Anglia Components is helping customers navigate the current frenzy in the analog market by offering a full package of signal chain components from a range of high quality, reliable, proven, and audited manufacturers from around the world.
Says Steve Rawlins, Anglia’s CEO: “Anglia has signed full franchise, stocking agreements with 10 suppliers, enabling us to address the vast majority of applications. Our aim is to deliver customers choice, so they are not left high and dry by the apparent duopoly which has dominated this market. Although such companies continue to play an important role, customers are increasingly looking to build greater resilience into new and existing designs. With our expanded analog semiconductor portfolio, Anglia offers engineers high quality, technically excellent, competitive alternatives that help reduce supply chain risk, whilst delivering the performance, support and long term availability required by today’s demanding applications.”
Speaking at a media briefing attended by Procurement Pro, John Bowman, Anglia’s Marketing Director, explained where the ‘frenzy’ comes from: “There’s a US duopoly in the analog world that is leaving customers with an incredibly restricted choice. When that’s combined with a very tightly restricted supply channel, that choice diminishes again – and we’re seeing a frenzy amongst customers, with prices increasing rapidly and lead times becoming so long they are barely worth considering with any degree of accuracy.”
In many cases, Anglia can offer parts that are pin-for-pin compatible with the established brands, and which deliver comparable capabilities. However, brand recognition does not always correlate with technical superiority. In many cases, devices from newer suppliers can outperform their better-known counterparts. The established brands’ mature legacy products are often maintained primarily as revenue-generating assets, attracting limited or no further development and investment. Newer entrants, on the other hand, typically build their designs from a clean-sheet design approach, leveraging modern architectures and advanced design techniques. As a result, their ICs may benefit from more advanced fabrication processes with finer geometries, leading to enhanced performance and efficiency.
“Price hikes of 30% and more per quarter are not sustainable, and, when coupled with the lack of product availability and support, even if designers don’t want to change their current designs, they need to have options for their next platforms” explains Rawlins.
Bowman believes the market is at a turning point: “People are going to be facing the situation they had in 2020 and 2021, where they absolutely have to consider redesign. Many of these devices are pin-for-pin compatible, which makes them almost a drop-in replacement – but they’re also around 30% cheaper than the US versions, and of course they’re readily available.”
Anglia now offers a full range of analog building blocks. ADC, DACs, amplifiers, timing and interface ICs, analog switches, references, and power management ICs are available from 3PEAK, Silanna, BeRex, Linear Systems, Nanopower, Novosense, Cimo Microelectronics, Zynalog, Raystar Microelectronics, and Quest Semiconductors. More lines are planned to follow to build out the portfolio for an even wider range of applications.
The portfolio is deliberately global: alongside Chinese suppliers the line-up includes companies from the US, Europe, and Australia. “We recognise that some customers may not be able to use Chinese silicon in their designs, so we’ve been very conscious not to look just at the geography of where the supplier is, but at what they provide within the circuit,” explained David Pearson, Anglia’s Technical Director.
Selection was rigorous. “For the 10 partners we’re showing, there were twice as many that didn’t meet what we were looking for,” said Bowman. “We spent a lot of time in China – in factories, in headquarters.”
Longevity was the deciding factor. “We don’t want to work with a supplier that might not be here in two years’ time,” said Pearson. “Some of the companies we saw had nice, really innovative products, but they’d been set up around one particular customer, so the range wasn’t very wide. We work in industrial, communications, security – we need products that are more mass market. So we’ve checked their long-term investment plans, which markets they’re following, and where they’re putting their footprint around the world.”
As Bowman put it: “The best way to build a robust and resilient supply chain is to design for resilience.”
“We’ve built an entire signal chain IC portfolio using the best products we can find from all over the world,” concludes Rawlins. “Our manufacturing partners are strong, and we are continually evaluating them and new sources, so we can give the customer choice.”
