In 2007 Fairchild Semiconductor celebrates its 50th anniversary, formed in 1957 to develop and produce silicon diffused transistors and other semiconductor devices.

In 1958, Fairchild developed the planar transistor and with it a new industry. Last year also marked the 10th anniversary of the new Fairchild, now headquartered in South Portland, Maine, USA. From its beginnings in 1997 as the first multi-market semiconductor company producing logic, memory, and discrete technology, to becoming the leading supplier of analogue, power discrete, optoelectronic, and signal path components for system power.

After a series of acquisitions, it now has 9300 employees and wafer fabrication plants in Maine, Utah, Pennsylvania and South Korea, and assembly facilities in Malaysia, the Philippines, and China. Customers include Samsung, LG, Dell, HP, IBM, Arrow, Avnet, Nokia, Siemens, Solectron, Celestica, and Motorola.

Mark Thompson is President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Fairchild Semiconductor International. He originally joined Fairchild as Executive Vice President, Manufacturing and Technology Group.

He served as Vice President and General Manager of Tyco Electronics Power Components Division and, prior to its acquisition by Tyco, as Vice President of Raychem Electronics OEM Group. Prior to joining Fairchild, Mr Thompson served as CEO of Big Bear Networks, which designs and manufactures highly integrated, opto-electronic interface solutions for next generation networks. He has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the State University of New York, and a doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of North Carolina.

Nick Flaherty: There have been a lot of changes in the last few years since the Fairchild name was re-introduced. What is the current structure?

Mark Thompson: At 50 per cent of the business, power is the largest which, with MOSFETs. Multichip packaging and IGBTs that are vital for power regulation. Then there’s the analogue products group (APG) business which is where our biggest investment is. The biggest area is power conversion for ac/dc converters and regulation schemes plus the dc/dc integrated circuits. This also includes the interface business with interfaces for cellular and portable applications and the biggest portion of that is analogue switches where people want to switch data and video. These are differential signals so there are different dynamic requirements. MicroSERDES is the fastest growing part of that as serialising and deserialising signals is growing and allow data and video signals to be run around the handset.

The last quarter (of the business) is the standards products. These are our heritage products, logic, standard linear regulators and optocouplers. Fairchild has an unusually broad product line and a large set of customers so we have been paring our product portfolio and we have divested some of the smaller ones.

One big cluster is in cellular phones, and the power regulators, there’s a lot of business there, but not the central power management. Each element requires a discrete regulator IC and that’s a place where we have compelling offerings and that’s clustered with the analogue bus interfaces and microSERDES and these things are very complementary. That’s a place we are putting a lot of R&D dollars and becoming interesting to the top cellular phone makers around the world.

The other place where we are very focussed is on power supplies – generally comes from a combination of ac/dc and regulation and emerging standards that drive sleep modes and the efficiency of switching from sleep to active are significant requirements in OEM space and where we think we have unique insights in architecture, design and fabrication. Unlike the low power of the cellular designs, where everything is managed, we are typically switching and regulating large current. Here, efficient multichip packaging is also important, and I think that’s exciting.

NF: How is the industry going to change?

MT: The pace of change in the industry has accelerated if anything. People outside the industry see it as monolithic but its so large now, its perhaps half a dozen different industries. You have the big players, such as memory and CPU, which are really product driven juggernauts, and we don’t do that, but we enable these systems to work.

But there’s another interesting trend at work, as there are lots of opportunities in glue logic, such as digital power which is one of the emerging spaces in power where a lot of unleashed capabilities coming together such as high temperature memory, digital signal processing, MOSFET, microcontroller and interfaces so there are all these amalgamations around the periphery of those juggernaut industries. The trend is going to continue. People ask when will it collapse down to three players but there’s a good reason why it doesn’t. There are so many combinations of solutions that its impossible to provide them all. It’s also what makes it interesting.

NF: What are you doing to take advantage of these trends?

MT: What we are trying to do is figure out a handful of things that we can be as good as anyone in the world and focus on these. We have, I think, one of the most complete sets of power management, from processor technology to integrated circuits to architecture to multichip packages, and we look in a very wide way across power, linking 0.5Adc/dc regulators to high power converters.

NF: Other competitors are adding power to their products such as A to D converters. Is having power enough of a distinction?

MT: I think its highly unlikely that power gets integrated into other parts of the design as depending on the system you can break it up in many different ways. You can have a DAC-centric view of the world and put power around it, that’s a legitimate solution. When you are doing power you can’t just be focussed on power, you need to be good at other things. You have to take an engineering approach and look at all the aspects and come up with the right solution.

NF: How important is Europe to Fairchild?

MT: Europe is quite a diverse market. If you look at the companies with leadership positions, you have the most advanced auto industry in the world and world beating cellular companies. So companies like Bosch are very important. They make a very, very broad set of products from automotive to power tools. We have identified 10to20 global accounts in each region, companies such as Bosch and Nokia in Europe and these are the kinds of accounts that are very, very important for use as a global business but are managed from Europe.

NF: What’s the most interesting technology that you see in the industry today?

MT: If we had to pick one it would be multichip packaging solutions. There are many technologies that don’t integrate and that’s a place that’s extremely rich in the value of the solution. Things are often talked about long before they become commercially viable and it has taken sometime to make the solutions economical – its price, and it’s also that the current market is more friendly to it. If you are going to build some of the very efficient power supply solutions we can’t do it without multichip packaging so the capabilities that are being forced on a few high volume applications are what are finally creating a large enough market.

NF: How important are standards to Fairchild?

MT: I think we need to be more active in the standards community than we are. I think there should be – for almost any high volume electronic device – a set of efficiency standards. These get set by enlightened government, not the industry, and it typically starts at local level. Germany and Japan are the most active, and the US clearly needs to catch up, and that tends to start in California. It’s too hard to think about for the whole world.

All it really needs is a strong market to take a position and if they set a good standard that will along the global standard.

You have standards in datacoms and telecoms because of the need for interoperability, and you have interoperability at the product level. I think with standards you have to be careful what you ask for as I really do think the absence of any standard except in transmission protocols allows people to innovate and very, very quickly.