Japan-based Renesas Electronics, which has announced plans to double its workforce in India by the end of next year, on Thursday said that team expansion is critical for end-to-end chip design and product development in the country.
This means that the company’s approach is different from several global companies, who only do a part of the product development or design in India, based on specifications from their global teams.
“What we are trying to do is to have an end-to-end ability on chips design, build a product completely out of India, and increase the knowledge base,” Malini Narayanamoorthi, president and country head at Renesas India, told FE.
According to Narayanamoorthi, initially the company started off from a marketing standpoint in building a lot of proof of concepts in terms of system solutions for the Indian market. The process involved using the chips to building applications.
“Because of that, we are able to go top down approach. We now know these are the chips that we need, and we are building more and more design teams to build those chips in India,” Narayanamoorthi said, adding that there is a huge focus on research and development in India.
A reason for expanding the design team in India can also be attributed to company’s plans to cater to India-specific products as well.
Renesas is a provider of semiconductor solutions and specialises in designing and producing microcontrollers, system on chips (SoCs), microprocessors, and other integrated circuits (ICs). Their products are used in a wide range of applications, including automotive systems, industrial automation, consumer electronics, and communications.
Simply put, in India, most of smart energy meters are on Renesas chipsets. The recent Chandrayaan mission had over 28 components supplied by Renesas.
In India, the company has offices in Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru, Noida, and Hyderabad. Besides the team expansion in India across the chip design verticals such as microcontrollers, SoCs, Analogue, power products, and connectivity, Renesas is targeting to increase India’s revenue contribution to 10% to the global revenue by 2030.
“A lot of things are getting smart. They’re getting connected. I think people are applying AI and it’s going to give a lot of personalised experience. So, we see a lot of growth in this growing market because India has a huge population,” Srikanth N, senior director – India system solutions engineering sales and marketing division at Renesas.
According to Srikanth, the company is seeing a strong business from the electric vehicles space, besides smart meters and IoT.
Lately, Renesas has formed a joint venture with CG Power in the country for the outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) unit in Gujarat. Renesas, which is a minority shareholder in the joint venture, has also provided its chip packaging technology.
“We would also be customers of CG Power. Initially, we will start with QFP (quad flat package), QFN (quad flat no-lead) kind of packages but the plan is to progress to slightly more advanced packaging,” Narayanamoorthi said.
When asked if the company is looking to utilise fabs in India for manufacturing its chips as well besides packaging, Narayanamoorthi said the company will consider the possibilities when the time is right as currently the whole system of manufacturing needs to be developed in the country.