Automotive semiconductor manufacturer Renesas Electronics CEO Shibata Yingli said that the current chip shortage is bound to continue until the middle of next year.
The problem, he said, is not a shortage of critical semiconductors, but a lack of minor chips for peripherals. Shibata said people might be surprised by the shortage of secondary chips, and it will take time for demand to ease.
Renesas is one of the top three automotive chip makers in the world, alongside NXP in the Netherlands and Infineon in Germany. Shibata and other industry insiders expect chip shortages to ease around the end of this year but expect sporadic shortages to continue until the middle of next year.
Renesas was founded in 2002 and merged with Hitachi and Mitsubishi's chip divisions. Last year, it created record sales of 993.9 billion yen and an operating profit of 173.8 billion yen, estimated for the first nine months of this year. Sales were 1.1 trillion yen.
Shibata was responsible for a 130 billion yen investment in Renesas when he was an executive at a fund run by the Japanese government and the private sector. Renesas became a major player in the embedded chip market, which is increasingly used in home appliances and automobiles.
Shibata said he hopes to develop Renesas into a major player in the embedded semiconductor market, distinguishing itself from competitors in the memory chip space dominated by South Korea and Taiwan. Renesas' strength, he said, is that it has products and technologies that span the entire semiconductor chip field, not just memory chips.
0 Comments