Renesas Electronics recently announced the acquisition of Steradian and the reopening of its Kofu factory. Further elaborating on that context, Vivek Bhan, Senior Vice President, and Deputy GM of the Automotive Solutions Business Unit at Renesas in an exclusive interaction with TimesTech Media shares about the acquisition of Steradian, production of IGBT at their new Kofu factory, ADAS and EV strategy.
Fostering ADAS Focus
Calling Radar a hot market, Vivek said, “Radar itself is a growing field. And in general, the adoption of radar with ADAS is a very hot market right now.”
Highlighting the growth and the market trends around radar-based solutions. Vivek said, “The number and the demand of radar-based solutions are going to grow significantly, expected to triple in the next five years. So, it’s a very major growth segment in ADAS. And we can combine acquiring Steradian’s capability with other capabilities that we have in Renesas, which allows us to provide more comprehensive sensor solutions to the market.”
The Strategic Steradian Acquisition
Explaining Renesas’ activity on the ADAS, Vivek Bhan said, “Automotive ADAS, in general, is expanding very, very quickly. As part of it, solutions and multiple sensor fusion technologies come together. One of the key technologies for ADAS, for detection and ranging, is radar systems. Along with other technologies that are also in play, which are camera-based detection as well as LIDAR and ultrasonic, the acquisition that I’m going to talk about allows us the ability to provide radar-based solutions and expand our capabilities for sensor fusion technologies.
Adoption of Radar With ADAS
Steradian is based in Bangalore, India. It was founded in 2016. Gireesh Rajendran is the CEO of Steradian. Steradian has very strong expertise in radar systems, including hardware, semiconductors, understanding of the overall system and the software SDK that is needed for radar systems. They are leader in 4D millimeter wave radar, which are important components of sensor solutions for both automotive and industrial markets.
Explaining Renesas’ interest and reason to acquire Steradian, Vivek added, “The reason why we are interested in Steradian is because their technology for Radar offers high power efficiency and integration in a very small form factor. These features are exciting from a total solution perspective.
“In addition to ADAS, radar is also of interest for industrial applications for areas like home security, for traffic monitoring, for human-machine interface and so forth. After the acquisition, we will have the capability to offer radar solutions both for automotive and industrial areas,” he further said.
Renesas expects this acquisition to be completed before the end of 2022.
Renesas wants to further expand its capability through the acquisition of the assets and the team from Steradian. “It allows us to get technology for radar transceivers as well as the software SDK needed for radar. With those technologies obtained through the acquisition, we can strengthen existing product portfolios and technologies, including ADAS SoCs, Power management IC that supply power to the SoC and other parts of the system, pre-regulators, timing ICs. As a combination of what we have and what we acquire, we can offer complete system solutions to the market.”, said Vivek.
Renesas is planning to start shipments of Radar Transceivers to their customers in 2023 and start sampling by the end of 2022.
Improved Technology Offering of IGBT
There has been significant growth in the adoption of electric vehicles, which is well known in the market. And as part of the adoption of EVs, there is significant growth in power semiconductors. A section of that power semiconductor growth is reflected in the growth of IGBT devices in the market.
Talking about Renesas’ improved technology offering for IGBT as well as the company’s investment for capacity for IGBT devices going forward, Vivek said, “We have been very focused on improving the performance, reducing power loss and also reducing the size of the semiconductors that we make. By doing those things, we are able to build traction inverters that are smaller in size and highly efficient in terms of their power capabilities.”
What is AE5 and Renesas Bid
Renesas is building a new process called AE5 which improves power loss by approximately 10%. The new A5 process is based on the optimizations that Renesas has done, allowing them to deliver semiconductors and solutions which are 10% smaller.
In addition to these parameters, Vivek said, “We have worked to improve the technology so that their parametric variations over different conditions are minimized and for multiple solutions where IGBTs are run in parallel. We have improved performance and safety of those products when they get integrated into modules.”
“These improvements in terms of inverter performance, efficiency, smaller size, greater design flexibility provides a very strong foundation for our growth into power portion that is driven by IGBT.”, he further added.
Addressing Chip Shortage With New 300-Millimeter Fab
Due to some of the demand-supply issues recently in semiconductors, Renesas is building a new 300-millimeter fab at Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. That will be up and running first half of 2024. Renesas will start production of AE5 devices first at their 200-millimeter and 300-millimeter lines at Naka factory from the first half of 2023 then it will add more capacity with the Kofu factory when it’s running in 2024.
“We have invested about 90 billion yen to start the Kofu factory and it will add a significant capacity to the volume of IGBT that we can deliver to the market and as well as correlate to the growth that we see in the EV market in general.”, added Vivek.
