JASON RHODE has only been CEO of Cirrus Logic since May, but he's been part of the company for 12 years, ever since his former PhD advisor recruited him from North Carolina State University when he finished his degree.

He started by designing circuit boards, including the CS4334, a very small digital to analogue converter that he says has sold close to one billion units: "It was a really satisfying feeling to see it get out there in the market and have commercial success." He went on the road with marketing to learn about customers' desires, moved into design management, ran the department for mixed signal products and three years ago was re-organised into general manager for the audio-focused division.

Both personally and professionally, Rhode likes finding less-occupied niches. The fastest car in the world is insanely expensive, but for $10,000 he's very happy to own a Kawasaki ZX 14 motorcycle – "the fastest on the planet last year". Similarly, Cirrus, founded in 1984 to make chips for peripheral devices inside PCs, gave up on the overcrowded video market in favour of audio.

"It didn't go especially well," he says of the company's 2000 foray into video. "The market ended up being more competitive than management anticipated. "Three years ago, Cirrus adopted a new divisional structure and refocused on the company's core strength, the digital/audio and audio/digital interface technologies it acquired with Crystal Semiconductors in 1993.

Adapt and survive. "The company is much smaller now than it was at its peak, but probably its breadth allowed it to survive," says Rhode. "It's taken a couple of years ago to recover from that foray into video." Audio, he says, is "nowhere near as sexy, but there are precious few companies that have managed to net out their shareholders' interest in the video space."

Video products get hot quickly, evolve fast, and get a lot of analyst coverage – and all those things pull competitors in, including the Taiwanese. " It's hard to add value as an American semiconductor company."

Audio, on the other hand, is "a good market", in which Rhode believes western companies can compete. A lot of Cirrus's business now is in the automotive sector, where manufacturers want a guaranteed minimum of ten years' support. Designs ship for three to five years and replacement parts must be available for some years after that.

In addition, automotive industry pressure in the early 1990s led Cirrus to buck the industry standard of roughly 500 defects per million chips and aim for a zero defect process.

"Everyone sort of laughed at the idea of tens of millions of semiconductors with no defects," says Rhode, "but our corporate defects per million is now less than one – pretty amazing compared to five to ten years ago."

As a result, all Cirrus products are designed to be testable, and the tests the company does cover a larger die area. "You don't want to recall a Toyota because the audio amplifier is bad," he says. Another key is failure analysis, so the company can tell whether a defect is a one-off or the first of millions.

Outside of the automotive market, audio is expanding, too: MP3 players, headphones, tiny s;peakers, digital amplifiers, docking stations.

In his first 90 days as CEO, Rhode says he's essentially begun the process of trying to organise himself out of a job. "There are a lot of things left over from what the company was a long time ago." Changing those things meant hiring a new vice president for sales, buying in software to manage the company's 500 products and 6,000 active customers, making sales more accountable, and beginning the search for a replacement to fill his own former role.

"I'll be down to one job," he says. "Riding motorcycles." That Kawasaki, he says, tops out at 189 miles an hour. "At 155 miles an hour it's remarkably smooth. The road becomes like a tiny, little line, like staring down a straw." Then he remembers he's the CEO of a public company. "I would only endorse such things on a track, of course." µ