The company does Analog IC design, Test and Validation
But why do we still need a company to do so ?
Is analog obsolete ?
By looking at job trend for EE www.bls.gov we see
Overall employment of electrical and electronics engineers is projected to grow 2 percent from 2018 to 2028, slower than the average for all occupations. Employment growth is expected to be tempered by slow growth or decline in most manufacturing industries and in telecommunications.
These data refer to a mix of analog and digital engineers but, when compared to SW engineers we get a jump.
Employment of computer and information research scientists is projected to grow 16 percent from 2018 to 2028, much faster than the average for all occupations.
That confirms that both analog and digital design are getting out of fashion. Young people look at this picture and definitively are not attracted by the perspective of spending years to learning circuit design, device physics, math, control theory, material science and possibly not getting a good employment.
Because of this trend, large HW companies re-focus their attention to more fashionable targets, AI being one of the hot topics in the last few years. AI is mainly SW and digital. Interestingly most of the data those AI engines crunch are images, sound or voice generated by sensors, and all of them are analog in nature …
By 2028 who is going to take care of analog design ? There will be some changes, even today big companies that make money with SW and AI (GOOGLE, Facebook) are investing in HW more than other corporations that traditionally had done so in the past.
The other side of the equation is what happens to small companies that are still working on analog to produce new types of sensors. For instance gas sensors or X-RAY cameras or ultrasound . Many of them build special HW for special applications. They are in general too small to get the attention of large suppliers (ADI, TI). Their volumes are not attractive.
E-TD55 fills that vacuum. Our target is to serve small companies with custom odd products that still require custom circuit, ATE support and other related items to put their product into the market but cannot afford to have a full analog team in their organization.