Date: 27/06/2012

Intersil is betting high on pico projector

Intersil-India now has a bigger and well equipped office to serve the future expansion of Intersil India. The new 18000 square feet office can house close to 100 engineers. It houses development office, marketing and product test lab. Ramanujam Thodur is the Managing Director of Intersil India. He has M. Tech degree from IIT Kharagpur and had worked earlier at Texas Instruments.

On the sidelines of the inaugural function held on 26th of June, This writer sat with Roger Levinson VP and General Manager, Signal path products, and Susan J. Hardman, Senior VP, Analog and Mixed Signal Products Group, of Intersil for a brief conversation.

On the overall analog semiconductor market growth, Susan says the analog semiconductor industry is estimated to grow around 3-4% in 2012. The market is weak due to weaker global economy and Europe crisis, added to this is the change in customer choice for tablet over notebook, tablet computer is eating into notebook market, according to her.

Intersil is pinning high hope on pico projector. Where Intersil has developed pico projector technology using green laser with auto focus feature. Main stream availability of pico projector is expected in 2015, as per Susan. Intersil driven pico projector technology is more reliable and less expensive compared to the present pico-projector technology.

Intersil follows what called asset-lite, an other name for fab-lite where it gets its power management ICs fabricated by semiconductor foundry service providers. However it has strong manufacturing expertise in bringing high-rel chips to withstand harsh weather conditions in applications such as aero-space and military. Roger Levinson says Intersil has its own process called PR40, where each transistor on a semiconductor chip are completely isolated from each other.

Intersil's op-amps and other analog front end chips are used widely in India for the performance as well as cost advantage.

On the possibility of programmable analog similar to FPGA, Roger sees it as a failed concept.
Intersil India MD

Picture: Ramanujam Thodur at his new office