NXP accelerates into car connectivity

LONDON – NXP Semiconductors is not the largest automotive chip supplier, but it nevertheless considers itself a leader in the market niches it serves. Now, it is trying to leverage the increasing connectivity in cars that will play to its mixed-signal design and manufacturing strengths.

NXP is not trying to compete head-on with the likes of Renesas in automotive microcontrollers or compete across the breadth of the market with companies like Freescale, Infineon and STMicroelectronics. Instead NXP is choosing a relatively small portion of what in 2011 market watchers reckon was a $23 billion annual market opportunity.

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Even if it is pursuing an opportunity just one ninth the size of the total automotive semiconductor market, as NXP showed in the slide below, it is still an opportunity worth more than $2.5 billion and one that NXP reckons is on a higher long-term growth path.



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Two process technologies that will help NXP are its latest advanced bipolar, CMOS and DMOS process, ABCD9 and its RF-CMOS process, said Drue Freeman, vice president of automotive sales and marketing for NXP. ABCD9 provides monolithic analog, mixed-signal and power transistor capability along with logic with a minimum geometry of 140-nm. The RF-CMOS process is being tweaked to move from 65-nm to 40-nm minimum geometry to allow digital alongside high-performance RF.

Shanghai-based Freeman told EE Times that connectivity solutions already makes up about 70 percent of NXP's automotive sales; which includes car radio ICs and audio systems, PHY chips for in-vehicle networking, chips for keyless entry. The company has legacy business in magnetic sensors for wheel rotation in ABS.


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According to NXP's own estimates its 2011 automotive chips sales were worth at least $960 million with $420 million of that in car entertainment. But the exciting connectivity areas include telematics and car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure (Car-2-X) communications which Freeman said NXP is now well positioned to benefit from.