Burr-Brown extends ASSP reach

Burr-Brown extends ASSP reach
MUNICH, Germany — Burr-Brown Corp., an analog and mixed-signal house, is expanding into application-specific standard products (ASSP) to complement its standard product business and to exploit its gains in process technology, a senior executive said today (Nov. 10).

Paul Prazak, vice president of Burr-Brown's High-Speed Division, which specializes in telecommunications ICs, said the company's current mix of 80 percent for standard parts and 20 percent for ASSPs will become a 50-50 mix in the coming years.

"More and more customers want to integrate more and more features," he said. "If you wanted to do an ASSP a couple of years ago, maybe your op amp was bipolar, your A/D [converter] was bipolar. Now all those cells are in CMOS. It's must easier to integrate."

Burr-Brown (Tuscon, Ariz.) will never leave the standard-product business, Prazak said, because development work there provides the cores for later ASSP designs.

In an interview at the Electronica 98 show here, Prazak said that while sales for Burr-Brown have dropped off in Asia, which the company obtains a third of its total revenues, telecommunications-oriented sales have buoyed the company, particular in its current area of concentration HDSL circuits.

For its third quarter ended Oct. 3, Burr-Brown reported slightly lower year-to-year net income of $61.1 million and earnings of $7.5 million. Nine-month profits of $36.6 million are up over profits for the same period in 1997.

Burr-Brown is exploring an expansion into ADSL-lite and HDSL-2, but for the time being is avoiding jumping into the much-hyped full ADSL market, where little field deployment has occurred, Prazak said. The company also has no current interest in developing or adding a major DSP to its portfolio to complement the analog front-end devices it cranks for subsystems, Prazak said.

"It really makes sense now to partition the chip" into analog discretes and DSP. "You can't just easily integrate some of these functions because while digital shrinks well in finer process geometries, analog doesn't," he said.

Tweet

Please sign in to post comment