Semiconductor industry 2021
Growth during the COVID 19 pandemic
Digitization, electromobility and bandwidth have experienced a significant boost during the pandemic. They will continue to set the trend in the future, Dr. Sailesh Chittipeddi, Executive Vice President & General Manager, IoT & Infrastructure Business Unit, Renesas Electronics, is sure.
One of the biggest trends that we see for this post COVID-19 world is that there is a big push towards more bandwidth consumption. For example, Netflix video consumption, Facebook and other web consumption, and even text messages – all have gone up by nearly double-digit percentages in a matter of months. That has driven up quite a bit of data center spend for the major players like Google and Amazon. And that has been helpful for us because Renesas has a strong presence in power management, timing, and memory interface products.
There has also been an increased focus on healthcare and the environment, whether it's lowering the SpO2 levels or measuring it. There is a correlation between the SpO2 levels and COVID-19 if your oxygen levels drop alarmingly. So, that has also driven interest in our products, especially around bio-sensing, ventilator systems, air purification, air quality monitoring, and at-home self-test kits for COVID-19, which are expected to be widely available by early spring 2021. As part of our corporate-wide efforts, Renesas has prioritized customers and solutions that help society battle this global pandemic.
Another major trend is personal mobility, with the move towards electric vehicles, less polluting activities have taken hold. On the industrial side, certainly smart metering brings more efficient energy consumption. Surveillance and voice user interface (VUI) have been big and will grow as people are moving away from touch buttons. Fundamentally, the push is really towards data-centric, all the way from the front-end to the back-end.
We have also seen increased demand for laptops, and personal computing has really gone up dramatically. Even in the U.S., there are a lot of regions where school children cannot afford a laptop or a notebook. So there has been a big push for Chromebooks, where school districts have been placing big orders from our customers.
Focused investments, fast product launches
In terms of investment, we have emphasised a little bit more on voice and surveillance and trying to get out some of the products a little bit quicker. For example, our 48 V scooter and e-bike solution, which we have pushed forward a little more aggressively than we would have in the past. Same for the ventilator system reference design with Renesas components that can quickly be pieced together to develop a complete solution. Due to the coronavirus, we have focused and accelerated our system solution developments to take advantage of some of the end market trends that we are seeing.
Renesas has launched products at a very high frequency during the COVID-19 crisis, while most other chip suppliers were silent except for a few other brands. We did this because we were trying to make up for lost time. One of the challenges for us was that we were late to launch our Renesas Advanced (RA) 32-bit Arm-based microcontroller family in the 2018 timeframe.
So, we launched that MCU family in October 2019 and followed it up very rapidly with a whole set of RA MCU products and more than 50 ecosystem partners and 30 out-of-the-box solutions. These solutions represented a wide range of enabling technologies, including options for security, voice user interface, graphics, machine learning, and cloud. This allowed us to significantly expand our portfolio and fill-in any gaps, especially around our connectivity portfolio.
Serving customers in challenging times is our priority
One of my messages to Renesas employees has been that customers will always remember how you have served them during challenging times because challenging times always allow for the formation of best relationships, whether it's between people or whether it's between organizations. The one message I have always told people is that this is the time when we have to out-serve the competitors, whether it comes to new products or the supply chain. And we have used that to make a big effort across the organization.
The author
Dr. Sailesh Chittipeddi
became Executive Vice President and General Manager of Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit in July 2019. Before joining Renesas, he served IDT’s Executive Vice President of Global Operations and CTO, with an additional focus on corporate growth and differentiation.
Dr. Chittipeddi holds five degrees, including an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in physics from The Ohio State University. Dr. Chittipeddi has earned 64 U.S. patents related to semiconductor process, package and design, and has had nearly 40 technical articles published.
