The Hindu Business Line : All eyes on analog

"Convergence of creativity and spirit" is how Suneil Parulekar, Senior VP & GM — Analog Signal Path Group, National Semiconductor Corporation, chose to describe analog design at the first ISA Round Table meet organised by India Semiconductor Association in Bangalore recently.

The analog market has seen a continuous growth over the last 25 years. During 1995-2005, when semiconductors grew at 5 per cent CAGR, analog grew 7 per cent. It had a share of $31.9 billion out of the $227 billion TAM (total available market) for semiconductors in 2005 and this is expected to grow to $37.9 billion in 2006. As the semiconductors market has shifted from a PC era to a handset-driven consumer electronics market, the analog market is expected to grow at 11 per cent CAGR with a TAM of $64 billion in 2011.

The analog market has continued to grow in spite of the System-on-a-Chip era, as the need for high speed, high precision and high voltage requires analog circuits that are designed in an analog process rather than a vanilla digital process.

Pervasive

Analog is required as part of nearly all end equipments. The pervasiveness of the analog market lies in the fact that analog circuits are required wherever real world interface or human interface is required. It has been argued that the features that make an impact on the end-user are decided by analog designs. For example, in a mobile phone features such as sound quality, battery life (talk-time) and good display are determined by the quality of analog designs.

In the automotive sector, analog designs play a crucial role in safety, fuel efficiency and entertainment. High-precision analog circuits are required, for example, for electronic fuel injection to produce a fuel-efficient car. In the case of consumer electronics, the image quality in a digital camera is directly linked to the analog design.

Resurgence

Analog products are expected to clock an impressive growth over the next five years due to various reasons.

Greener appliances: These demand highly efficient power management designs. The European Union and the US have passed laws in favour of greener appliances, which in turn will fuel the growth of a new class of high-performance power management analog products. At present a lot of power is wasted due to inefficient design of power management analog circuits. The new laws will ensure that more efficient analog circuits are designed.

Display electronics: Analog products in display electronics are seeing a rapid growth because of the demand for high form factor TV. A large form factor TV is expected to have better audio quality and hence this will fuel the growth of precision audio analog designs. Large form factor TVs require a lot of power management products which belong to analog category. Feature rich mobile phones demand better power management to increase talking time.

Bio-medicine: The bio-medical sector calls for ultra low-power products. Faster connectivity will demand high-speed analog circuits.

The three critical enablers for successful analog design are circuit innovation, process technology and small form factor packages.

Opportunities for India

It is believed that out of every 1,500 VLSI engineers that India produces every year, less than one per cent work with analog design.

Parulekar stresses that there is a huge opportunity waiting for Indian engineers who focus on analog and he wants the India Semiconductor Association to foster this development.

Mohan Yegnashankaran, Senior Vice President - World Wide Technology Development, National Semiconductor Corporation, has called for a meaningful relationship between industry and universities to explore solutions in electronic design automation and process technologies.

(The writer is co-founder, President & CEO Cosmic Circuits.)