Thursday, March 28, 2024

“Research is now incremental rather than revolutionary”

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Q. What kind of market segments do you have?
A. Analog Devices plays in five major market segments. First one being industrial includes defence, energy, instrumentation, motor controls, and video surveillance. We call this segment as INI (Industry and Instrumentation). Second segment is the automotive, which includes applications like air-bags, roll-over protection, info-entertainment, battery management, engine electronics to name a few. Third is the communication infrastructure segment. Fourth is healthcare, the fastest growing segment for us, which includes CT scanners, MRI machines, heart-rate monitor, ECG machines, Pulse oximeters. Also, a big and emerging segment is the home-health sector. The final segment is the consumer sector. We are niche players in high-end audio systems for automotive and home, lens drivers for DSLR cameras, accelerometers for switching between landscape and portrait mode used also in tablets and smart-phones, and MEMS microphones as well.

Q. Here in India, what kind of marketing strategies are used by Analog Devices?
A. We involve ourselves in reaching out to our customers and media regularly with our press releases. We provide technical articles on our new products and reference designs or CFTL (circuits from the lab) to the design community. We also involve ourselves in featured articles about certain area of technology or business and presentations. We hold regular seminars in multiple cities targeting specific areas of interest like industrial, defence, energy, consumer, healthcare, and automotive as well. Webinars are done regularly from experts in India as well as worldwide.

Q. Do you attend events or exhibitions to create a presence?
A. Yes. We do attend very relevant trade shows like Electronica, Electronic Rocks where we had a key note session, and likewise. From an industry vertical stand-point, we meet our customers in these different industry segments via events. We are members of the Indian Semi-conductor Association (ISA) as well where we participate regularly in the forums and panels.

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Q. What’s Anveshan all about?
A. Anveshan is a project fellowship program that we started back in 2010 focused only on the university students to enhance their system design expertise. We recently launched the 2012 version in August. This fellowship gives students an opportunity to realise their dreams. The fundamentals and theories are provided by the universities but actual practical application of system design is not taught at the universities. We provide them guidance and help them in building their system. We started Anveshan to bridge that gap between industries and universities. Pairing the student teams from the universities with mentors from the industries, our overall goal is to increase the level of system design in India.

Q. Is it possible for students from any engineering college to participate?
A. Absolutely. In 2012, we reached out to over 100 universities and colleges all over India. We have received more than 200 registrations and over 100 submissions. Currently, we are processing them and selecting the top ones, which will be mentored by our industry experts. In the end, we would be choosing 3 top products for attractive prizes.

Q. Could you talk about the hiring policies of Analog Devices? Do you recruit freshers?
A. Our goal at Analog Devices is to hire the best. ADI does extensive hiring from the universities recruiting freshers as well as lateral hiring from the industry. We visit top universities like IISc, IITs, and so forth. It has also widely been acknowledged by students that ADI’s selection process is pretty stringent and challenging. Lateral hiring happens through multiple sources. We have industry’s leading recruiters working for us and we are also extensively using social-networking platforms like LinkedIn and other referral programs to pick out the right candidates based on the references from our existing employees.

Q. What kind of skill-sets do you look for while recruiting?
A. Skill-sets required are multiple. If I’m hiring a field application engineer, the criteria along with technical expertise would be inter-personal skills because he would be interacting with customers all the time. In case of technical engineers, which include hardware and software designers, we follow a stringent selection process in terms of technical expertise. During the course of inception training, there is an extensive training for about 1 or 2 weeks on IC Design, Software Design, Embedded Software, Different technologies of Mixed Signal, Digital Signal Processing and so on. We also touch upon the social and presentation skills.

Q. Is it possible for you to talk about the number of people you are looking to hire?
A. We typically don’t disclose the number of people we will hire but frankly speaking we would not be one of those companies that hire 100s of people every year. We do this for a specific reason. We, at ADI, hire primarily for the skills and expertise. We take full ownership of the product from concept to silicon and we have built up this design center based on centers of excellence and not from a cost arbitration stand point. They way we are planning to grow is by building up the skill-sets and expertise in specific areas.


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