Technologies like AI and automation to play important role in new normal: Sailesh Chittipeddi, Renesas Electronics

Sailesh Chittipeddi, executive vice president and general manager, IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit, Renesas Electronics Corporation talks about the organizations products, expansion plan for India, and the role played by new-age technologies in the post-pandemic scenario.

DQ: Please tell us about your organization and its Indian operations.

Sailesh Chittipeddi: Renesas is built on a strong historical foundation of technological innovation originating from Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC. It started operation on April 1, 2010, as Renesas Electronics through an integration of Renesas Technology. We have more than 18,000 employees worldwide with our headquarters office located in Tokyo, Japan. We are a global semiconductor company delivering trusted embedded design innovation with complete semiconductor solutions that enable billions of connected, intelligent devices to enhance the way people work and live. We endeavour to develop a safer, healthier, greener, and smarter world by making every endpoint intelligent with our products and solutions for the automotive, industrial, infrastructure and IoT markets. We are poised to increase our market share in fast-growing data economy-related markets such as infrastructure and data center by strengthening our kit solutions that combine world-leading MCUs, SoCs, analog and power products. We follow the strategy of “Going Broad” in the terms of sectors/customers and “Going Deep” in terms of the efficacy of cross-selling products with our Winning Combinations.

India is one of the most important markets for us.  We have marketing offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore. We are in the process of establishing a R&D center for our Infrastructure and IoT Business unit in Bangalore, and we are aiming to reach double digital growth in India as we ramp up operations and sharpen our sales strategy. Our product experts have developed "Winning Combos," which are compelling product combinations of MCUs, sensors, power, and analog products that help our customers accelerate their designs and get to market faster. These portfolio combinations focus on verticals including industrial, infrastructure, IoT ,consumer segments and automotive to service more customers and partners, worldwide. We are confident that with these “Winning Combos” will be able to gain a sizable market share in India.

DQ: The market realities have changed drastically in the post lockdown era. How has this affected your business? 

Sailesh Chittipeddi: The megatrends described at the beginning of the year, which are driving growth for the Infrastructure and IoT Business unit, are still valid, and COVID-19 has not changed that. All these trends were about data. The first trend is the disaggregation of data centers, with the hardware and software being broken up into memory clusters and processing clusters and interconnects. Then there is the 5G ramp-up and the last trend is that more and more intelligence is migrating to the endpoints. These three trends stand valid even today.

In data centers, we at Renesas are not talking about memory or the processors, but about interconnect components for the data flow between memory and CPU, i.e. memory interface products. These components account for a large share of our sales in the infrastructure sector, plus components for digital power, timing and optical components. The 5G ramp-up currently only refers to sub-6 GHz, but for this we have RF, timing, and optical components. In addition, this year we will be launching ICs aimed at 5G power applications.

And when it comes to AI in the edge and endpoint, our MCUs and MPUs are the core of our business. We have realigned our MCU/MPU roadmap. At the end of last year, for example, we launched ARM-based microcontrollers from the RA family. In addition, there are MPUs with which we can cover everything from motor control to graphics and surveillance camera applications. The RZ family, especially the RZ/V2M, is primarily used in video applications, where these products are characterized by the lowest power consumption. This means the developer gets a product with GPU-level processing power, but at a fraction of the cost and with a fraction of the power consumption.

DQ: What is your go to market strategy for Indian markets?

Sailesh Chittipeddi: According to Invest India, the Indian electronics market is expected to reach 400B by 2025 and per capita disposable income and private consumption having doubled in the past 7 years, India has emerged as one of the largest markets for electronic products in the world. The MEITY’s Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI), Scheme for Promotion of Manufacturing of Electronic Components and Semiconductors (SPECS) and Modified Electronics Manufacturing Clusters Scheme (EMC 2.0) have the potential to position India as a global hub for Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM).

We are looking forward to being a part of the growth journey that India is expected to enjoy. We are focusing on some key growth verticals like Mobility, Medical & Biometrics which are emerging as winners in the Post Covid era and Industrial & Infrastructure electronics which will give stable growth possibilities as the country develops towards first world capabilities. We are also leveraging our scale by going deeper with our existing customers specifically in Industrial Meters and Consumer Electronics. Using cross sell and taking advantage of product extension through integration of Renesas, Intersil and IDT product lines to widen our customer base and deepen engagements with existing customers is fundamental to our Go to Market strategy.

DQ: What is the USP of your products? 

Sailesh Chittipeddi: Renesas has a highly differentiated and broad product portfolio, including products such as microcontrollers (MCUs), microprocessors (MPUs), analog & mixed-signal, power management; and other technologies. Our RA kit solutions demonstrate high performance using Arm Cortex CPU Cores, high security and high flash memory integration. We have our RE family which is truly energy harvesting with features like extreme low current , battery-less system and smart sensing. Renesas’ RZ family of high-end 32-and 64-bit Arm-based MPUs combine connectivity and control, and provide industrial network support, HMI and high-speed real-time control. Our MPUs and MCUs offer the highest level of software integration. And the RZ/A2m MPU provides a 10x improvement in on-chip graphics performance compared to the previous generation MPU.

Our MCUs, MPUs and SoCs offer advanced security, efficient power consumption, lower BOM cost, real-time control, image recognition, energy harvesting, and low pin counts to provide a tiny footprint. Our MPU products are playing an important role in emerging applications, such as surveillance cameras with AI-based human presence detection.

DQ: There has been a spike in the demand for connected devices, which are highly sophisticated and can support new technologies like AI, Automation etc. How do you think Renesas Electronics can meet this demand?

Sailesh Chittipeddi: In the new normal, technologies like AI and Automation will play an important role, as the human presence will be less owing to new guidelines post-lockdown. We are ready to help our customers in the new normal with advanced Renesas MPUs. And we are developing products with a focus on the industrial market while keeping the new realities in mind. All these MPUs come ready with AI capabilities and human machine learning enhancements.

We provide scalable solutions to our customers ranging from general purpose MCU to AI integrated microprocessors. This product range comes with predictive analytics that can help our customers further in making business decisions. Similarly, our products have motor control that ranges from the low-end suitable for home appliances to the high-end, enabling cutting-edge robotics, etc. So, in nutshell, I can say that we are ready to face whatever challenge that the new normal throws at us.