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lead-times. We need world class
product quality and reliability to meet
increasingly demanding system
requirements. These “commodity
elements” are prerequisite to
meeting market demand. But in
all cases, the ultimate decisions
are based upon the communication
between engineers at the customer
and the supplier. The RF portion
of the analog world still requires
an intimacy between the design
engineer, and the supplier to achieve
the expected results and to optimize
system performance.
Through the course of industry
history, the suppliers that
successfully adapted and thrived
were those who were able to
transition to scale and improve upon
the level of quality and engineering
support that had led to their initial
success. They either adapted
through consolidation to serve the
biggest customers with focused and
intensive engineering support, or
they did what Mini-Circuits did and
proliferated broad-based application
support for many, diverse customers.
Those touch points may be
organized differently to best serve
the needs of particular customers or
customer groups, but the value we’re
creating was, is and remains, in its
essence, the same. It’s in the close
relationship between the supplier
and the customer to solve problems
and achieve mutual success. At
both the mega-volume level and the
mini-volume level, it’s the engineer-
to-engineer collaboration where
the real value lies. Companies that
have failed to preserve that value
have been lost to history, and those
that discount it now will leave a
void between themselves and their
customers.
solutions that aren’t supported by
these high-volume, application-
specific circuits and suppliers. The
challenge today is that there aren’t
many suppliers left who provide the
breadth of product and application
support that these smaller, more
specialized customers need.
At Mini-Circuits, we’re deeply
committed to serving this segment
of the market, and in spite of the
consolidation and the ostensible
shift toward commoditization,
we’ve found that the paradigm is
still very well rooted in a prevalent
and powerful need for applications
engineering, partnerships with the
customer at the technical level, and
direct involvement in the customer’s
design process. The value that the
little garage shops provided still
exists and is very much warranted.
We saw the need for this kind of
support years ago, and that’s what
pushed us to hire more applications
engineers. Even though our
applications engineering team has
more than quadrupled in the last
five years, we’re still finding more
demand for engineer-to-engineer
application support. That’s our
validation that the industry still
needs and values this kind of
technical partnership.
The need for dedicated technical
partnership is further validated
when you consider the inherent
challenges of replacing or second
sourcing a component in an existing
system architecture. Whether
you take a Mini-Circuits mixer or a
SkyWorks front-end chip, nothing is
perfectly fungible. Even though the
end products may be commoditized
in the consumer mass market, when
the iPhone 7 comes out, Apple
doesn’t say they can buy from either
supplier A or supplier B. They make
a commitment to one supplier, and
they organize their development
around that supplier’s solution.
In the RF world, you can’t simply
replace a part and expect it to work.
That’s the reality of the complex,
three-dimensional electromagnetic
world we live in. Take an example
as simple as a capacitor. Replacing
a Johansen capacitor with an AVX
capacitor in a 10 GHz matching
circuit and expecting no change
in performance would be naïve.
Whether we’re talking about the
simplest circuit element or the
most integrated chipset solution,
at 5 GHz or at 50 GHz, parasitics
and unexpected results are still
important factors in selecting the
right component. And because
of that, the value of technical
collaboration between supplier and
customer is undeniable.
Value: A Constant in a
Changing Industry
This leads me to reconsider the
prediction of a commodity market
and the marginalization of the
engineer-to-engineer relationship.
Even at the most competitive,
consumer-driven edge of our
market, that’s not what’s really
happening, and it’s simplistic to
expect that it ever will. Even though
the industry may have evolved into
two camps of suppliers, one serving
the high-volume consumer wireless
customers and the other dedicated
to the diverse array of smaller, more
specialized applications, is value
defined differently in these two
segments of the market?
Of course we need to remain
technically competitive and cost
competitive and offer competitive
32 l New-Tech Magazine Europe