Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/969348
38 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2018 Shaughnessy: I understand you have some pretty interesting things you're working on for 2018. Amla: Yes. What we're really excited about is that whatever's happening in the economy on a global scale—there's buoyancy out there. There's a lot of new technology coming to the fore. There's 5G deployment that's going to start somewhere around '19, '20, and there's autonomous driving, which is finding root; a lot of people are investing in it, and it cre- ates demand for new materials that didn't exist before. Our roadmap is aligned to come up with new products which basically enable these technologies. When the cloud revolution was happening, and people were installing these server farms, they needed lower-loss products, and that's what ITEQ had been focused on developing in the last few years. Now we've moved towards developing products that enable extremely high digital speeds up to 56 gigabits per sec- ond and beyond, 112 gigabits per second with the change in signaling and coding. On our drawing board now are products that are going to enable autonomous driving, for ITEQ Ready for Autonomous and Electric Vehicles of the Future 2019 2018 2020 2021 Feature Interview by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 During DesignCon 2018, I spoke with Tarun Amla, the executive vice president and CTO of ITEQ. We discussed ITEQ's future plans, including the development of materials for cutting-edge technology needs, such as auton- omous and electric vehicles, as well as 5G technology. Andy Shaughnessy: How are you doing, Tarun? For anybody who's not familiar with ITEQ, why don't you give us a quick background? Tarun Amla: Good to see you, Andy. ITEQ is headquartered in Taiwan. It started in 1997, so we just recently celebrated our 20 th anni- versary, and it's grown very rapidly. We are approximately 21 billion NT, which is about US$700 million in revenue. We have facili- ties in China—one in Wuxi, and another in Dongguan, and both are copper clad laminate manufacturing facilities. Additionally, we have a flexible copper clad laminate factory and an HDI factory in Guangdong, and then in the same area we have a mass lam facility. We are placed probably sixth globally in terms of rev- enue. It's been a story of great growth for us at ITEQ.