Renesas exploring local production of chipset developed in partnership with TCS

Semiconductor company Renesas is exploring local production of chipsets that the company is developing in partnership with leading software company TCS, a senior official of the company said. Last month, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Renesas Electronics Corporation (Renesas) opened a joint Innovation Center in Bengaluru and Hyderabad to jointly develop semiconductor chipsets for wireless technologies, industrial technologies etc for the global market.

Renesas, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit, Sailesh Chittipeddi told PTI that the collaboration is on the lines of “Make in India to make for the world”.

“Partnership with TCS will start bearing fruit in 2 years in the form of semiconductor chipsets and system solutions for both Indian and global markets. We aim to explore pathways to locally produce these chips as part of the Make in India initiative with partnerships,” Chittipeddi said.

Renesas gets most of its semiconductor made through third party electronic chip plants which are then processed into System on Chip (SoC). The SoC integrates multiple computing functions on a single chipsets like processing unit, memory, graphics etc.

Renesas is the largest microcontroller and third-largest automotive semiconductor company globally as per market research firm Gartner.

The Japanese semiconductor company will develop SoCs with TCS initially for 4G, 5G telecom networks and industrial technologies.

“The hardware part will come from us. We will work jointly on the firmware. Software and other stack will come from TCS,” Chittipeddi said.

TCS and state-run C-DoT led consortium has bagged a contract to deploy 4G and 5G technologies in BSNL network.

“We are starting first in the telecom space in partnership with Tejas and Saankhya. Simultaneously there are other things that are going on in the area of industrial applications,” Chittipeddi said.

Semiconductor company Saankhya Labs was acquired by Tata group’s telecom gear maker Tejas Network last year.

Renesas at present has partnership with Chennai-based SPEL Semiconductor for assembly of its chipsets and Bengaluru-based Tessolve Semiconductors for design of the chipsets.

Chittipeddi said assembly and testing companies will come up faster and before semiconductor manufacturing plants.

He said that Renesas is in talks with other semiconductor assembly and testing companies in India as well besides existing partners.