INTERVIEW DR. SAILESH CHITTIPEDDI
Taking technology
to the next level
Dr. Sailesh Chittipeddi, Executive VP & GM of Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit talks
mega trends, market opportunities and product roadmaps with Neil Tyler
Appointed Executive VP and General Manager of Renesas’
IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit back in July 2019, Dr.
Sailesh Chittipeddi has responsibility for the company’s
IoT, industrial and infrastructure business at a time when
the industry is not only having to handle the impact of Covid-19, but
having to adapt rapidly to address new opportunities - such as the
increased need for telecommuting solutions, remote healthcare,
greater environmental awareness and e-AI.
Then there are the mega trends that are driving growth, whether
that’s data centre disaggregation, the ramping up of 5G or the
accelerating movement of intelligence to the edge.
“On top of all of that Renesas has changed significantly in the
past few years,” says Dr Chittipeddi. “I joined when Renesas acquired
IDT back in 2018, two years after the acquisition of Intersil. In two
short years the company has been restructured and we’ve been pretty
successful in accelerating product development across the entire
portfolio.”
Acquisitions, particularly those by large Japanese companies,
haven’t always had a great track record but Renesas appears to have
bucked that trend.
“We made the decision to split the business into automotive and
non-auto, for which I have responsibility. In general the non-auto
business moves a lot quicker and our customers’ design cycles are
certainly shorter. The new structure has provided a sound platform
enabling us to react to market trends much more quickly,” says Dr
Chittipeddi.
“From a R&D and business perspective we’ve successfully
repositioned our portfolio to address an increasingly data centric
world. There are still issues that need to be addressed - the supply
chain is still centralised and we’re using internal factories for our
MCU, MPU and analogue devices. We need to look at using external
foundries as new technologies are developed and if we want to
continue to drive design-in momentum.”
The challenges associated with the clash between the US and
China is another issue. Dr Chittipeddi makes the point that Renesas’
R&D efforts are well distributed globally, although he concedes
that some divisions – power and analogue, for example – are more
exposed than others.
“In the UK we have a big presence, in terms of R&D, in both
analogue and power and are likely to increase investment there. But
we have a strong presence globally and our focus has to be on serving
our customers.”
Dr Chittipeddi accepts that international politics and trade disputes
are challenging. “I have to hope that this is a phase that we’re going
through and that things will become more settled in the years ahead.
“China is a very important market and has made significant
advances in artificial intelligence – it would be a shame if the global
market ended up fragmenting.”
Global technology trends
When it comes to technology trends, Dr Chittipeddi identifies three
key ones.
“When it comes to data centres there’s a growing realisation that
it’s not just CPU performance or memory that’s the limiting factor, it’s
actually the interconnect that is becoming more important. The break
up and the virtualisation of the network is accelerating and is now a
firmly established trend. That’s going to lead to memory pooling, as
well as processor and storage clusters, so the role of the interconnect
is becoming more important.”
From the company’s perspective that trend works to its advantage
as Renesas is all about “timing and interconnect technologies.”
“We are seeing the move from DDR4 to DDR5 and looking beyond
that, to the CPU and GPU break-up. You are going to have to adjust
data centre workloads in future - that will become more critical
going forward. Chip architectures will also have to be quite different
depending on the sector and the associated workloads.
“Another area of interest is memory and there’s an emerging new
class that now plays between DRAM and NAND Flash. People are
looking for a compromise between these two and I believe that once
the software support has been developed to a point when there will be
enough momentum, then that is a trend that will gain more traction in
terms of the data centre.”
14 13 October 2020 www.newelectronics.co.uk
/www.newelectronics.co.uk