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Analogue is a broad collection of technologies, with of course a high overlap with RF and wideband as already presented. Here I will limit to specific analogue technologies not covered elsewhere.
Power One of the applications dominated by NXP was AC/DC power conversion, with the primary side directly connected to the rectified 230V. Typical applications were lap top power supply blocks, telephone chargers and lighting. Greenchip controllers were a combination of primary and secondary controllers for very high efficiency at all load levels. With the arrival of electronically controlled (dimmable) CFL and of course LED lighting these concepts were re-used for lamps. For these applications we had specially developed SOI-based silicon technologies, one of which supported voltages up to 900V for direct-to-mains connections. Power discretes (transistors) was yet another segment with its own technology; initially Trench-MOS, later we introduced GaN-on-Si for higher efficiencies. |
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Discretes and Logic
Although generally considered an outdated corner of electronic components, the number of discrete transistors and diodes still used is enormous: we produced more than 60 billion (!) of them each year. But it's true that it is true that these are not technologies like CMOS; in fact, the silicon for the components is almost irrelevant and the majority of effort and cost goes into extremely high volume packaging and testing. Logic is only slightly more integration than discrete, covering functions like ANDs, NAND, ORs and NORs in many variations, as well as basic buffer, interface and control functions. Being involved in the technology roadmaps to produce these extremely high volume, very low cost, increasingly small size components, but with nevertheless very healthy margins, has always been a very rewarding activity. Luckily it is now being sold by NXP to become the independent company Nexperia. |
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Interfaces
High-speed interconnect is a never ending struggle to get more bits transported, where modern standards are increasing the physical limits of what can effectively be sent across copper wires. Over the last 25 years we've seen a continuous stream of new standards, and we worked on all of them. Without being exhaustive: I2C, USB (1, 2 and 3), SPI, Ethernet, HDMI, PCI-Express, SATA, DDR, MIPI, FireWire, etcetera. Because of backward compatibility and multi-mode use many products consisted of bridges and converters between the different standards. |
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Audio
Audio (together with video) is one of the most outspoken consumer-related technologies, and because of its leading position Philips has always been an audio experts company. However, in the course of things most of this was cannibalized for designing medium performance audio IP for for not-so-well selling mobile phone base band and digital TV SoC's. When these businesses were sold by NXP's private equity owners, and being at the time the analogue/audio competency manager, I organized a round table with the remaining experts to see which competencies were left and whether we could do something useful with it. The rest is history: we defined the revolutionary speaker protection concept, made a compelling business case, got the budget, collected most experts into the new Product Line Mobile Audio, and started the project Maximus. Three years later the TFA9887 hit the mobile phone market with HTC as the first customer, and in the following years it conquered 80% of that market, becoming a standard feature in modern mobile phones. As an hommage to this project, a fine example of successful breakthrough new products based on core competencies, I've called my own company Maximus-R&D. |
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Sensors
It has always been my strong belief that both the mobile phone and the Internet-of-Things would be major applications for sensors. As such I've always stimulated and funded sensor developments, even though that proved to be a far from simple area. Although the ultimate goal is always monolithic sensor integration with CMOS, initially most started as stand-alone functions. The MEMS Microphone is a good example, although that project stopped when we sold the Sound Solutions speaker business. We then focused on environmental sensors, first highly accurate temperature sensing, then relative humidity while the next steps were pressure and gas (e.g. CO2). The Environmental Sensor product line was one of our emerging businesses, developing the SEN200 and SEN300 families. In 2015 it was fortunately sold to Austrian ams AG, a company that really drives sensors as its core strategy. |
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