"Freescale is doubling its patent filing in the next two years"

EDN Asia recently spoke to Sumit Sadana, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Freescale Semconductor, Inc., which was spun out of Motorola two years ago and is charting out its independent path. Sadana talks about major issues affecting Freescale and the semiconductor industry. Excerpts:

What trends does Freescale foresee in the semiconductor industry?

Answer: The industry is heading towards consolidation, with customers asking for fullscale solution. Small companies will be taken over. Freescale plans to take over companies that can add value. We are looking at opportunities from Intellectual Property perspective. The industry growth rate during the last decade was at 16 percent. Such high growth rate will not be sustained any more because the industry has matured. In this decade we expect a growth rate of 10 percent. The earlier growth was driven by enterprise computing and infrastructure. But now the growth will come from mass markets, like consumer markets. In these markets pricing pressure is high and product cycle is small. To meet these new challenges, companies are moving more towards partnerships. Freescale has partnerships with STMicro, Philips and TSMC. The trend towards partnerships is aided by complexities of process and power technologies. Node transition in the past was easy; now it is extremely complicated.

How is Freescale positioned to meet these new challenges?

Answer: Freescale is focusing on developing highest performance products with lowest power consumption. In networking segment, our PowerQuicc products have been the leader in offering such characteristics. Though the sweet spot for this product is 130nm process node, we are offering 90nm also, and moving towards 65nm. In automotive segment, we are the no.1 supplier of semiconductors in the world, bringing tremendous level of functional capabilities. When we separated from Motorola we had 4.900 patent families. Freescale is doubling its patent filing in the next two years. For achieving this goal, we are entering into patent cross-filing deal with other companies, including ones bigger than us. We were the first to come out with a multicore programmable DSPs. Multicore programmability offers a way of delivering higher performance without increasing power or frequency. In the last two decades frequency improvement meant performance improvement. Going along the same curve is no more valid. Innovative design techniques, not higher frequency, are the key to reach higher performance. Freescale has mastered the technology. The architectural evolution of PowerPC is towards multicore.

How do multicore chips affect applications?

Answer: The effort is to make applications indifferent to multicore. If this is not done, too much investment will be required on changing softwares. Operating systems, however, will need to be changed. Majority of applications may not require multicore. Only those at the higher end will need this processing capability. For instance, editing movies and playing sophisticated video games will require dual core. Networking and security will most likely use dual core. Many of the most popular applications of today, such as word processing, will not need multicore.

How has Apple’s decision to use Intel chips affected Freescale?

Answer: About 3 percent of Freescale’s revenue comes from Apple. This revenue will be affected. But the impact is manageable.


What design activities are Freescale planning in Asia?

Answer: We are making India the biggest design center outside the US, with activities in wireless, networking and transportation. The hardware facility at oida, currently focused on semiconductor chip development, has designed chips at 90nm node that have been first-time right. This is a rare success. The software design center at Bangalore will become the nuclear of software design activities for the entire company. This design center is currently involved in protocol software for wireless handset market. Now there are some 200 engineers at our design centers in Bangalore and Noida. In two years there will be over 1,000.

You can reach Kirtimaya Varma at kirti.varma@rbi-asia.com