Through a combination of strategic acquisitions and organic product development, ON Semiconductor has become a global, broad-based supplier of energy-efficient electronics innovations.
The company has successfully completed 13 corporate acquisitions and now generates annual revenue of more than $5 billion, transforming itself from a standard products supplier to a leading provider of differentiated power, analog, sensor and wireless connectivity solutions.
ON Semiconductor operates a responsive, reliable, world-class supply chain and quality program, a robust compliance and ethics program, and a network of manufacturing facilities, sales offices and design centers in key markets throughout North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
It works closely and collaboratively with its customers to solve their unique design challenges using innovative technologies, robust designs, and energy-efficient products and solutions.
Staying Agile in a Fluid Market
By leveraging it scale, engineering expertise and technology delivering, ON Semiconductor has established themselves as a top-tier provider of enabling technologies in a number of strategic end markets. The organization’s strategic focus is on fast-moving, high-growth sectors, putting the company in a strong position in terms of growth and market penetration.
Additionally, in-depth industry knowledge has allowed it to stay ahead of market shifts. Continuous alignment of R&D investments to customer needs has made ON Semiconductor the key solutions enabler in the industry. The company’s broad product portfolio comprehensively addresses those needs while delivering innovation and leadership at the component level.
ON Semiconductor focuses on remaining agile to meet business and market needs in this ever-evolving industry. Through its targeted investments in high-growth segments and in highly-differentiated products in automotive, industrial internet of things (IoT) and power conversion and motor control solutions, it has radically transformed the nature of its business.
The IoT specifically is the aggregation of major advances in wireless connectivity and sensing, supported by processing, control and power management. ON Semiconductor comprehensively addresses all of these requirements for IoT devices.
With the acquisition of Aptina Imaging and Trusense Imaging in 2014, ON Semiconductor has vastly expanded its image-sensor business and established the company as a leader in the fast growing segments of automotive and industrial vision. This imaging expertise combined with ON Semiconductor’s R&D, manufacturing and global logistics infrastructure addresses a wide range of end markets including Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), machine vision, surveillance, traffic monitoring, medical and scientific imaging.
In 2016, ON Semiconductor acquired Fairchild Semiconductor. This made ON Semiconductor a global power management leader and expanded its reach into the high and medium voltage power markets. It is now uniquely positioned to support customers across multiple sectors in creating a range of power solutions spanning smartphones to renewable energy systems that meet ever increasing energy efficiency mandates.
Recently established advanced sensor design centers have uniquely positioned the company to provide sensor fusion solutions for next generation industrial, machine and automotive vision. With a diverse product portfolio of market-leading products, a highly competitive global manufacturing footprint and resilient customer relationships, ON Semiconductor is well-positioned to lead in its focus markets.
Based on market leadership in verticals such ADAS, machine vision and surveillance we are uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of vision IoT spanning video door bells through smart agriculture to advanced medical procedures.
Addressing the Need of the Hour: IoT
The IoT is the culmination of progress that has been made in a number of different interrelated technology disciplines. Through major advances in wireless connectivity and sensing, as well as support from processing, control and power management devices, the stage is now set for the IoT to start seeing widespread deployment in both consumer and industrial spheres. Historically customers have procured elements of their system solutions from a variety of suppliers, and this has posed a challenge in prototyping, trials and systems deployment. By providing innovative solutions such as node–to-cloud platform solutions, ON Semiconductor addresses this critical drawback, and allows customers to focus on value-added applications and services.
The organization is working with its ecosystem partners to deliver holistic solutions. It is leveraging its manufacturing scale, supply chain and quality programs for its partners’ success and to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
Customers are increasingly relying on ON Semiconductor as a key provider of enabling technologies for emerging, disruptive applications in automotive, industrial IoT and power conversion and motor control solutions.
Solving the Challenges of Designing for the IoT
There are a few challenges that come up with developing for IoT. First there is the growing trend in today’s electronics industry for OEMs to seek to minimize the time their engineering teams spend selecting components and creating discrete designs. They want these teams to quickly implement solutions that free up internal resources to concentrate on the core competencies that engender competitive advantage and product differentiation.
Secondly, extending operating life in hard to access environments is a key challenge. Greater functionality often means increased power consumption. For devices that operate on coin-cell batteries for long periods of time, battery life is of prime importance, so it’s crucial for the IC’s power management to be optimized.
To address the latter ON Semiconductor products, from sensors to connectivity solutions, are ultra-low power and best in class in the industry. As an example, our latest Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) system on chip is two to three times more efficient than the closest alternative. Our environmental smart passive sensors are completely battery free and based on energy harvesting. This leadership portfolio enables wireless remote sensing, aggregation, and analysis of temperature, moisture, proximity, and pressure, for various IoT applications.
ON Semiconductor has played a pivotal role in helping those customers drive down the time from initial concept to end product. By giving access to ecosystems that comprise a varied combination of products, tools, reference designs, engineering support and third-party hardware and software, the company helps customers speed up design cycles.
One example of this investment can be seen in the recent introduction of a modular IoT Development Kit (IDK) that provides engineers with all of the hardware and software building blocks needed to speed the evaluation, design and implementation of medical, home and industrial IoT applications. The objective was to provide an intuitive IoT platform to help customers prototype and develop node-to-cloud solutions for various IoT verticals and deploy them much quicker and with greater cost effectiveness.
A wide selection of energy efficient connectivity options, image and environmental sensors, lighting and motor control elements, and battery and power management products give ON Semiconductor unmatched capability and flexibility in creating comprehensive IoT solutions.
Experienced Leadership
Boasting more than 30 years of experience in the industry, Mr. Keith D. Jackson was elected a Board Director and appointed the president and CEO of ON Semiconductor Corporation in November 2002.
Before joining the organization, Keith served as executive vice president and general manager at Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. He also served as the president and a member of the board of directors of Tritech Microelectronics in Singapore, a manufacturer of analog and mixed signal products.
From 1986 to 1996, Mr. Jackson worked for National Semiconductor Corporation as vice president and general manager of the Analog and Mixed Signal division. He also held various engineering and management positions at Texas Instruments Incorporated from 1973 to 1986. He has also served on the board of directors of the Semiconductor Industry Association since 2008 and joined the board of directors of Veeco Instruments Inc. in February 2012. In February of 2014, Mr. Jackson became a Leadership Fellow of the National Association of Corporate Directors Board (NACD). This is the highest level of NACD credentialing for corporate directors and corporate governance professionals.
In 2016, 2017 and 2018, with Mr. Jackson as the president of ON Semiconductor, the company was named as the World’s Most Ethical Company® by the Ethisphere Institute, and a Supply Chain ‘Pro to Know’ by Supply and Demand Chain Executive publication. ON Semiconductor has also been recognized in the Philippines with the Outstanding Employer Award for the third consecutive year and has been named a global competitive employer in Malaysia.
On the other hand, Dr. Hans Stork is the senior vice president and chief technology officer at ON Semiconductor. He oversees the development of wafer process technologies, modeling and design kits, design libraries, as well as packaging technologies and assembly support.
Before joining ON Semiconductor, Dr. Stork was group vice president and CTO of Silicon Systems Group at Applied Materials. From 2001 to 2007, he was the senior vice president and the CTO of Texas Instruments. Before that, Dr. Stork held various R&D and management positions at Hewlett Packard Laboratories and at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.
Dr. Stork serves on the supervisory board of ASML, is a member of the Scientific Advisory board at IMEC and has previously served on the boards of Sematech and the SRC. He is also a longstanding member of the SIA Technology Strategy Committee.
He has authored more than 100 cited papers and holds 11 U.S. patents. Dr. Stork was elected IEEE Fellow in 1994, and served on several IEEE-sponsored conference program committees. He is currently vicechair of the technical field awards council and a member of the awards planning and policy committee.
Dr. Stork was born in Soest, The Netherlands, and received the Ingenieur degree in electrical engineering (EE) from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University. Dr. Stork is fluent in English and Dutch.
Drawing the Future Roadmap
There are a number of market segments that are well positioned to achieve very high growth in 2018 and beyond; these are areas that ON Semiconductor considers to be underpinned by exciting global megatrends.
For example, there is strong demand for innovative semiconductor and general electronic component solutions in the automotive sector as electrification of the vehicle powertrain and the proliferation and consumer acceptance of electric and hybrid electric vehicles continues to gather pace.
In addition, growth in the extent and value of general electronic content throughout passenger vehicles shows no signs of slowing. It is being driven by new body and interior systems, LED lighting and, most notably, ADAS which now seems certain to lead us to fully autonomous driving at some point in the next decade.
The combination of diverse technologies by companies like ON Semiconductor is providing engineers from a hugely diverse range of industry areas with practical, integrated end-to-end solutions for the IoT.
The organization continues to see strong demand for its IoT solutions for most end-markets and from most geographies. This is because customers are increasingly relying on them as their key partner in segments ranging from industrial automation, AR/VR, robotics, predictive maintenance, machine vision and process control through agriculture, environmental controls and traffic systems to wearables and connected wellness.
The components, including devices such as the company’s energy harvesting, battery-free Smart Passive Sensors, are supported by tools like the mentioned Internet of things Development kit (IDK) that lower the barriers to adoption and make transitioning a concept to a working solution easier, more intuitive, faster and cheaper.
Quote: “With tens of billions of connected nodes expected to go into operation in the next few years, the huge potential of IoT is evident. However, supporting the variations and nuances of multiple industry segments and delivering comprehensive, ready-to-use solutions that are power, size and cost efficient is imperative.”
Source :-The 20 Most Innovative IoT Companies to Watch 2018
