The Hindu Business Line : Logs into product development

Rene Penning de Vries is the Senior Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer of the Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors. Innovation and technology are his two key areas, in addition to overseeing the product creation processes.

In an exclusive interview to eWorld, de Vries talks about the company’s R&D initiatives in the Indian context and the scarcity of skilled radio frequency engineers.

Excerpts:

Could you tell us about your R&D initiatives in India? Has the R&D spend changed as a result of the downturn?

In spite of the downturn, as a company NXP Semiconductors spends around $800 million a year on R&D. Thus, funding is not an issue for us.

It is about finding the right match between the technology and the skillset of the R&D team. Moreover, we are trying to move from being an IP house to explore more product development opportunities.

Keeping in line with that, our projects are smaller and localised with more of application-driven content. In India, we have around 700 people in our research centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore. And, we expect this number to move up.

Given the kind of high-end specialised work done in your R&D centres, what are the kind of skill sets that you require? And how easy or difficult is it to get the right match in the Indian context?

Our skillset needs are very specific, almost ‘craftsmanship’-like.

The engineer needs to understand details of silicon, electronic behaviour, designing and so on, which are skill sets not possessed by many. The people we require are radio frequency engineers with more than five years of experience. Unfortunately, there are not many good RF engineers around.

Don’t you think that this calls for closer interaction between academia and the industry?

We are in the process of talking to some educational institutes. Our plan is not to co-develop curriculum with them but to work in projects jointly so that students are able to get exposure to the latest in technology.

It helps them realise the skill sets they need to possess to intern with us. We work closely with IIT Madras, IISc, and other local colleges.

It may be recalled that the first very-large-scale integration or VLSI program was co-founded by Philips Semiconductors (which was later rechristened NXP) in IIT Delhi.

Does NXP have any plans of establishing a manufacturing hub in India?

As of now there are no such plans. We generally have two kinds of factories — the System-on-a-chip (SoC) ones and the ‘More than Moore Factories’ where we are able to do more of application-based products. (‘More than Moore’ is a concept that reaches beyond the boundaries of conventional semiconductor technologies and focuses on creating high value micro/nanoelectronics systems.)

These factories need not be high-tech and can use the existing 8-inch, 120-nm technology.

Then there are big SoC factories which require huge capital investments. For ‘more than Moore’ we will go fabless and use the foundries of the world.

adith@thehindu.co.in

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