Voices: Altera's John Daane: programmable patriarch
by Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief, Electronic News -- EDN, January 19, 2006
John Daane is president and chief executive officer of FPGA-maker Altera. He is also a former design engineer who worked his way through the ranks at ASIC-maker LSI Logic before taking the helm at Altera. Daane's position and background perfectly suit him to discuss why programmability will gain ground in the consumer and automotive markets and what types of engineers are critical to the task. An excerpt of an interview with him follows. You can find the entire interview at www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/article/CA6291917. The complete interview covers Moore's Law, why Altera is hiring, and the global engineering climate.
When you're hiring engineers, what areas of expertise are you looking for?
As a company, Altera has been hiring more specialty designers.
Define "specialty."
Analog. When you do high-speed transceivers, you need analog engineers to design the transceivers and a different applications organization to do the verification for different standards. Once you have the transceiver, it can work for PCI Express; it can work for XAUI [10-Gbps attachment-unit interface]; it can work for lots of different standards. You need to characterize that device for different standards, so there's suddenly a whole host of equipment that you have to invest in that you didn't have before.
There are types of engineers for the analog design as well as the applications engineers that have the experience in these different submarket sets that can do the verification and characterization for you.
Analog engineers traditionally have been the gold standards of engineering because of the amount of experience needed to do the job. Where do you find them?
That's one of the reasons Altera is investing in engineers in the United States. You find engineers here in areas such as analog and high-density, high-performance-memory design, particularly in advanced geometries, and in a number of areas in which you need experience.
We find we are one of the few companies that is still aggressively hiring in North America. People want to work for a successful, high-growth enterprise. Programmable logic offers a great growth story. This company has been extremely profitable, and a lot of people are excited about the product road map that we're putting out in front of them. We've had no trouble attracting the talent we want.
One of the complaints- particularly among automotive suppliers-about programmable chips is that the number of defects is higher than in the ASIC world. Is that situation going to change?
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When you look at the core DNA of a company, Altera has always been operationally excellent. We focus on delivering high-quality products on time-much higher quality than any of our competition. We report in our financial statements warranty reserves, and you can see that Altera's warranty provisions are significantly lower than our competition's and our quality is a lot better. Those factors allowed us to extend first into the consumer market, because it has the same concerns about quality as automotive suppliers.
Isn't it a lot different if an MP3 player breaks down from if your car breaks down?
If you buy a TV and that TV has a failure, you have to take that TV back. You can't send it in the mail because it's too expensive. You have to physically drive it somewhere. So, that problem may turn you off to the brand. Maybe on smaller items that are lower cost and throwaway items, people can live with the fact that it doesn't work well. On a higher end item, which is where you see programmable logic ... they are concerned about quality. If we feel we can meet the demands of the consumer industry, we certainly can meet the demands of the automotive industry. The first thing the automotive companies do is to require a packet of information for your products going back many years. That packet includes failure information and quality-reliability information. That's the first thing you have to prove to them before they'll even engage with you-that you have the right quality metrics. You need the systems and procedures in place and the data that back it up.
Is it largely infotainment, or is it the basics of running the car?
There are some basics, but the opportunity in the next few years is on the infotainment side. Are we in some drive- and power-train applications? The answer is "yes." But the larger dollar opportunity for us is in infotainment.
That's the largest opportunity, anyway, isn't it?
It's the largest incremental opportunity. If you look at the automotive industry, the number of cars is not going up as a total number. But the electronics is going up, mostly on the infotainment side. If you're supplying microcontrollers that do power-train or engine control, it's a market-share game because the number of cars is basically saturated on a worldwide basis.
