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managers, but they are not
thinking in terms of long-term markets or trends. They are looking
for that 10-million-chip-a-month order. They are talkers, not
listeners. You don't really need any good applications people, for
these big consumer electronic markets, the customer just hands you a
preliminary data sheet and the sales guy just tosses that to an IC
designer. It costs a few hundred grand to design the chip and the
best thing is that you get high-volume revenue immediately. A company
that has the talent and foresight to just design a good
general-purpose part, well they have to compete against all the other
general-purpose parts and the sales team has to endure the slow ramp
up of volume.
With
that high-volume needle things are so much more satisfying. All the
sales and marketing managers get a big bonus because their pet
project is moving 10 million parts a month. The product groups get a
pat on the forehead and a cookie as well, since they did not spend
anything on applications or system expertise, the customer told then
just what the chip had to do. To top things off, the part will go on
the website so if anyone else wants to uses it, well, that is just
pure cream.
That high-volume needle in the arm has some problems. When things get bad, you lose 10 million parts a month from all those high volume customers across all those high-volume projects. And you loose that business all at once. All the semiconductor companies have talked about how Asian manufacturers are becoming their largest market. But executives need to get down in the dirt to see what is really going on. I had an FAE at a semiconductor company tell me: "Sure we sell a lot of parts to Asia. Those low-voltage CMOS consumer parts are what we have been making. If we made parts for the ISM market I could have kept the volume here in the USA." Now I doubt anything could have maintained volumes at
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