Also surprising, Analog Devices climbed over Philips and National Semiconductor to become the world's third-largest supplier of analog and mixed-signal ICs. If I were TI, I'd be just a little nervous. ADI doesn't have the manufacturing muscle of the other guys, but it does have the engineering savvy.

Of course, there will always be people who take exception to the Dataquest numbers. Joe Martin, chief financial officer at Fairchild Semiconductor, thought the rankings in power were skewed toward voltage regulators and didn't include discrete devices like rectifier diodes and switches. If those were included in the rankings, he said, Fairchild would be the largest supplier of power ICs.

Rankings for 2000 emphasize semicustom products, application-specific standard products for specific markets like communications, automotive, data storage and consumer electronics. This will change this year, as the growth curves for those markets flatten. Standard products will occupy a much larger proportion of what's shipped and sold this year.

Even for emerging markets, such off-the-shelf standard products as data converters, amplifiers and voltage regulators support prototyping. New-generation catalog ICs will be designed into and used in the installation of new communications infrastructure. A part like ADI's ultrahigh sample-rate A/D converters, for example, should see use in new cellular basestation installations, and National's new complementary bipolar op amps will be used as CATV cable drivers.

Thus, the 2001 rankings of the top suppliers will lean toward catalog offerings. Already, standard parts supplier Maxim Integrated Products has made Dataquest's list of top 10 analog suppliers; we expect their relative position to be even higher at year end.