A: The biggest current challenge has to do with how strong the markets are. We thought the markets would be strong, but we didn't really forecast that it would be as strong as it has been in the last six months. And so what it's done is it has put a very heavy load on our operations or the manufacturing part of our business. We announced just a few weeks ago that we are expanding our facility here in Greensboro with approximately an $80 million expansion.... We are expanding our manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible to meet the demand and the demand is driven by cell phones going into not only China but in India and there's some parts of South America that are also very strong. There's phones that the volume is going up very rapidly. We think that this year, there will certainly be over 900 million cell phones shipped around the world. In 12 months, there's soon to be a billion cell phones a year. That's just incredible, and because of our strong market share, naturally it reflects back to us. We've announced the expansion here just in Greensboro is going to create 300 new jobs, but we're also expanding our facilities in China and we're actually considering some other facilities in other places.

Q: What's one thing you didn't see coming? That is, where did you miss the boat?

A: The technology that's used in a cell phone has been changing faster than we anticipated.... It used to be new technology would come out and it was several years before it actually made its way into major production, but that time is shrinking. It's still maybe a couple of years, but certainly the time it takes for new technology to get into production, I would say that it's been cut by probably 50 percent at least. It means that we have to be smarter and anticipate what's coming better than we have in the past and to be able to deal with that when it does happen. That's a major challenge.

Q: What's the most innovative thing you've seen or heard of another company doing?

A: A lot of what we see that's innovative are ... technical aspects to products. ... The general population might not appreciate the subtleties of what we're seeing. Some of our competitors are actually ... in one area they're using software in their chips very successfully. It's almost like a miniature computer, it requires software to go with the chip. Some of our competitors are able to deploy resources to deliver this software around the world very effectively. This has to do with a technology called BlueTooth. We have BlueTooth chips ourselves, but it requires you to deliver complete applications software with it and some of our competitors, particularly one that comes to mind is CSR, Cambridge Silicon Radio in the UK, have done a very good job with this software. I'm impressed by what they've been able to do in that area.

Q: How about your company?

A: In the last calendar year, we have been working on supplying to the cell phone more of the communication electronics than just the power amplifier. The power amplifier is the part that we've built our reputation and built our company on. But last year, we started supplying to Motorola a communication transceiver. It's both a transmitter and receiver that goes into each cell phone. We have taken Motorola through the introduction of that chip over the last 12 months to our No. 2 customer. Which means that we're shipping more than 10 percent of our products to this one customer and it is to an area that we haven't shipped before. It's a completely different line of chips. It took years to develop these chips. We had version after version of this chip before we got it right, but we persevered and we do have it right and we're shipping it in huge volumes. So far we have shipped over 25 million sets, these are several chips in a set, and this is continuing to ramp up and get even stronger.

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