semiconductor Association forecasts that the Indian market for analog products will grow from $212 million in 2007 to $437 million in 2009, more than doubling in only two years. "The market here is growing fast, with wireless handsets giving a major push and the industrial market segments coming up fast," Jain said.
