New-Tech Europe Magazine | July 2017

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

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.

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

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