Renesas Electronics has crossed 1,000 employees in India and will open a new office in Pune later this year, expanding its work in automotive, industrial and physical artificial intelligence applications, company president Malini Narayanamoorthi said. Pune will serve as a strategic location for the Japanese semiconductor company’s automotive business.
The company currently has operations in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Noida. The Pune office is expected to support solutions and system development for automotive applications, including technologies for electric two-wheelers and four-wheelers.
“We’ll do a fair bit of our solutions and system development for automotive from Pune,” Narayanamoorthi, President of Renesas Electronics India and Vice President, Renesas, said. The expansion adds to Pune’s role in automotive engineering and technology development, although the company did not disclose the size of the proposed office or its planned investment.
Renesas is focusing on locally developed semiconductor solutions that can make automotive systems more cost-efficient for the Indian market. One area of development involves combining functions such as motor control, DC-DC conversion and over-voltage protection into a single microcontroller.
“In a motorbike, five different functions can be combined into one microcontroller and optimised. Such innovation can only happen in India. This also means less weight, more efficiency, and a lower cost,” Narayanamoorthi said. She added that the company had built a system solution by combining and modularising functions used in a two-wheeler, potentially reducing the number of chips required.
The company is also applying its automotive design and development capabilities to industrial applications and physical AI. India-based teams are involved in the development of advanced chips, with a 3-nanometre chip largely developed at Renesas’ Noida site and system development carried out from Bengaluru.
The chip has been taped out and is now being sampled by customers, according to Narayanamoorthi. It is designed to consolidate several functions associated with software-defined vehicles, including entertainment, gateways and vehicle control, into a single chip.
Renesas is expanding its manufacturing presence in India through CG Semi, its semiconductor packaging venture. The company’s mini outsourced semiconductor assembly and test facility in Sanand, Gujarat, has entered commercial production with an annual capacity of about 300 million units.
The main Sanand facility, which is under construction, is expected to reach an annual capacity of 4 billion units. Renesas expects to move to the main facility next year, Narayanamoorthi said. The company did not provide further details on the facility’s investment value or workforce plans.
The expansion links Renesas’ India operations across design, system development and semiconductor manufacturing. While Pune is being positioned around automotive solutions, Noida and Bengaluru are contributing to chip and system development, and Sanand is becoming the company’s manufacturing base in the country.
