Innovation

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Innovation

Innovation | Products and Solutions

Renesas’ Strategy for Sustainable Technology

Automotive, Infrastructure and Industrial IoT industries have experienced rapid changes in recent years, such as Connected, Autonomous, Shared & Services, Electric (CASE) vehicles and Digital Transformation (DX). In addition, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed our lifestyles, accelerating a paradigm shift globally.

At Renesas, one of our core businesses provides products and innovation that contribute to a sustainable society and sectors that are critical to people’s work and daily lives, such as automotive, factory automation (FA), communication infrastructure, medical care, and healthcare. Specifically, Renesas invests in product development and technological innovation with a focus on the power efficient solutions and other solutions that make people’s lives safe and secure. We have also defined our four core technologies to support our sustainable products and solutions. We have developed and implemented an action plan including periodic reporting to the board, evaluation, and corrective actions.

To this end, Renesas invested a total of 220 billion yen (non-GAPP basis, equivalent to approximately 15% of total sales) in research and development in 2023. In order to strengthen our existing business and advance technological capabilities, we plan to make the same level of investment in research and development in coming years.

Renesas’ Technological Innovation

Renesas has identified four key technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Safety & Security, Digital & Analog & Power Solution, and Cloud Native.

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• Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is an important technology for enhancing computing power to meet the emerging social needs of an automated, data-centric world.
• Safety & Security: It is the foundation of mission-critical applications that realize a safe and secure society.
• Digital & Analog & Power Solution: As automation and IoT advance various sensor technologies and human interfaces, Digital & Analog & Power Solution enable more optimized and integrated implementations in which the brain (digital) controls the nerves (analog).
• Cloud Native: It is a technology that uses low-latency real-time control and communication to facilitate cloud services on the end-point devices. Embedded systems become valuable by connecting to the cloud and running cloud services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Renesas was one of the first semiconductor suppliers to introduce flexible, scalable embedded artificial intelligence (e-AI) into the end-point devices. We are providing intelligence to the end-point devices in order to realize a safe and secure lifestyle and an environmentally friendly smart society.

Energy-Efficient Computing with AI

Renesas is a proven provider of energy-efficient AI computing solutions for automotive and industrial applications.

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In the automotive field, our company's R-Car SoC, which enables AI implementation with a stereo front camera, employs a heterogeneous architecture that enables energy-efficient, state-of-the-art deep learning while balancing peak performance. Renesas provides solutions for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving (AD) to enable flexible design for Tier 1 and OEMs.

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In the industrial sector, RZ/V series MPUs address real-time AI processing needs for human and object recognition in applications such as surveillance cameras, product scanners, and point-of-sale (POS) terminal cameras. The series features our company's unique Visual Optimization AI Accelerator, Dynamic Reconfigurable Processors (DRP-AI). Because DRP-AI is dynamically reconfigurable, it can flexibly meet requirements such as face recognition, context recognition, and object recognition as a multimodal AI.

Our company also provides DRP-AI Translator, a dedicated development tool that simplifies the implementation of learned AI models. Examples of AI applications based on object recognition include smart shopping cart systems that perform automatic tabulation, industrial robots to work safely with humans, and medical cameras that support physician diagnosis. 

Click here to learn more about Renesas' AI technology.

Safety & Security

Renesas meets the growing need for safety and security in connected products. Our company's safety and security technologies are designed to meet the industry's highest ISO/IEC reliability and performance standards, providing solutions that help our customers feel more secure in a world where everything is virtual.

Building "Root of Trust" with Safety and Security Technologies

With 1 billion connected devices worldwide and growing demand for services, there is a huge demand for robust safety and security. From road, car, home safety, and product from manufacturing to consumption, connected devices improve the way we work and live by providing valuable measurement data. Our company uses safety and security technologies to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data and to reduce the risk of breakdowns and cybersecurity. We provide comprehensive functional safety and security support for mission-critical applications to help our customers build robust systems.
 

Click here for Renesas' safety technology.
Click here for Renesas' security technology.

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Our company provides robust safety and security for many industries, including IoT, factory and building automation, consumer electronics, and robotics. In addition to supporting application-specific safety standards such as IEC61508, we have established a "Root of Trust" to meet the needs of the target business and market and provide security solutions based on it.

As one of the world's leading automotive semiconductor suppliers, our company has actively participated in the ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434 working groups and led the development of functional safety and security technologies for automotive systems. Leveraging our automobile-related experience and core competencies, we are actively proposing new system solutions that can meet our customers' functional safety and security needs.

Digital & Analog & Power Solution

Renesas offers an attractive solution that maximizes system efficiency and performance while reducing power consumption, number of components, and BOM costs through the synergy of its complementary product portfolio of analog + power + embedded processing. These comprehensive systems solutions reduce your time to design and commercialize and ultimately contribute to sustainable development and reduced environmental impact worldwide.

Easy-to-Use, One-Stop Solutions

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To date, Renesas has developed more than 330 winning combinations, and the number continues to grow every day. Customers can use these attractive product combinations to accelerate development schedules and accelerate time-to-market. These product portfolio combinations focus on a variety of applications, including industry, infrastructure, automotive, and consumer industries, providing a variety of solutions to many customers and partners around the world. Renesas' Winning Combinations help reduce the number of components used on Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and reduce our customers’ development costs and timeframes.
 

Cloud Native

Cloud Native technology enables cloud services to run smoothly on endpoint devices. To enable Cloud Native embedded devices, system solutions must incorporate advanced software and IT technologies. Renesas is working with cloud providers in a variety of industries to develop cloud-specific core technologies such as safety, security, connectivity, and human machine interface (HMI), and is working on partnerships to do so.

Innovation through Collaboration

Renesas provides a variety of embedded systems and IoT cloud solutions in collaboration with cloud service partners. The published source code includes a middleware stack that supports secure connections with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and third-party MQTT brokers. Our company will continue to work closely with its cloud services partners to provide optimal solutions for your systems.

Renesas Partner Program and Consortium

Renesas offers two partner programs: the hardware-focused Renesas Preferred Partner Program and the software-focused Renesas Ready Partner Network. Renesas offers system and solution partners in a number of genres that make Renesas products ideal for use. We also have consortia that specialize in specific fields, such as automotive and industrial sectors.

Please visit respective product websites to learn more about our company's partner programs and consortium activities.

Active Participation in the Open-Source Software (OSS) Community

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The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium dedicated to promoting Linux growth and collaborating on OSS. Our company has long been a gold member of the Linux Foundation, contributing to open-source development. Renesas is also a Platinum member of the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) and Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) projects.

Renesas’ contributions to the Linux Foundation not only help customers quickly set up community OSS assets, but also help them find highly-skilled engineers from local suppliers. Through the Linux Foundation, our company is committed to sharing innovation and working with the broader community to continue its efforts to ensure the trust and security of OSS for engineers around the world.

Innovation Focus 1 (ISSCC 2023)

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Renesas' innovative technologies in the automotive and IoT markets were adopted at ISSCC 2023 in the following papers. We hope that these results presented at ISSCC will contribute to the global green transformation through power efficiency and intelligence. Thanks to the adoption of these two papers, Renesas has been listed as one of nine global companies that have adopted two or more papers.

Automotive:
“A 33kDMIPS 6.4W Vehicle Communication Gateway Processor Achieving 10Gbps/W Network Routing, 40ms CAN Bus Start Up and 1.4mW Standby Power”
(Authors: Kenichi Shimada, Keiichiro Sano, Kazuki Fukuoka, Hiroshi Morita, Masayuki Daito, Tatsuya Kamei, Hiroyuki Hamasaki, Yasuhisa Shimazaki, Renesas Electronics, Kodaira, Japan.)

IoT:
“Single Chip, Qi Compliant,40W Wireless Power Transmission Controller using RMS Coil Current Sensing and Adaptive ZVS for 4dB EMI and up to 1.7% Efficiency Improvements”
(Authors: Filippo Neri, Fabio Di Fazio, Giovanni Figliozzi, Jure Menart, Marcin Augustyniak, Renesas Electronics, Zürich, Switzerland/ Gus Mehas, Amit Bavisi, Turev Acar, Renesas Electronics, San Jose, CA)

Innovation Focus 2 (AEK 2021 Keynote Speech)

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Renesas Chief Technology Officer, Shinichi Yoshioka, was invited to speak remotely at Automobil-Elektronik Kongress's 25th anniversary international conference (Stuttgart, November 17, 2021), which brought together experts in the field of car electronics, mainly from Europe.

"The automotive industry on its way to the software-defined car" was set as the theme of the event, and participants discussed the software-first megatrends that are coming to the automobile industry. Renesas emphasizes the importance of promoting the cooperative design of hardware and software, and highlights three key technological contributions through the simultaneous evolution of hardware and software.

• “Easy to Develop” for front-loading software design
• “Easy to Abstract” for hardware agnostic software platform
• “Easy to Scale” for enriching applications and services

Contributing to SDGs

The Renesas Group's innovation initiatives contribute to the following Sustainable Development Goals.

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SDG 9.5 "Promote scientific research and enhance technical capacity in the industrial sector in all countries, including developing countries, by promoting innovation by 2030, substantially increasing the number of R&D workers per 1 million people, and increasing public and private R&D spending."