Renesas Executive Briefing
October 22, 2012, Renesas DevCon, Anaheim, CA—The senior executives described the efforts and results in the company since their acquisition of the NEC assets. They noted that the third DevCon had more attendees and 36 percent of those people were not from existing customers. They heralded their increasing number and value of ecosystem partners.
The company is resilient. It has the technology and commitment to innovation needed to do well in the midst of economic turmoil and uncertainty. Now, they are working on implementing their vision on making the whole world smarter through more electronics. These electronics will be in cars, homes, communications, health, and industrial products. All of these areas need microcontrollers and apps to implement and improve their functions and reduce power.
Renesas has an overall 27 percent market share. In automotive products their share is 42 percent, in general products it’s 28 percent, 17 percent in consumer, and 25 percent in computers and peripherals. To enable better market performance, they are restructuring their microprocessor/microcontroller lines from 5 families to 3 to address three general sectors; high performance, extreme, and low power. The MUC families are geared for specific ranges of performance.
The high-performance RZ family is now based upon ARM cores for applications that need high-speed data processing and operate the Linux OS. The RZ family can have up to 10 MB of RAM on-chip, which may eliminate external RAM. The RZ/A series focuses on man-machine interfaces and supports Open VG 1.1. The RZ/N series is made for connectivity. It has GigE and USB 3.0 interfaces for high-speed data transfers.
The RX series integrates flash with a 32-bit MCU for high-performance, general-purpose computing. The low-power version has as little as 8 KB of memory for low costs and power.
The processors are now in their 40 nm process and include between 8 KB and 8 MB of flash memory on chip. They also added TSMC as a foundry source for their products. Over time, they will port the products to their coming 28 nm process and hope to realize performance increases of 34 percent, power reductions of 28 percent, and increased integration, reliability, and longer retention for the memories.
In the automotive segments, they offer products for power train control, chassis and safety, analog, and communications. The F series MCUs are intended for the body electronics, and support all major communications protocols.
Their power devices include IGBJTs and MOS devices and can operate at voltages up to 1250 volts. Some processing techniques allow for thinner wafers for better heat dissipation, and the super junction MOS devices have deep trenches and integrated diodes for faster switching in operation at up to 600 V. They have integrated silicon carbide FETs with the bipolar transistors for very high voltage operation.
For lower power applications, they offer the RL 78 family. This product line offers 56 percent lower power than its predecessor in operating mode. In standby, it reduces power by 84 percent, and in sleep mode the power is reduced by 90 percent. As a demonstration, they powered the MCU with copper and zinc strips in a lemon. They also tried apples, tomatoes, and oranges as power sources. They will be looking into other energy harvesting capabilities over time from sources like ambient radio, from WiFi antenna.
The smart analog products are configurable analog building blocks in a programmable fabric. The mix of MCUs and programmable analog enables faster prototyping and configuration. The combination allows for in-field recalibration and tuning. The increased integration reduces total package footprints and the programmable power function can reduce power consumption by up to 20 percent over a discrete implementation. Web-based design tools enable fast developments and can access a library of circuits and function block models.
They are developing new business strategies to go along with their new product lines. Their automotive focus and smart consumer products will be their mainstays. They released over 450 products in the last two years. Their products will be based on scalable processes such as their embedded flash. The monolithic integration affords higher density and their split-gate architecture reduces power while improving noise margins.
New products will focus on functional performance in the MCUs and MPUs. As seen in the new microprocessor and controllers, they are working on power, performance, and general purpose functions. they will continue to expand the families with higher clock frequencies while expanding performance and low power operations.
Integrating various disparate functions will continue to be their charter, as the higher integration offers reduced power and higher performance. Offerings in safety and security will appear soon and other areas like lighting, metering, and capacitive touch are available now.
The merger integration is almost complete, with one more year to finish all the tasks. They trimmed product lines and processes in the fabs, while adding TSMC as a supplier to realign fab capabilities. The NEC ASIC business is still on-going, with MCU and analog SoC devices in production. These products are infrastructure and industrial focused, and not for consumers, because the business units have a long-term focus.
The SH mobile lines have moved to become apps processors. They bought wireless from Nokia to get a handset-related platform. Mobile and communications are changing technologies, so Renesas is changing to become a mobile company with navigation, smart phones, etc. as drivers for product categories.
