austriamicrosystems has established itself as a leader in the supply of high-performance analog ICs. About two years back, it concentrated on producing industry-leading, customized and standard analog products. These include Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs) and Standard Linear components.
Around that time, the company was seen in the news for tying up with Bharti Teletech with an aim to tap India’s rapidly growing wireline services market brought the company in the news.
Lastly, in January 2005, austriamicrosystems and Nu Horizons Electronics Asia Pte. Ltd., a leading distributor of high technology active components, announced a partnership agreement to distribute austriamicrosystems’ ASSP and Standard Linear IC products throughout APAC (Australia, China, India, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand). Further, it was announced that all demand creation, engineering support and product distribution would be managed locally through Nu Horizons’ offices.
“To cater to this one of the most emerging markets of APAC called India, austriamicrosystems has appointed Anupam Sharma as Sales Manager for India,” informed Gary Lee, Regional Sales Manager at austriamicrosystems for South Asia. He further added, “Now, we have a direct representative of austriamicrosystems in India besides Nu Horizons.”
austriamicrosystems leverages its significant expertise in low power consumption and high accuracy to provide highly integrated best-in-class products for communications, industrial, medical technology and automotive markets worldwide. We bring our world-class capabilities to exciting products for power management, MP3 players, touch screens, MEMS microphones, diabetic blood glucose measurement, automotive safety systems such as ESP, solid state electricity meters, sensor interfaces and many other applications. Many of our customers are well-known brands and they rely on austriamicrosystems as their sole source supplier of choice.
The strategic cooperation formed in 2001 with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest foundry, assures access to state-of-the-art processes for both partners. Leading edge products. austriamicrosystems’ ICs are used worldwide in virtually every aspect of life: mobile handsets, fixed line telephones, MP3 players, a variety of other handheld devices, insulin pens, blood glucose meters, cardiac pacemakers, diagnostic imaging equipment, car key immobilizers, keyless go systems, in-car safety systems, rain sensors, and electronic electricity, to name but a few of our products which help you every day.
When asked to elaborate on India operations, Anupam Sharma added, “For our automotive product range, we are targeting the OEMs rather than the automobile manufacturers. We are already on the talk paths.” Some of the big players are targeted by us directly and the rest are addressed by our distributor called Nu Horizons.”
The latest offerings from the house of austriamicrosystems are AS8218 and AS8228 ICs. They offer an integrated system-on-chip solution for LCD-based, single-phase meter applications and are specifically tailored to fulfil Indian utility anti-tamper requirements. Meter implementations based on AS8218 or AS8228 require a minimum of external components, inherently improving meter reliability, reducing meter cost and ensuring the meter manufacturer a fast time-to-market.
The AS8218 and AS8228 ICs incorporate all the required functional blocks for single-phase metering, including a precision energy measurement front-end, an 8-bit microcontroller, real-time clock, LCD driver and programmable multi-purpose inputs/outputs. These ICs drive an LCD of up to 96-segments and up to 12 programmable inputs/outputs for a host of interface or display requirements.
“The anti-tamper features are provided by the precision, two-current input analog front-end and the user configurable digital signal processor (DSP),” states Dave Simpson, Marketing Manager for Metering Products at austriamicrosystems. “The DSP ensures all meter anti-tamper conditions are accommodated. The device calculates active energy, MAINS voltage and MAINS current. Reactive power and apparent power can be calculated by user configurable application software.” Adding to this, Anupam said that both of these devices carry a solution to the emerging meter tampering issues of India.”
In the end…
Today, austriamicrosystems employs over 850 people in Europe, America and Asia. “Our large pool of design engineers and PhDs is 
focussed on keeping us at the forefront of analog and mixed-signal product design and process development,” informed Gary Lee. The company has been dedicated to meeting the highest quality standards since its foundation in 1981. In the past ten years, they have received quality certifications ISO 9001:2000, QS 9000, VDA 6.1 and Q1 certification from Ford Motor Company as well as ISO/TS 16949:2002, the newest international quality management standard. These certifications make them one of the few semiconductor manufacturers worldwide to be fully automotive qualified. With dynamic product portfolio and now a direct representation in India, austriamicrosystems is trying to tell the people how serious they are about the Indian market. But how successful they are going to be, only time will tell.
