Touchstone CEO eyes Linear, Maxim, disruption

MILPITAS, Calif.--In the summer of 2011, a lone semiconductor startup went "old school," as my colleague Dylan McGrath put it. That's when he wrote about Touchstone Semiconductor getting $12 million in venture funding, poised to make a splash in--of all markets--analog components.

To some, it may have seemed like watching a car crash in slow motion, with the brake-less vehicle careening toward a stand of huge trees, the occupants blissfully unaware of their fate. These were former analog veterans starting a small company to take business from huge, entrenched players in the analog space. For one of those analog veterans, Touchstone CEO Brett Fox, it was quite the opposite. In fact, it's been an exhilarating ride so far.

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To date, the company has rolled 35 products into the marketplace and will finish calendar 2012 after adding another 25 to its portfolio.

"We got a lot coming," he said, including new analog comparators and amplifiers. The company also is entering the ADC market place and adding to other product lines. Next year, DACs and power management devices. In a July interview with our reporter Ismini Scouras, Fox said his company would go after "everything in the signal path."

"Suddenly, we start looking like a full-fledged, catalog, broad-based analog supplier...in essentially three years a time. Not bad," he said in an interview at Touchstone offices here, a stone's throw from Interstate 880 and a warm stroll down the street from Linear Technology. In 2010 there were six designers in the company, today Touchstone has twice as many, averaging 20 years' experience and roughly 10 patents apiece. Fox and company are pulling in people from Maxim and Linear, adding one new designer a quarter.

I asked him about competition, the nature of innovation, and venture capital investment. Perhaps not surprisingly, Maxim, his alma mater, figured prominently.