Embedding Intelligence Into Everyday Date:   Wednesday , February 09, 2011 With recession finally giving way to economy revival, what is the outlook for the semiconductor industry? In 2009, every industry including especially the semiconductor faced stiff challenges A huge respite came the governments that injected large sums to fuel the demand during the second half of 2009. In U.S. there was the “cash for clunker” program by Obama government under which General Motors received a huge investment to revive automobile industry. Due to this, the U.S. the car sale was almost up by 30 percent. Similalry, the Chinese government invested a lot of money in second half of 2009 to roll out their own 3G standard called TDS-CDMA. There was $20 billion worth of capital expense done by China Telecom and China Unicom to buy that new generation network, so that telecom things started moving by the end of last year beginning of this year. Since Indian semiconductor industry is not much export oriented, it revived as the industry stabilized globally. Even though some pockets of Europe continue to struggle, generally Europe was a market is back to the road. Currently the semiconductor industry is up by 25 – 35 percent this year globally. The consumer market is witnessing a sudden spurge with the Notepads, Netbooks, Tablets, Smartphones, 3D HDTVs and more. Where does Freescale position itself? Freescale does not play purely in the HDTV market though we do have peripheral components for the next generation remotes of the LED or 3D TVs. Philips, Samsung Electronics, Sony Corporation and Panasonic have joined forces to develop a standardized specification for radio frequency-based remote controls for audio visual consumer electronics devices. Working with Freescale Semiconductors, OKI and Texas Instruments, the seven companies have formed the RF4CE (Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics) Consortium to create a new protocol that will enable the development of radio frequency remote controls that deliver richer communication, increased reliability and more flexible use. Tablets are an area of heavy interest to us and that is where our partnership with ARM comes into the picture. ARM is positioning one of their high end processor as alternate to X86 platform for the tablet market and while we build several of our chips based on their architecture, we have done a lot of IP in it too. We made two chips called i.mx 51 and i.mx 53, these will allow videos to be played in the tablet’s hardware without the support of any additional software and the chip requires very low power. So once the tablet is charged it runs anywhere from 8 – 10 hours depending on what you are doing. It also brings down the booting time of the Android or Linux run tabletsto less than 25 seconds. Next year several tablets with Freescale chips are expected to be launched globally and a global top brand is building a tablet for Indian market with us. While we worked in the 3G modem space earlier, we exited the business in 2008. At present our focus is on the Smartphone segment. Many smartphones use an additional ARM processor which runs all the operating systems, the fancy graphics and more. Our chips are currently being used in some of the models of BlackBerry and Motorola. There is a huge smart phone industry based in China and we are working with several Chinese vendors. Most smartphones today have a motion sensor which allows you to change a picture from landscape to portrait mode or if it is a game, the actions are based on the motions one makes such as shaking it to throw a dice and so on. Very few companies develop this and the one we do is the 3D accelerometer sensor. What are the new trends? The trend is definitely “low cost and low power”. To achieve this, the semiconductor industry is doing more and more integration with the chip. Earlier a phone would have five chips but now it has come down to three. The ultimate goal is to have a single chip per device, so that the design of the board and the software becomes very simple. This trend is today known as System on a Chip (SOC) integration that is driving the consumer space, where low price, low power and small size is the key. In high performance product segment like 3G, 4G base station the requirement is low power, low price but high performance which is driving the trend of multi-core processors, where one chip has multiple processors. How many is optimal or practical is yet to be proven but Freescale believes an eight core processor is very practical today and had already begun shipping these processors to various customers in 2010 and hope to increase the volume this year. How is Freescale positioned in India? Our company is divided into four regions, America, Europe, Japan and Asia. On business perspective Freescale India is part of the APAC. India contributes to roughly 5 percent of our Asia revenue. Though comparatively small, the share is rapidly growing. But more than just sales, the India center is involved in designing of chips that get used by conglomerates across the world. Hence, a Freescale chip sold in Latin America may add to the revenue in that geography but it would be designed in India. We call it design win; we won the design here and getting the revenue somewhere else. The design win of India center is much bigger than its revenues. What are the plans for the immediate future? In India, Freescale is eyeing 30 to 40 percent revenue growth annually. We are focusing tremendously at automotive electronics and are in deep engagement with Tata, Mahindra, Bajaj and TVS; understanding their requirements. There is a concept that is being tried in auto industry known as ‘start stop systems’. The idea is if you stop at a signal for more than certain seconds the car engine stops automatically and starts back the moment accelerator is pushed. During this period everything is being powered by the battery and Freescale is developing a unique chip for Lead-acid battery management system for the Indian automotive industry. Then we did another unique chip for car speedometer. We are also in talks for infotainment, which is unique to this market and have done body computers in collaboration with Tata motors for the recently launched Tata Aria. We are also focusing on industrial side with UPS, inverter, energy meters, and more. Smart metering is a good initiating we are taking. A few of the Indian companies will launch smart meter that are tamper proof and if someone tries to tamper with the meter it will record date and time in which the tampering was done and the electricity board can give a generic bill from that date onwards. Any chip that we supply is programmable so basically we are embedding intelligence in the devices. As told to Hari Anil