Digs: Inside Silicon Labs

RCRtv got an exclusive look inside Silicon Labs “Digs” in downtown Austin to see what it is like to work there and what it takes to be one of the company’s 1,060 employees.
We got to check out the beautiful views and interesting features inside the company’s two buildings and see the technology that is driving Silicon Labs into the future, including a look inside the failure analysis lab where chips are ripped apart and tested and the underground tunnel that runs under city hall.
Silicon Labs’ Corporate Marketing Director, Kamran Shah explains the company isn’t just a semiconductor company anymore, it is expanding into other markets as well. With the acquisition of Cygnal Integrated Products, Silicon Labs began building its Broad-based business, which is now 40% of company revenue.
“We’re really putting together some of the most complex software and hardware components to enable our customers to develop the next generation connected applications from wearables to smart lights to smart meters to data centers that have to process information at really fast speeds given all the data that’s been generated,” Shah says.
As for what the company is looking for in its employees, Shah says, “We are looking for the best and the brightest in every discipline from software engineers to firmware engineers to RF wireless designers.”
Employees say that one of the best features of the company is its size because of the mobility and camaraderie that it provides.
“It’s at that great size where you have many different areas you can move to and a lot of experiences you can obtain, but it’s small enough that really you know everyone that works here,” Product Test Engineer, Leila Kasprzyk says.
Silicon labs is a mixed signal fabless semiconductor company with a total revenue of over $600 million. Its CEO, Tyson Tuttle, has been with the company since 1997. He took over as head of the company in April 2012.
The company was founded in 1996 by Nav Sooch, Dave Welland and Jeff Scott and is separated into three main businesses: access, broadcast and broad-based.
The access portion of the business includes SLICs for VoIP gateways, PoE devices for networking, analog modems for set-top boxes, point of sale terminals and multi-function printers.
Broadcast includes single-chip AM/FM radios and silicon TV tuners and demodulators.
And 8-bit and 32-bit micro-controllers, low power wireless ICs and sensors targeted at the Internet of Things and timing clocks, oscillators buffers and digital isolators targeted at internet infrastructure make up the broad-based side of the company.
This is the first installment of RCRtv‘s “Digs” series. We will be taking you inside many other important tech and telco businesses around the world in the coming year.