David Baillie is chief executive officer of CamSemi (Cambridge Semiconductor), a UK fabless-semiconductor company, which, in 2007, launched its first products in the offline-power-conversion market. The company’s RDFC (resonant-discontinuous-forward-converter) controllers target the linear-replacement-system market. Baillie was the second employee of LSI Logic in Europe and the first for C-Cube Microsystems. During his career, he has held a variety of technical, international-marketing, and sales-management positions in both the United Kingdom and Silicon Valley. Baillie is also a founding member of the European Leadership Council of the GSA (Global Semiconductor Alliance). He holds a bachelor’s degree in applied physics and a master’s in microelectronics and business studies, both from Durham University (Durham, England).

What role did Cambridge University play in giving you a start? Do you still cooperate with the university?

Cambridge University was instrumental in helping our founders, Gehan Amaratunga and Florin Udrea, PhD, launch the company with a core team of postgraduates working with them in the high-voltage-device space. The university also provided early-stage funding through its Cambridge Enterprise Seed Funds, supported the spin-off, and then joined as an investor in our A-round funding in December 2002.

Amaratunga is chief technology officer and head of the EPEC (electronics/power/energy-conversion) research group within the university, so there are still close ties between the two organizations on a number of technology developments. Udrea continues to work part-time for the company, focusing on the high-voltage-device arena.

Being in a university city means that the company can access a rich source of very skilled, talented designers who are attracted here and eager to make their career and name within the electronics industry.

When the founders first launched the company, you proposed making FETs that had the gates etched from the back to make them fast and low-loss. Then, you put the low-C gates on the back burner and came up with an innovative architecture for low-cost, efficient power supplies. What were the difficulties you encountered in the FET program? Was working with external or foreign fabs a factor in the difficulty of getting the project finished?

As a fabless company, CamSemi is and will almost always be working with external suppliers. That [situation] gives us real freedom in partnering with companies that are centers of excellence in their technologies, but it also means that technology transfer and maintaining good supplier communications are critical for business success.

The decision to delay introducing integrated-controller and high-performance-switching products has nothing to do with the challenges of working with overseas suppliers. During the manufacturing-development phase for these products, we uncovered batch-to-batch variation that impacted the overall process yield. As a result, we decided to invest further time and resource in the manufacturing-development phase and to accelerate our stand-alone-controller program. This change in strategy was in response to increasing market demands for better, more-cost-effective solutions and to get CamSemi into revenue as quickly as possible, which is critical for any early-stage company.

By switching from a process-based innovation to an application-based innovation, it would seem you made the success of the company more dependent on customer interaction. How did you accomplish that over international boundaries?

We have always maintained strong contacts with major players in our markets throughout all of our product-development programs. Most of the world’s power-supply design and manufacturing is in the Far East. So, our management team and many of CamSemi’s engineers have spent a considerable amount of time with customers in Taiwan, China, Japan, and other countries to better understand and match our products to their needs. We are continuing to ramp up our operations, technical support, and sales teams within the region. As part of this [strategy], we have now established application-design centers in Taipei, Taiwan, and Shenzhen, China. Elsewhere, we have appointed Brian Thomas, who is based in Portland, OR, to lead our drive into the US market and are working with leading distributors to address other major markets.

Do you fear the lack of IP (intellectual-property) laws in developing countries will hamper your success there?

The issue is often less one of lack of IP law and more to do with how the law is applied. We take great care to patent our key innovations and do so in the geographies we consider to be most key. We are also careful about where we develop core capabilities to minimize the risk of know-how leaking out of the business.

Among Asia, the United States, and the European Union, where do you see the greatest opportunity for your products?

The easy answer is Asia and predominantly Greater China because that is really the heart of the world’s power-supply industry. However, for many of the world’s leading electronics brands, the design decisions are often made in their home territory, so Japan, Europe, and the United States are important regions for us.

You have come up with a clever architecture for low-cost power. Is it difficult to keep engineers from going overboard?

I guess it is a trade-off, but we have always worked very closely with our customer base so are well-grounded in developing products that address a real need at an acceptable cost.

Manufacturers face considerable cost pressures. It used to be that the only option for linear replacement was an SMPS [switched-mode-power-supply] flyback [converter], but we have changed that [assumption] with our unique RDFC approach. Now, manufacturers can have a low-cost path to SMPS performance and without having to worry as much about the challenges of EMI [electromagnetic interference] or FCC [Federal Communications Commission] Part 68 compliance.

Do you think it would have been possible 20 years ago to launch a global endeavor such as CamSemi 20? Has the Internet and e-mail leveraged the ability of a start-up company to span the globe?

The Internet and e-mail have certainly made it easier to do business and to develop customer, supplier, and other commercial partnerships across the world. I think direct, face-to-face contact has such a major role in building relationships that it can never be wholly replaced by the Internet. Web conferencing is not nearly as effective as working directly with customers and their engineering teams in their own development laboratories. Companies did establish a global presence before the Internet!

In the areas of process refinement, IC design, applications, and sales, which area seemed to require the most innovation?

For us, the greatest challenge is knowing what the market will want in 18 to 24 months’ time. This [knowledge] is fundamental and can come only from in-depth understanding of the end-market dynamics and close customer relationships. And, to help us with this [need], we have worked with customer partners who actively participated in specifying our first two major platform products.

Do you find English to be the working language for technical people all over the world?

No. For us, we have more end-customer engineers working in Mandarin and Cantonese than in any other languages. However, it is fair to say that English is the second language that is commonly used when needed.

Now that the company is getting established, where do you see the next requirements for global innovation?

The next big wave in the offline-power-conversion space will be in lighting. Incandescent lamps are only 5% efficient and will be phased out over the next five to 10 years.

With the success of your power-supply design that can use lower-cost transistors instead of FETs, do you plan on revisiting the project of back-etching wafers that you started out with?

The work on our PowerBrane technology is continuing, but we took the commercial decision to accelerate the development of stand-alone controllers and to bring those to market first. It is still our intention to launch integrated products.