Executive Interview: Chris Armstrong, SIGLENT Marketing Director - North America

1. SIGLENT America was established in 2014, but SIGLENT was founded in 2002. What can you tell our readers about SIGLENT’s origins, what drove the need for SIGLENT America and how SIGLENT America has evolved to where you are today?

SIGLENT was born as an oscilloscope company. In the early years of our history, we established a presence for these precision instruments in the global market. After years of growth, development, and innovation we opened our headquarters in Shenzhen and then our office and team here in North America.

Building out the global company allowed us to create a dedicated team from the ground up. We can service and support our North American customers from our office in Ohio where we have a complete repair and calibration lab as well as applications team and inventory. This foundation means that we have been able to quickly expand and offer new performance RF and time-domain products over the last several years that have quickly found success with customers.

2. Can you share some information about your background and how your prior experience has translated to your position at SIGLENT? What attracted you to SIGLENT?

I started my career at Keithley Instruments, spending eight years in the marketing and applications group. I then spent 13 years at Rigol Technologies as a general manager as well as applications and marketing. So, I have always been involved in test & measurement. I love working with customers on their test requirements. Especially in performance applications, engineers need more than just a great product. SIGLENT delivers excellent capabilities but also great support and reliability. SIGLENT’s overall quality is easy to see. The number of issues or repairs we deal with is, in my experience, world-class. This dedication to detail really attracted me to SIGLENT. The corporate culture also really prioritizes teamwork and innovation making it an easy adjustment. I am excited about the future as we continue to develop products for more advanced RF and time-domain applications. In May, we will be launching a new handheld 2-port VNA with a range up to 26.5 GHz and advanced TDR applications.

3. Can you describe any “metrics” of SIGLENT (number of facilities, number of employees, square footage of facilities, etc.) that would give our readers a better sense of your company?

SIGLENT has offices all over the world including Shenzhen, Tokyo, Augsburg in Germany and in Ohio. We have more than 400 employees worldwide, including more than 200 professional engineers. 30 percent of our engineers hold a master’s degree. SIGLENT is a publicly traded company with a > 25 percent CAGR from 2017 to 2023 making SIGLENT the fastest-growing major T&M brand for which public data is available over that time.

4. Can you describe SIGLENT’s product portfolio and market focus? You are an international company, is that product mix and market focus different for different regions?

We continue to focus on performance applications where we can add value for engineers. Recently, we have added high-resolution oscilloscopes up to 4 GHz as well as spectrum analyzers to 26 GHz and RF signal generators to 40 GHz. We make sure to bring mature products to the market worldwide that we are ready to support, so while our focus is global, some products arrive at different times in different regions. We have another exciting year of new products and applications ahead of us as we continue to extend our product offerings.

5. What are the core competencies and technologies that differentiate you from your competitors?

One of our key technologies is our new high-resolution oscilloscope front end. We now offer 12-bit oscilloscopes with low noise and high accuracy from 70 MHz to 4 GHz. What differentiates us is our complete solution approach to these products. A number of competitors have 12-bit oscilloscopes, but to create a complete solution our design significantly reduces the noise floor while improving isolation. These scopes also share design technology for visualization tools including vertical zoom, dynamic scaling and deep memory FFTs. All together, these improvements don’t just give you more resolution but provide solutions to signal fidelity challenges that engineers face every day.

6. Your responsibilities are in North America. What is different about North America for SIGLENT’s business? Are there any unique challenges that the company sees in North America?

There are always regional differences in the applications and test requirements for engineers in these fields. Here we serve a broad set of customers including medical devices, education, semiconductors, automotive and RF components. I think engineers all over the world are interested in instrumentation that provides new capabilities, increased value and improved quality. Part of my job is making sure engineers are aware of what SIGLENT brings to the table and helping them select the best instrument for their application. Having a wide variety of instruments and tools to solve customer challenges is part of what makes the job fun and interesting.

7. On your website, you have “SIGLENT Solutions” which offers application support for your products. How important is that to your value proposition to potential customers? How do you envision the importance of application support going forward and how do you see that area evolving?

Engineers need more than just an instrument. The debugging and testing challenges we face today are more integrated as well as more software and data-centric than ever. Customizing the utilities within our instruments to solve engineering challenges is critical to both their capability and value. We are building solutions that address these testing challenges. This takes a combination of advanced hardware, firmware and software but also applications support from questions to evaluation and ultimately results. In this way, defining solutions is increasingly important as SIGLENT continues to evolve along with these engineering test requirements.

8. How do you see your product and market mix changing in the next five years? Where is your development focus? What applications, products and markets have you excited for the future?

SIGLENT continues to see rapid growth in our performance products, especially RF. Innovation and development of these advanced test requirements will continue to define our success. We will continue to move into higher-frequency applications in both the RF and time-domain. As we do that, we will be able to deliver customer value in more advanced semiconductor, communications and field applications. Continually expanding our product portfolio and application coverage means we will be able to address new test requirements and challenges. Tackling these new challenges is what excites me for our future.

9. How would you describe the culture at SIGLENT? What do you want your customers and employees to think of when they think of SIGLENT? How does the company reinforce those ideas?

SIGLENT is very people-centric. The company was built for engineers to be able to do their best work. This comes through in the company’s DNA with every decision and investment we make. I appreciate having a growing team to work with in partnership around the globe. From the customer perspective, that people focus means engineers get capable, quality products. We try to reinforce this with every customer interaction. I hope our customers find us responsive and helpful. Being people-centric cannot stop with engineers or employees but needs to reach our customers in how we interact with them and support them through their test challenges.

10. What else can you tell our readers about SIGLENT?

Let me take this opportunity to thank all our existing customers and partners out there for collaborating with us and helping to make SIGLENT what it is today. We will continue to bring value and quality to new applications and capabilities. We are looking forward to supporting all of you as well as those new to SIGLENT on your future test challenges.