Analog Devices, Inc. ADI

The business

Analog Devices makes the chips that sit between the physical world and the digital one. A sensor produces a voltage; a converter turns it into numbers a processor can use; a power management chip makes sure everything gets the right current. None of it is glamorous and none of it is easily replaced, because an analog part is qualified into a customer's design and stays there for a decade or more.

The customer base is the point. Industrial is half the revenue and thousands of designs deep, automotive is a quarter, and communications is where the data centre buildout shows up. Nothing here is a single-socket business, which is the opposite of most of what has performed in semiconductors lately.