Completely happy on its own

Consumer business is also important

So rather no business in the consumer sector?
No, that’s not what it means. It means that we need to offer an advantage which is sustainable over several generations of products. We are also quite successful with this strategy in the consumer area.
We don’t do commodity products for the consumer market, but rather components which others can’t achieve. It’s therefore important to decide if Maxim can keep the advantage, which we were offering in the first place, as well as along several generations either on the process or design side. If we are leading here and have a good customer relationship, then nothing speaks against a project in the consumer market.
From my perspective, the consumer market also has one decisive advantage for Maxim itself: It drives the agility within our company. Consumer customers would like to have our product today rather than tomorrow. This has an effect on your own company culture—it makes you faster and gives you shorter decision paths, and you manage to meet even challenging time schedules.
So, in fact, it is definitely beneficial to be active also in the consumer market. Most important is that it doesn’t play too big of a role for the company, so it’s not about only one customer and only one sales segment.

Still the product launches last year mostly came from the side of industry, medical technology and automotive…
That’s correct, and we did it on purpose. The automotive market is very interesting as vehicles are being equipped with more and more electronics. We already acknowledged this development 10 to 15 years ago and decided accordingly to put more resources into this area.
In the past, the topic of efficiency wasn’t important for vehicles, but today it plays a major role. This development is excellent for us, because Maxim grew strongly in the 1990s as it developed ICs for battery-powered devices. This means that the technology in which the automotive industry wasn’t interested in at that time, but definitely is today, has been in-house for years.
That was our access to the automotive market, and in the meantime the share of sales from this market has risen from a few percent to about 20 percent. In fact, sales continue to grow. We expect the automotive market to deliver the greatest growth for us, and for many years to come.

What’s driving this development?
Power management is a big driver, as well as serial links for driver assistance systems. We are very strong in power management ICs for MCUs and processors, especially in infotainment systems where we have been most successful so far because of heavier current loads.
In addition, as already mentioned, there are the serial links for driver assist and infotainment, power supplies for LEDs, and ICs for battery management of electric vehicles. All in all, we are growing faster than the market.
In addition to the automotive industry, the industrial market with its factory automation is also an important sales market for Maxim. Our customers in this area are doing well, and we are doing well with them, because we provide them with the electronics. This includes products related to interface, factory communication, and digital inputs and outputs as well as power management ICs for space-constrained applications in which not much heat should be generated.
Factory automation is the second biggest growth driver for Maxim as many customers modernize their factories to make them more efficient.

From which market segment do you expect further growth boosts?
From data centers, as this area will explode thanks to AI and machine learning. There are companies which go through the roof thanks to their CPUs/GPUs, and we provide the power supply for these products. We have some 12V and, even more important, several 48V power products for this sales market. We deliver components which transfer data back and forth inside data centers between servers as well as to and from storage racks. This optical communications function is also a very good growth market for Maxim.

But 48 V will still take its time...
Yes, but we are patient. It’s the same as in the automotive market. Data centers have gone through an interesting development. In the past it was about companies investing in their own little data centers, and now a lot is being moved into the cloud. Those many little data centers have become so-called Mega Data Centers. The companies which are establishing these Mega Data Centers are more interested in highest efficiency as energy costs are the biggest costs besides capital investment. Therefore, the performance of power management becomes the crucial factor.

It wasn‘t for nothing that data centers were the first application area to use digital power. Maxim relatively early launched products based on InTune technology in the market. But after that, there wasn’t much happening. Why?
The InTune Technology made it possible to automatically stabilize the feedback loop, which made life much easier for our customers. We still sell these products today.
But from our perspective, digital power has lost some of its fascination. 15 years ago, everyone was talking about it, as it was substantially more flexible. But in the meantime, the majority has realized that the inner control loop can still be realized better with an analog controller. Consequently, we decided not to develop an IC with which a complete digital control loop is realized.

1. Completely happy on its own
2. Maxim offers MCUs, does this make sense?
3. Consumer business is also important