Steve Sanghi, chairman of the Board, president and CEO of Microchip Technology is one of the rare Indians to lead a global semiconductor company. The Nasdaq-listed firm is a major supplier of microcontrollers?a highly integrated chip that contains the processor, non-volatile memory, volatile memory, a clock and an I/O control unit. Microcontrollers make all kinds of products intelligent?air conditioners, remote controls, TV, alarm clocks, hair dryers, refrigerators, security systems, lights, switches, and automobiles among others. The company has seen rapid growth in its fiscal year 2011 ending March and expects to grow from $948 million in FY10 to $1,486 million this year. In an interview with Goutam Das, Sanghi talks about the chip world and his plans to ramp up India operations. Excerpts:

Tell us about your links with India. We have seen many Indians contribute substantially to the US information technology industry. What has been their contribution to the semiconductor world?

I was born in India?grew up in Punjab and Haryana. My parents are in Chandigarh. I graduated from Punjab Engineering College in 1975 before going to the US. I became a US citizen in 1986. I don?t really track the contribution of Indians to the global semiconductor industry but it is substantial. The CEO of SanDisk is an Indian (Sanjay Mehrotra). There has been substantial contribution made by Indians to Intel over the years?Vinod Dham among other people. If you go to the Silicon Valley, you would find lots of Indians and Chinese.

After a strong shipment year, will 2011 be a year of significant inventory correction?

The analyst estimates vary. There are a group of analysts who think the industry will go through a deep inventory correction cycle. Others believe that the industry will have a normal level of growth this year and that the overall shipments last year were not that drastic. I am in the latter camp; I believe that there was a minor inventory correction in the December quarter and the March quarter was normal. Rest of the year should be normal too, leading to a healthy growth.

Will the industry?s growth come primarily from consumers this year?

The drivers are continuous increase of semiconductor content and intelligence in everything? from consumer products to automobiles to telecom equipment to industrial machinery. Anything and everything today has semiconductors whereas it did not before. That?s what is driving the growth. Years ago, during the Chinese New Year, all the gift giving used to be clothes and dolls. In recent years, it has dramatically shifted to electronic products? MP3 players, iPads, iPhones. There is a dramatic internal consumption going on in China and in India that never used to be the case some years ago.

FY 11 has been record year for microchip. What applications have fueled this growth?

Lot of the intelligence is being added through microcontrollers. The secret to our success is that our business model is not dependant on a single killer application. Because when it is, you can have a dramatic fall off when expectations are not met, like the internet in 2000. Microchip has been the most consistent grower over the last 20 years because we have built our business on thousands of everyday applications. We don?t call out any one application because for us they are all important.

How are the company?s Indian operations ramping up?

We have 250 employees in India, a large R&D centre in Bangalore that includes functions like IT, product development and applications. We have three sales offices?one in Bangalore, Delhi and Pune. We sell into the automobile industry here?parts go into two wheelers and cars; the telecom industry, inverters, batteries, voting machines. We can put our product everywhere. Three years ago, we forecasted that we would invest about $65 million in India over the next five years starting in 2008. We said we would get to 300 people in those years.

Despite the global financial crisis, which set a lot of companies back, we are on track. We are ahead in terms of hiring?we will have 300 within a year from now. A majority of them would be in design services.