Welcome to the ADI Integration Digest
Welcome to the ADI Integration Digest! We are launching this monthly digest to keep you informed about integration developments and the progress we’re making toward creating the new ADI. These updates are intended to let you know what’s happening, what we’ve accomplished, and what’s next.
Leader Update
It's been about a month and a half since we officially combined ADI and LTC and while "Day 1' was momentous, it was really just the beginning of the combination of our two companies. Day 1 marked the move from planning for our integration to the hard work of executing that plan. I’m pleased to say that the progress we are making already is encouraging. That's not to say there haven't been (and will continue to be) hiccups, but by and large, the enthusiasm with which both companies are approaching this integration gives me increasing confidence in our ultimate success.
We've been holding roundtables to bring our two employee populations together by functional area and unsurprisingly, getting to know each other professionally and personally is paving the way for the new culture of our combined company. One of the biggest joint gatherings to date was our General Technical Conference (GTC) that close to 200 legacy LTC employees attended. The GTC is an annual event at ADI that brings together our engineering community to learn about and discuss the latest engineering advances as well as market and business developments that influence how we continue to evolve. This year's GTC was a huge success as the numbers below indicate and while we were there, we spoke with a few of the legacy LTC attendees to capture their perspective on GTC and how they are beginning to envision their roles at ADI. You can see the resulting video below:
As we continue to move forward with our integration, I'd like to reiterate the four guiding principles I described during my GTC keynote:
- Create a cohesive identity of who we are as a combined company, why we exist, and what we stand for to extend our success into the future – both of our companies have long histories and strong identities and figuring out how to share and embrace them to create a shared identity will be crucial to securing the 1+1>2 value of this combination that we envision. We need to get beyond us and them; unless of course, the "us" is ADI and the "them" is TI.
- Make smart, frugal investments with the long-term in mind – the most successful companies are those that do not shy away from making smart investments in their future, but do so frugally. There are many things we can do. We need to invest in the things we must do. And before we make new investments, we need to first look at our existing pool of resources. Our new company has a bigger toolkit than either company had previously so part of our "investment strategy" needs to be focused on recombinant innovation and tapping our existing resources in new ways to solve new problems more effectively and efficiently than we ever could before.
- Remain aware of and adaptive to our market environment – our world continues to change and if we make the mistake of thinking our operations and success to date will guarantee our success in the future, we will walk the path to obsolescence. We need to continue taking cues and inspiration from the world around us and work to create innovations that reflect the world's and our customers' evolving needs.
I know there are still many questions about organizational structure, final compensation/benefits alignment, etc. We are working diligently with leaders from both organizations to discuss and make those decisions and remain committed to communicating those decisions as soon as we can. I believe we will be through the next levels of organizational structure decisions and able to communicate them later this quarter. We still don't have all the answers about our future state but we're making important progress as our integration teams work hard to determine and plan the end states for HR processes, facilities, engineering processes, etc.
In the meantime, I urge you to remain focused on our current priorities even as we plan for our future. Our customers and shareholders are counting on us to continue delivering for them. Thanks for all of your great work to date and I very much look forward to what we will accomplish together in the future.
We recently wrapped up ADI’s 38th annual General Technical Conference. GTC 2017 boasted 2,310 attendees – our largest yet – and served as our first large-scale event since integration. Topics at the conference included driving into the broad challenges to respond to the explosion in development cost and complexity, developing domain-specific applications expertise, supporting advanced system level integration and celebrating the new generation of engineering talent which will lead ADI into the future.
GTC 2017 was organized to create connectedness among engineering disciplines -- focusing on core technologies, as well as diverse topics such as sensors, software, the IoT cloud, ultra-low power, security, and manufacturing technologies “moving up the stack.” The Conference also allowed the integrated company’s engineers to network and learn about new and emerging projects. Below are some additional highlights.
- The Global Early Employee Challenge (GEEC) winners were announced and the police body camera solution envisioned by the "Machine Wealth" team was the overall winner. In announcing the winner, President and CEO Vince Roche revealed that the "Machine Wealth" team's project is being put into the Analog Garage and funded for development and that he and his leadership team will be evaluating the remaining 54 GEEC teams' projects for potential funding.
- Dave Robertson was announced as the newest ADI Engineering Fellow
- Six teams won Ahead of What’s Possible (AWP) awards
- Nokia Air Scale
- E-band
- SiriusXM
- AD81006
- Sphinx
- 28nm
- Once again, GTC featured the AWP conference track, covering diverse topics such as systems engineering, security, sensor fusion, and more – including a special session entitled “The Land of Giants” with ADI Fellows Barrie Gilbert and Paul Brokaw, and LTC co-founder and ADI Special Advisor Bob Dobkin.
We’ve heard “best of both” and “1 + 1 > 2” many times. Please give us specific examples in which best practices and processes from each legacy company are being adopted.
We’re committed to learning from each other to the betterment of our entire combined organization. That not only goes for the Power division, but across all of ADI. Both legacy organizations bring multiple best practices to this union – that’s why we’ve both been so successful. Through our integration work, we’re actively looking to identify and adopt the best practices of both companies. For example, we’re specifically looking to capitalize on the speed of legacy LTC decision-making and the collaboration benefits of legacy ADI.About Question of the Month:
We want to hear from you, address questions foremost on your mind and share how we’re moving together as one company. Each month, we’ll answer a frequently asked question. We also encourage you to review our current FAQ located on the Integration Microsite. If you have an integration question you’d like answered, please send it to employee.questions@analog.com.
1+1>2
We’ve all seen this tagline on communications about the combination of Analog Devices and Linear Technology.
But together, we are already proving that this is much more than a tagline. It’s reality.
More Powerful Together
Cisco has long been a high-volume customer of LTC’s power and power system management products, which deliver market-leading performance. For example, the LTC2497, a 16-bit, 16-channel Sigma Delta analog to digital converter (ADC) has near perfect 16-bit performance, excellent noise rejection, and is ideal for general purpose monitoring of noisy power supplies, current sense resistors, sensors, and other slowly changing voltages. Another go-to part for Cisco is the LTC4306, a 4-way I2C bus multiplexer with capacitance buffering that expands the available I2C address space, provides alert demultiplexing, improves signal integrity on large, high-capacitance busses, and provides isolation should a stuck-bus state occur on one or more of the downstream busses.
Cisco had utilized both parts for years under the control of various processors running bare-metal application code and in combination with auxiliary “helper parts” that improve reliability, provide diagnostic information, increase end user manageability, and solve various annoying problems in their designs. However, in line with the ongoing trend of customers demanding more engineering support from suppliers in order to mitigate risk and shorten time to market, Cisco recently made the delivery of Linux driver support a requirement for LTC to retain this business.
The software development team at LTC had never before delivered a Linux device driver and the design ins at Cisco were in jeopardy.
But then ADI’s System Development Group and the legacy LTC team joined forces to save the business at Cisco.
The LTC applications engineer constructed two sets of test hardware consisting of LTC2497 and LTC4306 evaluation boards, Raspberry Pi computers (running Linux), and shipped one off to ADI’s team in Munich. Using a standard platform (Raspberry Pi) allowed for smooth communication and rapid, parallel testing and debug of the driver code. Delivering, testing and replicating on a standard platform reduced custom hardware development and software development times. The two drivers were developed and delivered to Cisco successfully.
During the evaluation process, a number of questions came up that “broke the ice” for joint field support. LTC’s FAEs coordinated support through ADI’s local FAEs, and all of the customer’s concerns were quickly addressed.
In short, the ADI and legacy LTC teams worked together effectively to ensure that Cisco received the necessary support and would continue to utilize the LTC2497 and LTC4306 – a success story that preserved the revenue stream and demonstrated that we really are more powerful together.
For more information about the System Development Group or reducing risk in the customer designs, please email Dave Babicz, Michael Hennerich or Mark Thoren.