70 miles northeast of Tokyo, belongs to Renesas Electronics, which supplies about 40 percent of the world market for those crucial chips, known as automobile microcontrollers.
automobile industry has evolved in the digital era, microcontrollers are usually customized for each car model.
Renesas is that it is the product of mergers involving three Japanese semiconductor companies. Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric merged their semiconductor operations in 2003 to form Renesas Technology. Then, last April, Renesas Technology merged with NEC Electronics, the former semiconductor division of NEC, to form the current company, Renesas Electronics.
Renesas’s main competitors include Freescale Semiconductor and STMicroelectronics.
microcontrollers are different in small but important ways,” said Tom Starnes, an analyst at Objective Analysis, a technology research firm. “That makes it very difficult to switch to alternate suppliers, at least not quickly.” Switching could take six months or more, analysts say. …highly customized software that provides instructions for the various chips. From automaker to automaker, “there’s no software compatibility
the long term, automakers will probably spread their bets more to other major suppliers,” said Egil Juliussen, an auto electronics analyst at IHS iSuppli, a research firm. “And there will be more reason to push the industry standardization efforts
Renesas in Japan Scrambles to Make a Critical Car Chip - NYTimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment