The US-based semiconductor company Freescale has been active in bringing innovations and future ready products/ technologies, and these are being showcased here at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) since last two days.

Solutions by Freescale and its ecosystem partners in areas such as smart cities — how to control and save energy of things like traffic and street lights — to Internet of things (IoT) in automobiles, medical and consumer space are all here on showcase. The company has assembled more than 250 technical demos from Freescale and its ecosystem partners, and many of them are expected to come to India as well for FTF India in August.

The company that has four centres in India (Noida, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune), which is also one of the most important and strong research and development locations for the company outside the US. The company has around 1,100 people in India with major numbers in the R&D team.

In an interview with Business Line , Gregg Lowe, President and Chief Executive Officer, Freescale, shares more on India-specific plans and how the country is important for the company. Excerpts:

How is India shaping up for your business, especially with end-consumer devices like mobile and telecommunications companies also growing rapidly?

We have a very large design engineering teams and sales offices too in India. Yes, the telecommunications market is quite good and indigenous companies are growing. Also, the country has presence of many MNCs from Western countries with significant design infrastructure. We have many customers and see immense growth opportunities.

To be honest, today every part in the world has big opportunity for us because the products that we make, for example, microcontroller products could be used in so many different applications — 10s and 1000s of different parameters and applications — so there is lot of growth opportunities.

To emphasise the points, the company has two objectives — topline revenue growth to gain market share — and gross margin growth for good profitability.

The profitability will allow us to reinvest that money back in the R&D, which will allow us to introduce more products, increase market share and margin. So we need to keep growing. Like in 2013 we gained market share as we grew by six per cent and the market grew by 1.9 per cent (globally) in the semiconductor market (minus discreet and memories).

Can you comment on the Mindspeed acquisition deal, which you announced recently?

This is an addition to existing product portfolio —ARM (requiring fewer transistors than typical processors)-based products for communications market — that really fills a gap for us and extends our presence and reach in multiple high-volume segments. We already have a very talented team located in India and they (Mindspeed) are very close to a sight that we have in India.

So, the integration will be relatively straight forward and it will become a part of our networking business. It won’t be a standalone per se and will be integrated in our networking business and will be a great growth opportunity. This will also contribute to our topline growth.

You spoke about Internet of Things going into lot of devices and things in our daily lives. Will you consider of Freescale going into producing such products or devices (white boxes) from only a semiconductor company?

No. We are trying to provide more complete solutions and sometimes we do that with device for managed applications (with partners). But, the expertise in packaging and systems expertise and even the engineering around coming up with something that customers like, is not our focus. We are a chip/ semiconductor company and we are talking about providing more solutions, which includes both hardware and software solutions.

With India implementing policies around fabs manufacturing with subsidies from the Government, do you consider India as a manufacturing centre in future?

We have three manufacturing fabs worldwide — two in Austin, Texas and one in Arizona and we have two assembly operations (in Tianjin, China and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia).

And, we believe that is a good footprint. As we move forward, we will continue to building infrastructure, but anything below 65Nm (chip), we could be outsourcing them because cost of building a chip is prohibitive and that business model is not worth doing it.

The writer is in Texas at the invitation of Freescale

(The writer is in Texas at the invitation of Freescale)

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