Japanese semiconductor major Renesas Electronics has entered an optimisation phase after moving past initial commissioning, as the plant works to lift yields and throughput towards its full rated capacity, according to a senior Renesas executive.
Renesas currently holds a minority stake of about 6.8 per cent in CG Semi, alongside Thailand’s Stars Microelectronics, with majority partner CG Power and Industrial Solutions overseeing construction. The Sanand, Gujarat-based venture’s first facility has a peak capacity of 300 million units a year. Meanwhile, a second, larger facility, currently under construction, is expected to scale that to roughly 4 billion units a year once complete.
Speaking to FE, Malini Narayanamoorthi, President, Renesas Electronics India, and Vice-President, Renesas, said: “The construction is on schedule, production has started. Now we continue to optimise, like any factory, you have to start somewhere and get better and better.”
The company’s contribution to the venture is technology transfer and its role as an anchor customer, drawing on CG Semi’s packaging capacity for select chip lines, the executive said.
“You can’t start technology with 20 different packages at the same time, you start one by one,” the executive said, adding that Renesas will scale its plans to explore packaging India-designed chips locally as the country’s semiconductor localisation push matures.
Renesas has an offtake agreement with CG Semi but does not hold exclusivity. “CG Semi is also able to go to other customers and figure out where they’d like to get their business from,” the executive added.
CG Semi is investing more than Rs 7,600 crore over five years to build these two OSAT facilities in Sanand — G1 and G2. While G1 commenced commercial production in July, the second facility, G2, the larger facility under development, will significantly scale CG Semi’s production capacity once operational late next year or early 2028.
Renesas currently has three growth vectors, including AI data centres, software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and physical AI — humanoids and robotics — alongside ‘intelligence at the edge’, which Narayanamoorthi describes as pushing more processing power onto devices rather than the cloud. Renesas supplies chips for embedded systems and data-centre hardware.
Since chips typically take about two years to move from design into production, Renesas is building AI capability, including Neural Processing Units (NPUs), into its products well before specific use cases are defined.
“I wouldn’t know the AI use cases a couple of years from today, so it’s good to make sure you have the infrastructure built within the chip to support different AI use cases,” Narayanamoorthi said.