NXP to rage on high performance mixed signal space

BANGALORE, INDIA: Neeraj Paliwal, vice president and SoC design manager, NXP Semiconductors shares the company's roadmap during an interview with Akanksha Prasad and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: Neeraj, you have taken over as NXP Semiconductor's country manager recently from Rajeev Mehtani. What are your plans?

Neeraj Paliwal: NXP, as a company, is going through a transformation in 2009 to become a high performance mix-signal (HPMS) company. As far as the India design centre is concerned, we play a major role in NXP's strategy, i.e. HPMS.

When we started out in India as Philips Semiconductors, we began as an R&D outsourcing centre in Bangalore. Then we moved down to product development.

From India design centre, now we are moving to product creation centre, and in this process we need ownership and engagement from the local leadership team as well as the engagement knowing the customers what the customers need and designing products whether it is in mix-signal domain, analog or RF domain.

So, moving forward to 2009-2010, we are looking forward to having more examples like Tata BP, where we can have product creation right from here in Bangalore.

CIOL: In a recent report you have said that NXP will be concentrating more on its core competencies. And has also divested some of its segment like wireless, analog, digital TV and set-top-box segments. Could you just elaborate on that?

NP: Yes, we have a clear strategy to move towards HPMS. The areas that we have divested, such as MNP, and Trident, are complex system-on-chip domains. NXP has made a clear decision to move away from the complex system-on-chip (SoC) business.

We have created power play leadership position with Trident for their consumer business and set-top-box and we stay fully focused on our strategy to move towards HPMS and the remaining businesses such as automotive, identification and standard products.

CIOL: In another report you have also said that you see a huge demand coming from India for smart cards. Can you also tell us more about a few projects that you have undertaken?

NP: Yes; see in India we strongly believe that we are on the right track. There is a big opportunity in smart card as well as in general when you look into different things for any country. And in a country like India, with a huge population, what we need is basic infrastructure where the database of all people is stored and similar to the UID project which Mr. Nilekani is taking on.

And once we have the database ready, there are many opportunities for various government departments, for example healthcare, or driver's license DMV. All these departments will start using the database that UID will create and start issuing some sort of smart cards to handle the transaction as well as to better control some of the things like safety and security of citizens here in India or its delivery of social programmes.

So we do anticipate a huge demand in India and our estimate is that in the next three years there could be a demand of about 50 million pieces of smart cards in these areas.

CIOL: How do you look at the Indian market and what are the trends that you see in the market today?

NP: As per the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) report, Indian Semiconductor is anywhere from two to four per cent of the global semiconductor market. We started out with about 1.2 per cent about four to five years ago.

Moreover, market share of India is growing when compared to globally. We look at the global semiconductor market somewhere close to 225 billion to 250 billion.

As per the latest reports from ISA, Indian semiconductor market will be close to 7.8 billion in 2010, and that is a significant piece of pie.

Moreover, if you look at how strong the growth has been in last one year in China, I see India at the same situation ten years from now. That is why companies like NXP are fully focused on growing not only it R&D outsourced capacity in India but also products creation that they can do in India for the markets in emerging economies.

CIOL: Can you also tell about the role that the India centre will be playing in the development of ultra high frequency chips?

NP: Ultra high frequency (UHF) is just one area of the HPMS. I would say India has a strong role to play in the identification as well as the HPMS markets. In 2010 we are moving with our strategy in HPMS and are also looking at India for growth opportunity and possibly becoming a hub for creating low cost product for the identification as well as for the HPMS areas.

When we say HPMS what we mean is, if you take an example of base stations, we all know that ten years ago having a mobile phone that can do voice talk was a big deal in India. Now we are all talking about 3G coming to India, and with 3G, there will be a lot of data transfer from A to B or among all these connected devices.

So with a population of one billion plus you can just imagine how many base-stations you would need to handle this kind of data. NXP is the world leader with new technology RFLD mass to create solutions that take the least power to deliver these things because what's happening is the data that is flowing between base-stations is exponentially increasing and with it the energy consumption in all these areas also increase. So the NXP's technology will help with the HPMS focus in bringing the power consumption down and bringing innovation to RF and analog domains.

CIOL: NXP recently tied up with Tata BP Solar Pvt Ltd. Can you tell us more about this joint venture?

NP: This is really exciting for us, as this is the first time we are doing it with a large Indian company like Tata with the global presence. We are building a strong partnership where we have a range of products in solar and the whole system that we are looking at starting with charge controllers going all the way to various products that we can do in partnership.

And this is really a key to us as an example to replicate with other countries within Tata and other companies in India. We are looking forward to it and hope to have our first products launched together sometime in next year.