Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1391285
42 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2021 you were funding. I think at the time you had a lighting project of some sort going on, and we don't hear much about assemblers and EMS companies putting money into R&D. Irfan: ank you. at ties into how we run the operation. We don't sell ourselves as a cheap shop. We are not selling on price; we're not competing with the small assembly jobs on a price difference of a few hundred dollars. Once the customers understand, then our job is a lot easier to sell to those customers. In some areas, our rates are better than the given local market because of our offshore setup that's integrated into our local presence. But overall, we are a profitable business, so we could stay in busi- ness and stay ahead of the curve for our cus- tomers. We run a viable, healthy, long-term profit- able business that can sustain itself through ups and downs. We didn't have layoffs in 2001- 2003, or in the 2008 downturn. We didn't lay off any manufacturing workers or any office workers. Matties: Moving to what the customers are bringing to you, what sort of trends are you seeing in the actual products that they're ask- ing you to build? Anything significant in the last couple of years? Irfan: We've had a major program with one of the big chip mak- ers creating a 5G program for O-RAN, the Open Radio Access Network. Traditionally, the big guys were the suppliers of these radio boards that customers use to access the cellular network. ere is a trend for white-label boxes. Intel partnered with us to do a reference design platform, to white label an O-RAN box. is box is to enable a lot of 5G radio access network customers, radio providers, who would sub- license the design or buy boards from us. We shied away from labeling it as our product because we're a service company, but we put the reference design together for our partners. is reinforces that recognition with the tier ones. When they're pitching your name to a lot of customers, instantly there's credibil- ity. e challenge comes when you're individu- ally taking a lot of designs and putting them together as a system, but it's a very compact, smaller form factor. More complex than the logic of that board is how to physically make it work, and we've become really good in that space because of our in-house signal integ- rity, power integrity, thermal simulation, and mechanical design—that has become a very crucial part of electronics design. ere are a lot of electromechanical design challenges with different products because of the form factor, cost reduction requirements, and very high speed that causes thermal issues and other noise. Matties: Dan, you're in the marketing area. What trends are you seeing in the marketing space? Dan Williams: I think clients are getting very choosy and it's kind of two worlds. It's a very closed ecosystem, and in some cases, it's tough