Some snips from recent Renesas article with link to full article below.
Interesting basic business insight to the thinking, planning, roadmap and execution.
Renesas' EVP on M&A, disaggregation, customized solutions, and how and why the various technology pieces are shifting.
semiengineering.com
Repositioning For A Changing IC Market
Renesas’ EVP on M&A, disaggregation, customized solutions, and how and why the various technology pieces are shifting.
MAY 26TH, 2022 - BY:
ED SPERLING
Sailesh Chittipeddi, executive vice president at Renesas, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how changes in end markets are shifting demand for technology. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.
SE: Renesas has acquired a number of companies over the past several years. What’s the goal?
Chittipeddi: The goal very simply is to create an industry leading solution provider addressing the industrial, IoT, infrastructure and automotive markets. We are strengthening our market leading position in embedded processing with acquisitions that strengthen our presence in four specific domains — power, sensing, connectivity, and actuation. Historically, Renesas had a major focus on the automotive industry even though it did sell microcontrollers into other markets. What we’ve done since 2019 is to reposition the company into two major business units — Automotive, and IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit (IIBU). Today IIBU has become the bigger part of the company, both through organic growth and the acquisition of Intersil, IDT, Dialog, and now Celeno.
SE: No one chip is going to dominate everything in the future, because we’re seeing a lot more heterogeneous designs even from large chipmakers. How does that fit into your strategy?
Chittipeddi: Yes, you are correct. We are seeing a lot of start-up activity in AI, edge, or endpoint AI companies, and several of these are optimized for specific workloads. A big part of it is really about intelligence moving to the edge. But it’s not just about the CPUs from companies like AMD and Intel, or GPUs from NVIDIA, or TPUs from Google and the rest. As processors get more complex, you need more digital multi-phase controllers and smart power stages. You need memory interfaces and timing devices. We see ourselves as an attach opportunity for these core processor providers.
SE: So where do you see this going? Will chips disaggregate even further into smaller and smaller components? Or will it hit a limit where it’s too difficult to integrate everything?
Chittipeddi: Some level of integration will always be needed, and that’s going to be workload-dependent. The reason it’s disaggregating is that it’s dependent on what you’re trying to do. So for certain kinds of workloads, MCUs probably will be more than adequate. For others, you’re probably going to need an AI-optimized chip. And for voice applications, for example, there might certain specific neural processing chips. And for vision AI, you might need another category.
SE: So how does all of this begin changing the MCU?
Chittipeddi: Originally, you had all these companies that were doing proprietary cores, where you had the hardware and the software to give the customer the whole complete solution. With Arm we have created an ecosystem where you have a more flexible software package. Lately, we have been making progress in MCUs with our RISC-V products, the initial one which we optimized for motor control applications. Now, we’ve introduced RISC-V for voice applications. And the nice thing about it is we can extend that concept into other areas, such as a RISC-V IoT gateway MPU. The transformation on the MCU and MPU side is journey, which over time will accommodate all three cores — the proprietary internal cores, ARM cores, as well as RISC-V cores based on application and region specific needs.
SE: Are there enough commercially available design tools, or do you need to develop them internally?
Chittipeddi: For first pass, we relied on a third-party RISC-V core. But we are developing the RISC-V core ourselves so we can optimize those for what we need.
SE: And if you have the compilers, then the idea is that you can optimize them very quickly, right?
Chittipeddi: Yes, but we don’t have a choice. There are customers that are always going to want handholding and a black-box model, and if you don’t support them, you’re in trouble. But there are customers in other regions of the world that don’t want to pay the Arm royalty. And then you have the customers in geopolitically sensitive areas that are worried about lack of access to IP type of issues. For them, RISC-V is the only open ecosystem out there. So you have to operate in all of these diverse environments.
SE: Is that 7 to 10 years you talked about because things are moving from mechanical to electrical? Or is it because change is happening so quickly, that they need to stay current?
Chittipeddi: It’s the latter. The changes are happening rapidly. And the notion of power efficiency, power consumption, and new systems is becoming far more important to people. They’re recognizing that sustainability is not just a couple of points for the stock price. It has to be a way of life, and that is driving a change in behavior — especially in the industrial segment.