Sailesh Chittipeddi - EEWeb

central engineering efforts and
took on the role of CTO for a period
of time, after which I became
the president and COO prior to
assuming my current role as CEO.
What are the main areas
of technology that your
company provides?
Our technology focus and new
investments are in two primary areas
– audio and video. One of the areas
of focus in the audio business is the
smart television market with voice
and speech recognition capabilities.
We bring our far-field voice input
processing knowledge into this
market space via our voice input
processor SoCs. One of the latest
televisions demonstrated by Korean
manufacturers uses our voice input
processor SoC, and it is currently
selling into the market today. In
terms of algorithm development,
far field voice input processing is
where we have a niche. We are in
the true far field arena, which means
if you are sitting in a room and are
watching television and you tell the
television to wake up, it basically
wakes up. We are currently
developing a new technology called
“Watch, Live and Talk.” Imagine you
have your television at full-blast and
are watching a baseball game when
you get a Skype conference call
from the other side. This technology
will allow you to take the call and
watch the game at the same time
without the person on the other side
hearing what you are watching.
The second area in which we are
involved in audio is the unified
communication headset market.
We are partnering with every major
headset manufacturer and have a
dominant presence in that market.
The third area is what we broadly
call integrated mobile audio,
which includes two specific facets:
PC audio and mobile audio. Our
analog and mixed signal design
together with our firmware enables
us to provide customers with a
differentiated audio and voiceinput
processing experience. It
is what distinguishes us from the
competition.
Video is a significantly smaller
business for us, but we expect it to
scale up significantly from current
levels over the next several years,
If you step back for
a moment and ask
how Conexant is
different from all of
the broad-based audio
suppliers, you’ll see
that we don’t compete
on an individual,
commoditized
component level
and take advantage of the move from
standard-definition to high-definition
technologies with our new product
launches. In video, the application
segments in which we are focused
include security and monitoring
and video surveillance. We also
have a legacy PC-TV business that
is being adapted for a broader
application base re-using existing
IP. The application processor used
for security and monitoring markets
can also be adapted for low-cost
tablets and is currently being used
by Datawind and other suppliers to
address emerging market needs.
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In addition to these two investment
areas, we still have a fairly mature fax
and embedded modem business,
where we continue our marketleading
positions. Unlike some of
our competitors, we are investing
in roadmap development to sustain
our leadership positions and make
sure our customers’ needs are met.
Unlike the PC-modem, which is
largely de-bundled, the continual
demand for secure point-to-point
communications keeps the demand
for these businesses relatively
healthy.
The final product line where we had
made substantial investments in the
past is the Imaging Systems Group,
which focuses primarily on SoCs for
multi-function and single-function
printers. This unit has successfully
deployed 11 generations of printer
SoCs. The combination of its
unique hardwired imaging pipeline
combined with superior firmware
development makes it a market
leader in the ASSP market for printer
SoCs.
Between your audio business
and video business, which
would you say is more
dominant in terms of direction
of resources you plan to hit?
Audio is a very resource intensive
area for us. We are selectively
investing in video, but not in the
conventional areas where we would
run into major SoC participants.
Rather, we are focused in areas
where we see more opportunities to
bring our competencies in design
and software/firmware to provide
differentiation. So when you look at it
in aggregate, audio R&D investment
is very heavy – we are invested in a
wider range of applications than
on the video side, but in the next
18- 24 months, we expect video to
contribute to a significant portion of
our growth.
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