AN IRISH technology company that has been a multinational for a decade or more, S3 survived the dotcom crash and is now in the middle of some of consumer technology's hottest sectors and could be a poster child of a new wave of Irish tech companies. Its CEO has even learned to avoid using mindnumbing jargon like "middleware" to describe what it does. When we spoke in the 300-strong company's Leopardstown headquarters not long after Miche�l Martin visited to announce a Euro9m Enterprise Ireland supported R&D investment by the company, he was buoyant.

But memories of less happy times are still fresh.

Ask John O'Brien what his worst day was on the job and there's no hesitation.

"The day I had to stand up and announce that we had to restructure the company, " he says. In a cruel twist of fate, O'Brien had only took over as CEO from founder Maurice Whelan in May 2001, when the mere words "tech company" and "potential IPO" were enough to make investors' knees go weak.

At first things couldn't have seemed rosier.

S3 and Dutch consumer electronics giant Philips, which then owned 90% of the company, sought advice from Merrill Lynch on the first steps towards IPO. Comparisons were made with chip maker Parthus, a company in a complementary space, which floated in 2000 and had a market value of $760m in May 2001.

We all know what happened next. The dotcom bubble burst, but even then, for a while it seemed that infrastructure companies - the firms selling the picks and shovels for the internet goldrush - would escape.

"We weren't in a dotcom business as such, " O'Brien muses. S3 was selling computer chips and software to companies building the backbone of the internet. "A lot of routers and switches. Nortel, Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs, we were doing a lot of work for these guys. Very solid work. Serious chip design, serious software. But once the bubble burst those guys hit the skids pretty quickly and those projects fell off a cliff."

By comparison, just a year later Parthus - eventually incorporated in the company known as CEVA - saw the value of its shares fall to just $110m.

At its height then, S3 had more than 400 employees. By the time O'Brien had to tell staff about redundancies, the writing for the industry was on the wall. "You knew you had to let very talented people go. It was quite a shock to people. To ask very talented people to leave the company - it's not nice for them, it's not nice for you, in the long term it's not good for the company but occasionally it's necessary.

That was the most unpleasant day."

Unlike some other firms that did not weather the storm, S3 managed to pull through.

"In hindsight it's probably eight years work experience rolled into two, but when you're going through it it's not that pleasant. But we survived well."

O'Brien had seen lean times before. He'd studied engineering in Limerick, graduating in 1984. "At the time a lot of graduates were emigrating." O'Brien went to work for Plessey Semiconductors in the UK, where he held a variety of engineering and tech jobs, developing new products and helping to market them.

He considered moving to Silicon Valley before meeting Maurice Whelan in 1989. S3 had been founded two years earlier.

"We got on very well. I think he offered me the job by the end of the interview."

O'Brien joined as a chip designer, but rose through a series of management roles before heading up a US division of the firm in 1995. In 1999 it was decided to bring the two divisions together and O'Brien became chief operating officer of S3.

After the initial phase of the dotcom crash, O'Brien steered the company to build on its base in telecoms and consumer electronics and look for new high-growth markets in which to move.

S3's main businesses involve designing bits of software and chips that sit inside set-top boxes for the home and equipment for mobile TV, for viewing on mobile phones and laptop computers.

In 2007 those areas of business are hotting up. The company's bread and butter is its relationship with the makers of cable TV settop boxes, which have gone from being deeply unsexy to the ultimate chokepoint between consumers at home and the media and entertainment giants trying to get access to them.

Microsoft, Apple and Google are furiously trying to develop products that will capitalise on the worldwide switch to digital TV, and S3 is a weapons dealer in that digital arms race.

"We've been doing systems integration in settop boxes for 15 years, " O'Brien says. "This is a high growth market."

It's understood that when Ireland's cable operator UPC (the combined NTL and Chorus) unveils its next set of set-top boxes that will make it possible for viewers to record programmes, like the service offered by Sky+, a bit of S3's kit will sit inside those boxes.

The next wave of opportunity is about to break in bringing TV services to mobiles. By 2010, it's estimated that between 10% and 15% of mobile phones will be able to receive digital broadcast TV signals. "We set out to create a software product that would sit in the handset that would facilitate decoding and displaying and analysing of the broadcast TV information.

So our play there is a piece of software that we would license to chip companies, or handset companies or even mobile operators or broadcast. If they wanted to mandate the same look and feel across phones, we'd be able to provide that."

Commercial services for mobile TV are up and running in Italy and trials are underway in several countries. O 2is currently conducting a trial in Ireland and mobile operator 3 has a licence to run a trial. Though S3 isn't directly involved in that trial, the more the technology comes closer to market the better it is for S3. O'Brien says S3 is talking to a range of companies, from handset manufacturers to mobile operators. At the mobile industry's huge trade fair in Barcelona this February, S3 unveiled a product using its software to get mobile TV to laptops.

But the biggest opportunity of all may be in a high-growth field that wouldn't at first seem related - consumer healthcare.

"The world's biggest challenge is global warming, " says O'Brien. "But it's secondbiggest challenge is the global cost of healthcare.

"I wouldn't claim to be an expert but one way to tackle it is to have people out of institutional healthcare when they don't need to be in there - that means more self-monitoring, self-education and self-management of diseases using technology."

S3's knowledge of consumer technology, O'Brien says, will allow them to link up healthcare firms looking for ways to reduce the cost of patient care with technology companies to allow remote monitoring of patients, for example.

S3 already has a customer in this area, he says, but there's room for further growth.

When Philips reduced its stake to a strategic shareholding in the company and ACT Venture Capital invested Euro10m at the end of 2005, a subsidiary of a multinational was effectively turned into an Irish indigenous company.

The company has four design centres, including one focused on software in Wroclaw, Poland, and another on silicon design in Prague in the Czech Republic. S3 has been in both locations since the 1990s, though the expansion of low-cost travel via Ryanair has made it easier for the company's executives to move around.

The company's key benefit to its customers is in helping them get products to market faster. And in the consumer technology space, there is no such thing as fast enough.

O'Brien is somewhat vague about future plans for S3, which had Euro22m in sales last year, and predicts Euro25m for this year. All he will say is that they're happy to currently be an Irish-headquartered private company. But O'Brien's admiration for the international expansion of Ryanair and CRH gives one hope that S3 may remain Irish headquartered at least in the near term.

"You can learn a lot by how those companies have grown. Not just pure tech companies you can look to for examples that have achieved global scale. And there are a lot of lessons to be learned about how those guys actually did it."

CV JOHN O'BRIEN Family: Married with three children aged 12, 10 and 8.

Lives: Kildare, leaves at 6.20 am for his commute to Leopardstown S3More than 300 employees worldwide, with design centres in Dublin, Cork, Poland and the Czech Republic, as a well as sales of"ces in the UK and US