National Semi India; small and smart team of analog and power semiconductor experts

National Semiconductor focuses entirely on analog IC domain. Its device's role ends once the analog signal is cleaned, amped, digitized and brought to the i/o ports of microcontrollers and any applications specific digital processor chips. No CMOS gate count stuff. National semiconductor makes some of the best amplifiers, ADCs, DACs and compact power ICs. The reliability and performance is the focus. When it comes to price, be ready to shell out more dollars compared to other similar vendors.

Added to this, National now is focusing on solar and advanced power management technologies. They call those products as SolarMagic (ICs used to reap maximum power out of solar panels) and PowerWise (ICs to extend the battery life using smart monitoring of power usage).

National Semiconductor India team has roughly 60 engineers but this comparatively small but smart team has 25 patents to its credit. K. Krishna Murthy MD India Design Center National Semiconductor says, India team has bigger share in National's PowerWise technology. India team is also involved in development of SolarMagic based products.

National Semiconductor's revenue performance in year 2009 was below industry average. That doesn't looks to affect National's performance in 2010 and after. The main reason is it has invested heavily in future technologies. Based on the technology advancement company is making in some of the strategic areas of power electronics, it can be forecasted a high growth for this company in next 3-5 years.

National Semiconductor is recognizing growing importance of domestic market in India. It's focusing on emerging market such LED lamps, Solar and Industrial and high rel electronics. Some of its linear power ICs, amplifiers and converters are popular in India.

To cut the power consumption and external components on PCB, National has announced a new small form-factor power supply modules coded LMZ10504 and LMZ12003, which resembles like a IC. These devices need just 3 passive components and occupy a space of 14mm x 14 mm on the circuit board. These modules have built in inductor.

The LMZ10504 can drive output current of 4A with an input voltage range of 2.95V to 5.5V. To know more visit www.national.com/pf/LM/LMZ10504.html.

The LMZ12003 can drive output current of 3A with an input voltage range of 4.5V to 20V. To know more visit www.national.com/pf/LM/LMZ12003.html.

To quickly (in less than a day) design a power supply from scratch, National offers an online power supply design software tool called WEBENCH. Through WEBENCH, designers can access ready reference design by keying in I/O voltages, power rating and other key power supply parameters. But you are restricted to only National's ICs.

National has expanded WEBENCH with the new version called WEBENCH Power Architect. Using WEBENCH Power Architect, system designers can instantly optimize multiple power supplies across several performance parameters including topology, intermediate voltage rails, footprint, efficiency, component count and bill of materials (BOM) cost.

Just like their Indian team, National Semiconductor products outsmart in size and technical performance. In next few quarters we will know the market performance of National's technologies and devices, particularly in emerging markets where cost plays important role.