Intersil has been undergoing a transformation over the last two years to focus on our core strength in power management.

Interview with Gaurav Kapoor, India Sales Manager, Intersil Corporation

Gaurav Kapoor is the sales manager for India, where he is responsible for Intersil’s sales operations, distribution, and field applications engineering. Mr. Kapoor has more than 17 years of engineering and sales experience. Prior to Intersil, Mr. Kapoor was the sales manager for Power Integrations India, a supplier of high-performance electronic components used in high-voltage power-conversion systems. Before that, Mr. Kapoor held sales roles in India for Arrow Electronics and Yosun Singapore Private Limited, a large electronics component distributor in Asia Pacific. Mr. Kapoor received his BSEE from Nagpur University in India.  He talks here about Intersil business, its leadership and product innovations.

1. Tell us little bit about Intersil semiconductor and its business overall?

Intersil is a global, publicly traded company with over 1,000 employees worldwide. We were formed in August 1999 when we acquired the semiconductor business of Harris Corporation and began operating as Intersil Corporation. Our business includes product portfolios and intellectual property (IP) dating back to 1967 when semiconductor companies were just emerging in Silicon Valley. Consistent through all of those decades of innovation is Intersil’s specialty in power management. Power management remains more art than science, and Intersil’s success in various markets has often been a result of our core IP in this area.

2. Which are your key products and applications?

Today we target a number of key markets with power management and precision analog solutions, including industrial, infrastructure, automotive, military and aerospace, and mobile computing. We specialize in power conversion and control: Our patented multi-phase technology builds intelligence into the silicon, which makes it easy for engineers to configure our digital power products through simple pin-strap options or by using PMBus commands with Intersil’s PowerNavigator™ software. We are also a company that knows how to build ICs for the harshest environments, with a complete portfolio of radiation hardened devices that have been onboard nearly every satellite and space exploration mission, including NASA’s Orion spacecraft flight testand even India’s Mars mission.

3. In which application segments is Intersil considered a market leader?

Intersil is often able to beat out larger competitors in applications where power efficiency and overall product performance is critical. In mobile products, for example, our solutions enable an increase in battery life of up to one hour, a meaningful competitive advantage for our customers. In infrastructure, where the cost of cooling the equipment often eclipses the cost of the equipment itself, our ability to increase the density of the boards through more efficient power management has a significant economic impact on large data centres. And in automotive and industrial applications, the ability to provide efficiency and reliability, even in extreme conditions, has made Intersil a valuable supplier to customers.

4. Can you tell us about company growth from last 2 years?

Intersil has been undergoing a transformation over the last two years to focus on our core strength in power management. In the areas where we are focusing our investment, we have added design and application engineers, expanded our sales channel and accelerated our new product introductions. This focus has increased our design activity, which is translating to growth in our strategic areas. For example, our automotive business has experienced double-digit growth over the last three years. India on the other hand is the region that has shown consecutive double-digit growth year-over-year, and continues to be the star region for the company.

5. How is Intersil powering innovation in power management solutions?

Intersil has decades of innovation behind our power management solutions to enable the most efficient customer designs. The foundation of this capability is our proprietary modulation technology that provides a compensation-free control loop, eliminating the external compensation resistors and capacitors. We also combine very sophisticated technology with easy to use programming tools to simplify power management design. For example, we recently introduced two new PMBus™ compatible, single-phase digital hybrid DC/DC controllers that provide point-of-load conversions for FPGAs, DSPs, ASICs, processors and general-purpose system rails. The controllers are fully configurable with external pin-strap resistors, which provide a familiar engineering design flow and eliminate the need for non-volatile memory.

Intersil also has leveraged our modulation capability to create world-class buck-boost technology that enables higher levels of integration and functionality, reducing bill of materials (BOM) in space-constrained applications. For example, we are the first to offer a single-chip USB-C buck-boost battery charger, which reduces BOM costs by 40% and extends battery lifein portable applications. The ISL9237 offers acoustic noise-free operation, excellent light load efficiency and ultra-fast transient response to achieve the extended battery run-time.

6. According to you, which are most disruptive technologies of 2016?

There are a number of technology transitions taking place that will change the power management landscape. In cloud computing, servers are transitioning to 48V from 12V, requiring more advanced power solutions capable of directly stepping down to 1V. In next-generation automobiles, 48V lithium-ion batteries have been added to operate a separate 48V network. These higher voltage batteries are needed to support feature-rich infotainment systems and a wide range of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which add complexity to power management design and create opportunities for experts like Intersil.

The advent of the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is creating applications with greater demand for advanced DSPs, FPGAs and ASICs that need to be highly power efficient, requiring power management devices with a greater level of flexibility. For example, Intersil recently released a family of integrated synchronous buck regulators that step-down 5V rails to point-of-load (POL) inputs as low as 0.6V. They deliver up to 8A of continuous output current from a 2.7V to 5.5V input supply, while providing up to 97% efficiency.

7. Tell us about your manufacturing and R&D services.

Intersil is primarily an R&D company, we manufacture and test about 20% of our products and outsource the remainder to proven and reliable manufacturing partners around the world. We believe the most important decision we make is what products to work on. Our worldwide R&D teams are focused on designs providing measurable improvements to customer systems and are highly differentiated relative to what is currently offered.

8. What is Intersil focus in India and how do you look at India semiconductor business?

We believe India’s electronics market represents one of the best opportunities for growth. The region has been doing exceptionally well for the company, and even globally. Experts forecast greater than a 20% compound annual growth rate through 2020 for semiconductor consumption here in India. In addition, favorable governmental policies, incentives, and Modi’s “Make in India” and“ Skill India” initiatives provide an environment that supports continued consumption and technology development.

We are continuing to invest in increasing the awareness of Intersil products in the region and expanding our sales network to be sure we can help OEMs and ODMs address their power management challenges with the latest technologies. India’s rapid growth requires greater power consumption, which aligns well with Intersil’scorporate focus of satisfying the power needs of various OEMs. Along with exciting and emerging automotive applications and having a strong foothold in the rad hard space flight segment, we are well poised to register continued growth this year, too.

9. Please tell us about your presence and marketing activities in India?

In addition to our local sales team, Intersil works with expert sales partners who are regionally present and have the technical capability and application knowledge to support customers designing with our solutions.

We have also been expanding our presence at local trade events and marketing activities to increase our visibility with prospective customers. This effort has been successful, as we have seen design activity in India increasing, which we expect will translate to further market share gains.While our India team is not as big compared to some of our peers, we have average experience of 15+ years, and we are making serious head waywith some big OEMsregional original design manufacturers (ODMs). Along with regional service, we do participate on global design platforms for ODMs or independent design houses (IDHs) who design for global OEMs.

10. How do you feel about the competition in India? What is most challenging to you?

While Intersil is an established $500M company, we do have many significantly larger competitors that are all present in India. The way we win against these larger companies that often have more local resources is to focus on providing differentiation in performance and features that provides a real incentive for customers to change. It all boils down to the value proposition that OEMs gets from Intersil in terms of efficiency, performance, engineering BOM cost savings and reduced form factor.

There are very few companies in the industry with Intersil’s capabilities and focus on power management. With the constraints on the power subsystems continuing to increase, there is considerable demand for our know-how and differentiated solutions. Such challenges are welcome when you do something that others cannot offer.