U.S designers watch out: Renesas signals may influence you

There’s nothing subliminal about Renesas’s strategy: With an emphasis on automotive, cloud computing and social infrastructure and ‘green’ industries, it is aggressively out to influence the influencers - -- those 80% of design decision makers that reside outside of Japan, primarily in America.

But don’t narrow your filters too much just yet: based on the discussions, technology and design activity on display at DevCon this week, from smart energy, wireless, sensors, touch control, displays and haptic feedback, to development kits, books, contract manufacturers and other tools to help you get started, this is a message you may want to tune into.

Speaking at the opening keynote on Monday, Dan Mahoney, Renesas’s president and CEO, said that the overarching strategy is, “to develop system-level solutions for target market segments,” and to that end it is marshalling  its sales, development, marketing and distribution channels, globally.

“Sixty seven percent of our staff is marketing, application engineers and development engineers,” he said. Pinpointing distribution and a sharp focus on “the long tail”, he added that 80 percent of the company’s business comes from 32 customers in the U.S. “We want to replace that with thousands of longtail customers in the U.S.,” and to help with that the company has cut its distribution channels from 10 to four, “for focus,” he added.

That focus and depth is epitomized, in many ways, by the company’s deepening partnership with the likes of Avnet and Arrow, partnerships that dovetail nicely with the company’s surging emphasis on global support and what could be termed point-of-load execution. “Customers can now access a seamless distribution channel wherever they operate,” he said.

In the context of cloud computing, Mahoney also went out of his way to talk up the Renesas purchase of Nokia’s wireless modem division.

“This acquisition will make connectivity our middle name,” he said.

Technology to support strategy
To support the strategy, the company is relying, among other things, upon its strength in microcontrollers, coupled with a renewed emphasis on analog and power. While Tad Keeley, a senior director at Renesas, acknowledges analog and power may have taken a back seat relative to microcontrollers,  that’s about to change.  For more on Renesas’s push in this area, see Dylan McGrath’s report: Renesas eyes growth in analog ICs.

In the meantime, the microcontroller group is not standing still and Renesas believes overall reliability and support will be its calling card. For example, in the case of the V850, Mahoney said the company has moved from measuring failure rates in parts per million, to parts per billion. “To capture the vanishing failure rates,” he said.

This reliability factor cannot be underestimated as Renesas prepares to put the squeeze on Freescale, which dominates in automotive-based MCU applications, especially under the hood. It is also banking on its MONOS memory technology, vs. SST-based flash, as a differentiator in terms of scalability, speed and power consumption, according to Jim Trent, vice president of Renesas’s automotive business unit.

To underscore its microcontroller expertise, the company used DevCon to talk up the RX architecture that it announced nine months ago, while also announcing a new site to help designers select the right MCU and get the necessary community and technical support. For more on that, and its possible implications, see: Renesas simplifies MCU selection: What now for independents?

According to Ritesh Tyagi, Renesas’s director of MCU products and solutions marketing, the new RX MCU platform enables 20 to 30% improvement in processing efficiency for the same code. In many ways, he said, it’s not so much about power as how fast it can execute (though the two are clearly related.)

Biz plus buzz = success
While Renesas is clearly intent on using DevCon to clarify its business and technology plans, it didn’t waste the chance to combine biz with buzz: The show floor was bopping with innovation that not only served to underscore its commitment to technology, but also its mantra that support for the ecosystem was paramount.

Some highlights:

• Support: Micriµm’s table was standing room only, and not just because it was next to the food. It announced a new edition of its muC/OS-III book with 200 new pages devoted to the Renesas RX.
• Touch Control: Move over CapSense! (Atmel).  Renesas showed off its capacitive touch control technology that it licensed from Omron and is now implemented as a dedicated Sensor Control Unit embedded in its MCUs. The SCU is ‘just another peripheral’ but off-loads the touch processing from the MCU, to enable to either go into sleep mode or do other tasks.
• Touch Feedback (haptics): Immersion Corporation showcased its haptic-feedback TouchSense 2000 platform. If you haven’t seen it (or touched it), it’s just plain cool! It uses a single vibrating motor to provide the feedback, but the trick is to distribute the vibration evenly across all the keys. A good analogy might be the even distribution of light for a backlit display from a point source like an LED. The $1,300 Libretto W100 uses the technology.
• Smart Energy: Renesas put on a full-fledged home-automation and smart energy scaled-down model display, complete with dolls. One key point about its approach to smart meter architecture is that  the metering itself should be treated separately. The rest of the system is where the MCU comes in, controlling the communications, memory and of course security. All three are constantly in flux and are where differentiation truly resides for the OEM.
• Wireless: Redpine Signals (why doesn’t Renesas just buy them already?) was showing of a new starter kit combining 802.11n Wi-Fi with Renesas’s R8/RXN MCUs.
• Displays: 3-D was a hit! See more on the company’s Horizontally Double Density Pixel (HDDP) technology, and much – much more -- on Brian Fuller’s on-going live blog from the DevCon floor.