Joerg Strughold,v-p of EMEA sales at Atmel tells Electronics Weekly industrial applications continue to be largest end market,followed by smartphones and tablets in the consumer market
Describe your company's business in two sentences.
Joerg Strughold:Atmel designs and manufactures microcontrollers,capacitive touch solutions,advanced logic,mixed-signal,nonvolatile memory and radio frequency(RF)components.Our products can be found in applications in a broad array of markets,including automotive,computing,consumer,industrial,medical,smart grid and wireless.
What is the biggest opportunity in terms of technology and/or markets?
Joerg Strughold:This year,we see industrial applications continuing to be our largest end market,followed by smartphones and tablets in the consumer market,which have been growing very rapidly,and then the general consumer market.Automotive is also a large growing market for us,especially in the European region.Atmel is currently working with a number of top-tier customers around the world in the automotive sector.
Products in industrial applications can range from our AVR and ARM processor-based microcontrollers to our microcontroller-based LED and wireless solutions.
Our touch solutions are also moving quickly into the automotive and industrial spaces.And with our recently launched XSense flexible sensor material for new form factors with touchscreens,we've opened a new era of industrial designs for touch applications.
What challenges in global markets are keeping you busy at the moment?
Joerg Strughold:As a global company,Atmel works with customers around the world along the entire supply chain,so there are always a number of factors keeping us busy.
In order to cater to our worldwide customers,Atmel has teams from sales and marketing to R&D and design around the globe.Having offices around the world allows us to support our customers at nearly all hours of the day,no matter their time zone.
Additionally,we are continually seeing design cycles shorten in the industry,requiring customers to bring their products designed with integrated MCU solutions to market faster than ever.
Finally,we are seeing customer applications require more of a system solution rather than just a specific product.For instance,with the advent of The Internet of Things and smart grid deployment,consumers are demanding more system and communication solutions to power these applications rather than just specific products from Atmel.
Other factors that require vendors,such as Atmel,to deliver more system solutions rather than just a point product include machine-to-machine(M2M)solutions,wired or wireless,and the requirements from the various standardization bodies to ensure devices are interoperable worldwide.
If you had to name one design technology with the largest commercial potential this year,what would it be?
Joerg Strughold:There are a number of potential opportunities that I would have to list with the largest commercial potential,especially with microcontroller designs.
These opportunities include designs in the growing touch market,along with a number of fast-growing markets such as the industrial,consumer and automotive markets,along with the sensor,wireless,lighting,battery and energy markets.All these markets have huge commercial potential and we are focusing on all of them with our microcontroller technologies and products.
