Analog Devices, Inc. operates as a global semiconductor leader dedicated to solving customers' most complex engineering challenges. The company delivers innovations that connect technology to human breakthroughs and play a critical role at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds by providing the building blocks to sense, measure, interpret, connect and power. The company designs, manufactures, tests, and markets a broad portfolio of solutions, including integrated circuits (ICs), sof...
Analog Devices, Inc. operates as a global semiconductor leader dedicated to solving customers' most complex engineering challenges. The company delivers innovations that connect technology to human breakthroughs and play a critical role at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds by providing the building blocks to sense, measure, interpret, connect and power. The company designs, manufactures, tests, and markets a broad portfolio of solutions, including integrated circuits (ICs), software and subsystems that leverage high-performance analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing technologies.
The company's comprehensive product portfolio, deep domain expertise and advanced manufacturing capabilities extend across high-performance precision and high-speed mixed-signal, power management and processing technologies - including data converters, amplifiers, power management, radio frequency (RF) ICs, edge processors and other sensors.
The Intelligent Edge is characterized by ubiquitous sensing, hyper-scale and edge computing and pervasive connectivity. These technological trends are driving a continuous evolution of new generations of applications that are increasing the demand for Analog Devices' high-performance analog, mixed-signal, power and RF ICs. The company has positioned its business to capitalize on the secular growth opportunities across its markets and to deliver innovative solutions.
Strategy
Central to the company's strategy is its focus on challenges that its customers have across the most impactful application areas. The company's strategy is to deepening customer-centricity.
In addition to driving organic growth, the company's strategy involves expansion through the acquisition of businesses, assets or technologies, including the acquisition of Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. (Maxim) in 2021, which allow it to complement its existing product offerings, expand its market coverage, increase its engineering talent or enhance its technological capabilities.
Products
The company's ICs are designed to address a wide range of real-world signal processing applications. The company sells its ICs to customers worldwide, many of whom use products spanning its core technologies in a wide range of applications. The company's IC product portfolio includes both general-purpose products used by a broad range of customers and applications, as well as application-specific products designed for specific target markets. By using readily available, high-performance, general-purpose products in their systems, the company's customers can reduce the time they need to bring new products to market. The company's analog ICs monitor, condition, amplify or transform continuous analog signals associated with physical properties, such as temperature, pressure, weight, light, sound or motion, and play an important role in bridging real world phenomena to a variety of electronic systems. The company's analog ICs also provide voltage regulation and power control to electronic systems.
The company also works with customers to design application-specific solutions. The company begins with its existing core technologies, which leverage its analog and mixed signal, power management, RF and microwave, edge processors and other sensors, and devise solutions that more closely meet the needs of a specific customer or group of customers. In certain cases, because the company has already developed the core technology platform for its general-purpose products, it can create application-specific solutions quickly and efficiently.
The company's analog and mixed-signal IC technology have been the foundation of its business for over five decades, and it is one of the world's largest supplier of high-performance analog ICs. The company's analog signal processing ICs are primarily high-performance devices, offering higher dynamic range, greater bandwidth and other enhanced features. The company's product portfolio includes several thousand analog ICs, many of which can have several hundred end customers. The company's analog ICs typically have long product life cycles. The company's customers include original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and customers who build electronic subsystems for integration into larger systems.
The company's product offerings include more than 75,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) that can be aggregated into the following general categories:
Analog and Mixed Signal-The company is a leading supplier of data converter products. Data converters translate real-world analog signals into digital data and also translate digital data into analog signals. Data converters remain the company's largest and most diverse product family and an area where it is continuously innovating to enable its customers to redefine and differentiate their products. The company's converter products combine sampling rates and accuracy with the low noise, power, price and small package size required by industrial, automotive, consumer, and communications electronics.
Power Management and Reference-Power management and reference products, which include functions, such as power conversion, driver monitoring, sequencing and energy management, provide efficient solutions for power management and conversion applications in the automotive, communications, industrial and high-end consumer markets. The company's high-performance power ICs include powerful performance, integration and software design simulation tools to provide fast and accurate power supply designs.
Amplifiers/RF and Microwave-The company is also a leading supplier of high-performance amplifiers which are used to condition analog signals. High performance amplifiers emphasize the performance dimensions of speed and precision. Within this product portfolio the company provides precision, instrumentation, high speed, intermediate frequency/RF/microwave, broadband, and other amplifiers. The company's analog product line also includes a broad portfolio of high-performance RF and microwave ICs covering the entire RF signal chain. The company's high-performance RF and microwave ICs support the high-performance requirements of cellular infrastructure and a broad range of applications in its target markets, including instrumentation, aerospace and automotive.
Sensors and Actuators-The company's analog technology portfolio consists of sensor and actuator products, including products based on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology. MEMS technology enables the company to build extremely small sensors that incorporate an electromechanical structure and the supporting analog circuitry for conditioning signals obtained from the sensing element. The company's MEMS product portfolio includes accelerometers used to sense acceleration, gyroscopes used to sense rotation, inertial measurement units used to sense multiple degrees of freedom combining multiple sensing types along multiple axes, and broadband switches suitable for radio and instrument systems. The company offers other high-performance sensors, from temperature to magnetic fields, that are deployed in a variety of systems. In addition to sensor products, its other analog product category includes isolators that enable designers to implement isolation in designs without the cost, size, power, performance, and reliability constraints found with optocouplers.
Digital Signal Processing and System Products (DSPs)-DSPs are optimized for high-speed numeric calculations, which are essential for instantaneous, or real-time, processing of digital data generated, in most cases, from analog to digital signal conversion. The company's DSPs are designed to be fully programmable and to efficiently execute specialized software programs, or algorithms, associated with processing digitized real-time, real-world data. Programmable DSPs are designed to provide the flexibility to modify the device's function quickly and inexpensively using software. The company's general-purpose DSP IC customers typically write their own algorithms using software development tools provided by it and third-party suppliers. The company's DSPs are designed in families of products that share common architectures and therefore can execute the same software across a range of products.
Sales Channel
The company sells its products globally through a direct sales force, third-party distributors, independent sales representatives and via its website. The company has direct sales offices, sales representatives and/or distributors in over 50 countries. The company supports its worldwide sales efforts through its website and with extensive promotional programs that include editorial coverage and paid advertising in online and printed trade publications, webinars, social media and communities, promotional and training videos, direct mail programs, technical seminars and participation in trade shows. The company publishes, shares and distributes technical content, such as data sheets, application guides and catalogs. The company maintains a staff of field application engineers who aid customers in incorporating its products into their products. In addition, the company offers a variety of web-based tools that ease product selection and aid in the design process for its customers. These distributors typically maintain an inventory of the company's products. Some of them also sell products that compete with the company's products, including those for which it is an alternate source. The company makes sales to distributors under agreements that allow certain distributors to receive price adjustment credits and to return qualifying products for credit, as determined by it, in order to reduce the amounts of slow-moving, discontinued or obsolete product from their inventory. These agreements limit such returns to a certain percentage of the company's shipments to that distributor during the prior quarter. In other instances, the company manufactures product based on forecasts of customer demand.
Markets
The following describes some of the characteristics of, and customer products within, the company's major end markets of Industrial, Automotive, Communications and Consumer:
Industrial - The company's industrial market includes the following sectors:
Industrial Automation - The company is a leader in industrial automation because it delivers robust, high performance solutions from its deep motion and process control expertise and precision sensing measurement and interpretation to expansive connectivity and power capabilities. The company takes real-world phenomena in the most complex environments on the factory floor and translate it into valuable insights and outcomes. The company co-creates with customers to architect robotics systems and solutions that improve dynamic behavior and precision while enhancing worker safety, machine health, and manufacturing flexibility. The company's industrial automation market includes applications such as condition-based monitoring (CbM), industrial power supplies, industrial robotics, industrial motion control, and factory and process control.
Instrumentation and Measurement - The company enables high performance measurement through its components and system solutions. The company's RF, high-speed and power management products are designed to enable solutions for complying with evolving communications standards. The company's high-voltage, isolation and precision products are a key part of the systems that are designed for safety, longevity and efficiency in electric vehicles and renewable energy. Beyond electrical testing, the company's precision and power technology enable analytical instruments for drug or vaccine research and development (R&D) and manufacturing, food safety and quality and environmental monitoring. The company's instrumentation and measurement market include applications, such as automated test equipment, automotive and energy test, electronic test and measurement, life sciences and drug discovery, and environmental and process analysis.
Aerospace/Defense - Many of the company's ICs can be supplied in versions that meet these standards. In addition, many products can be supplied to meet the standards required for broadcast satellites and other commercial space applications. Most of the company's products sold in this market are specially tested versions of products derived from its standard product offering. As end systems are becoming more complex, many of the company's customers in this market also look for it to provide higher levels of integration in order to minimize size, weight and power and to improve ease-of-use. As such, the company also sells products in the form of SiPs (system in package), printed circuit board assemblies, modules, and subsystems. Customer products include applications, such as navigation systems, radar systems, space and satellite communications, security devices, communication systems, and electronic surveillance and countermeasures.
Healthcare -The company is collaborating with customers and partners on innovative solutions that are designed to achieve better outcomes for patients and physicians. The company's offerings include both standard and application-specific products and are used in applications, such as ultrasound systems, anesthesia equipment, X-Ray equipment (CT and DR), lab diagnostic equipment, image guided therapy, surgical tools and instruments, multi-parameter vital signs monitors, blood analyzers, remote patient monitoring, and point-of-care diagnostics.
Energy Management - The global drive towards improved energy efficiency, conservation, reliability and cleanliness is driving investments in electrification across many different application areas, including electric vehicle charging infrastructure, renewable energy, power transmission and distribution systems, electric meters and other innovative areas. The common characteristic behind these efforts is the addition of sensing, measurement and communication technologies to electrical infrastructure. The company's offerings include both standard and application-specific products and are used in applications such as utility meters, wind turbines, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, solar inverters, substation relays and automation equipment, and building energy automation/control.
Automotive - The company develops differentiated high-performance signal processing solutions, which enable sophisticated transportation systems that span infotainment, electrification and autonomous applications. Through collaboration with manufacturers worldwide, the company has developed a broad portfolio of analog, digital, power and sensor ICs that address the emerging needs of this evolving industry. The company's focus is on audio/video applications that lead to an enriched in-cabin experience, electrification applications that improve vehicle range and reduce emissions, and mission-critical perception and navigation applications that enable vehicles to more clearly sense the external environment. Specifically, the company has developed products used in applications, such as: car audio, voice processing and connectivity, battery monitoring and management systems, and video processing and connectivity.
Communications - The development of broadband, wireless and internet infrastructures around the world has created an important market for the company's communications products. Communications technology involves the processing of signals that are converted from analog to digital and digital to analog form during the process of transmitting and receiving data. The need for higher speed and reduced power consumption, coupled with more reliable, bandwidth-efficient communications, creates demand for the company's products, which are used in the full spectrum of signal processing for data, video, voice and machine-to-machine communications. In wireless and wireline communication applications, its products are incorporated into cellular base station equipment, satellite and terrestrial broadband access equipment, microwave backhaul systems, optical and cable networking equipment for data center and carrier providers, and data centers and data storage.
Consumer - To address the market demand for state of the art personal and professional entertainment systems and the consumer demand for high quality user interfaces, music, movies and photographs, the company has developed analog, digital and mixed-signal and power solutions that meet the rigorous cost and time-to-market requirements of the consumer electronics market. The emergence of high-performance, feature-rich consumer products has created a market for its high-performance ICs with a high level of specific functionality that enables best in class user experience and battery management. These products include portable devices (smart phones, tablets, and wearable devices) for media and vital signs monitoring applications, and prosumer audio/video equipment.
Seasonality
The company's sales are subject to a varying degree of seasonality. The company defines backlog to mean firm orders from a customer or distributor with a requested delivery date within thirteen weeks.
Production Resources
The company utilizes, develops, and employs a wide variety of manufacturing processes, primarily based on bipolar and complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors, which are specifically tailored for use in fabricating high-performance analog, DSP and mixed-signal ICs. Devices, such as MEMS, iCoupler isolators and various sensors are fabricated using specialized processes, which typically use substantially similar equipment as bipolar and CMOS processes.
The company's IC products are fabricated on proprietary processes at its internal production facilities in Wilmington, Massachusetts; Camas, Washington; Beaverton, Oregon; and Limerick, Ireland and also on a mix of proprietary and non-proprietary processes at third-party wafer fabricators. The company sources more than half of its wafer requirements annually from third-party wafer fabrication foundries, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and others, and the remainder is sourced internally. The company also makes extensive use of third-party subcontractors for the assembly and testing of its products.
Patents and Intellectual Property Rights
As of October 28, 2023, the company held approximately 4,842 U.S. patents and approximately 416 published pending U.S. patent applications.
Environment, Health and Safety Compliance
The company's enterprise security program has been developed based on industry standards, including those published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The company's EHS management systems in all of its manufacturing facilities are certified to ISO 14001:2015 for environmental management and ISO 45001:2018 for occupation health and safety.
History
Analog Devices, Inc. was founded in 1965. The company was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1965.
