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Technology Stocks : ADI: The SHARCs are circling! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Oravetz who wrote (2852)	5/10/2005 7:16:22 AM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2882

ADI Broadens Product Portfolio By Jessica Davis -- 5/9/2005 Electronic News With an eye towards providing a greater number of parts that are better geared towards particular applications, Analog Devices Inc. this week is introducing two new ones. The two analog to digital converters are sampling now, ADI said, and are state of the art and geared for high-end applications such as test, medical and communications. It’s part of a strategy that the company has evolved over the last several years to offer a greater quantity of different parts to accommodate a more fragmented need as analog to digital converters go into many more applications than in the past. “Our portfolio has widened over the last year or two,” said Dick Meaney, VP of the precision converter group at ADI. “We don’t do that casually because it increases support cost for us and costs for engineers. But we are releasing over 150 converter parts to market each year.” His ballpark guess is that amounts to about twice of what was released 5 years ago. ADI made these changes to adapt to a changing marketplace. “For many years the measures of converters were resolution and speed,” Meaney said. “But now the market has become so fragmented.” Analog to digital converters are used in a much wider range of products than it has been in the past. With that in mind, ADI has increased its definition of performance to include cost and selection and other qualities as well. “Because of the fragmentation of the market, there are a lot of specialized needs,” Meaney said. “The ability to provide converters that are best fit to each customer’s need takes a broad level of application knowledge and commitment over the long term.” And that commitment and evolution is behind the introduction of the two analog to digital converters the company is unveiling this week. The maker of high-performance analog chips is introducing the industry’s first 16-bit analog-to-digital converter to deliver 100 mega-samples-per-second (MSPS) data rates while offering both best-in-class signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR). The AD9446 is 25 times faster than state of the art, said Ahmed Ali, senior design engineer for ADI’s high-speed converter group. “This kind of performance enables new levels of applications that were not possible before,” he said, such as instrumentation applications, cell phone base stations and in the medical field, MRI applications. A second device, the AD9445, is the first 14-bit, 125-MSPS (mega-samples-per-second) analog to digital converter to achieve a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) above 80 dBc and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 72.5 dBfs at input frequencies up to 300 MHz, better than competing solutions by a full 10 dB and 4 dB, respectively. Geared more towards communications applications, such a device can capture weak signals in the frequency band of interest, despite the presence of strong, interfering signals. The device can enable wireless infrastructure equipment designers to improve cellular base station receivers by offering lower overall system noise at higher intermediate frequencies, which translates to expanded cellular coverage and fewer dropped calls.