By Patrick Moore, VP Global Sales & Apps, Silanna Semiconductor
The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) market is dominated by just two major players.
This wasn’t always the case, but a series of consolidations has meant companies like National Semiconductor, Linear Technology, and Maxim Integrated have all been acquired (in 2011, 2017, and 2021 respectively), effectively leaving Analog Devices (ADI) and Texas Instruments (TI) as the only choices.
The scale of this dilemma is easily seen if we look at component distributor sites. At the time of writing, one of the biggest distributors listed ADCs where approximately 90% of the available devices come from just these two companies, with the remaining share spread across dozens of other vendors.
On another distributor, this figure rose to 94.4%. And for customers, this means limited choice and little to no leverage when it comes to pricing, availability, and technical support. Many neglected customers have taken to public forums such as Reddit to voice their frustrations with the current state of the market.
Price increases have become a recurring issue, especially given supply-chain vulnerabilities and the impact of U.S. tariffs on the rest of the world. In June 2025, TI implemented price rises of at least 15% across thousands of SKUs, creating significant cost pressures for OEMs and system designers globally. Then, in August, Chinese customers were hit with an additional increase affecting 60,000 products, with average price rises between 10% and 30%. And now, just days ago, Analog Devices announced their price increases. While these latest hikes were specific to China and driven by local cost pressures, they highlight the vulnerability of a market where two suppliers hold almost all of the cards.
How we got here
To see the way out, we need to understand how we arrived at this situation.
The ADC market is expensive to operate in. It requires that hundreds of individual SKUs be created, each with its own wafer stack. This makes it prohibitively expensive to pre-fabricate and store anything beyond the most commonly used devices, so most are manufactured to schedule or on demand. The result is that only high-volume demand can be supported: lead times increase, and small runs of niche parts—which are often essential to a small company’s board—become economically unviable to produce.
These underlying economics make it unsurprising that the market consolidated into just two primary suppliers. They also explain why competing vendors face significant barriers to entry, and why niche or small-scale SKUs are particularly affected. Increased costs are required to justify a run, or production is halted entirely, forcing redesigns.
In the ADC market, none of this is the result of a Blofeld-like character seeking sector domination. It is the natural consequence of the technology’s inherent method of production.
Silanna’s configurable ADC platforms (left) alongside a Silanna Plural Evaluation Kit (EVK). Plural devices support a wide range of resolutions (10-bit to 16-bit) and package types (QFN 32, 48, 64). They are designed to be pin-compatible with legacy products, making them true drop-in replacements.
Factory-configurable ADCs
So, what is needed?
Through consolidation, legacy brands have amassed hundreds of SKUs that effectively act as a product moat. Unless this is bridged, the two legacy players will continue to maintain and exploit their duopolistic advantage. Bridging it requires innovative technologies and fundamentally new approaches.
The answer is configurability: using a set of base wafers that can be flexibly configured after fabrication to produce hundreds of ADC variants.
This approach enables significant economies of scale. Development and inventory costs are lowered, manufacturing bottlenecks are removed, and both large-volume and niche devices can be configured and shipped quickly.
It also removes the traditional barrier to entry created by the need to manufacture hundreds – or thousands – of individual ADC designs at foundries such as TSMC or GlobalFoundries.
Such an approach not only addresses pricing and availability challenges, but also broadens access to high-performance ADCs. Smaller companies can now access designs that would previously have been economically unviable.
This is the approach we have taken at Silanna through our data-converter platform, Plural.
Plural ADC architecture features dual ADC channels with CMOS/LVDS outputs, clock and synchronization controls, and an SPI interface for factory configuration.
Plural and Silanna’s ResolutionEngine™
Earlier this year, we launched Plural. This was a project several years in the making.
The platform offers factory-configurable ADCs in 10-, 12-, 14-, and 16-bit resolutions with sample rates from 20 to 250 Msps. These devices are configured via Silanna’s ResolutionEngine™, with initial configurations selected to be pin-for-pin compatible with legacy components. As a result, they are true drop-in replacements, built on a fully qualified non-China 40nm process..
Manufacturing via this approach enables lower costs, with devices shipping at approximately 30% lower cost than equivalent ADCs from leading competitors.
Sixty five ADC configurations have been released, with 100+ additional SKUs to be made available in 2026. This delivers more choice, more flexibility, and greater resilience in a market that – due to its underlying technology and resulting consolidation – has long lacked all three.
Further information on Plural ADCs, including datasheets and pricing, is available via the 10-, 12-, 14-, and 16-bit pages of the Silanna ADC website.