Respond to the challenges of the market Ying Ying executives interpret business architecture

Infineon (Infineon) awfully busy recently, in the face of strong offensive competitors, the company announced plans to split its business logic and memory chip and other departments. The day before, the Infineon Corporation responsible for the automotive, industrial and multi market business executive vice president Peter Bauer to accept the "EE Times" interview, the interpretation of how to rebuild the market risk withstand Infineon business architecture.

Automotive electronics market: the war to the backyard, remain calm in the face

Recently announced to fly think of Carle (Freescale) and STMicroelectronics (ST) alliance in the automotive electronics market, the war to the German chip maker's backyard, Bauer was very calm. Although the two companies have agreed to jointly produce PowerPC and SoC micro controller based on Infineon TriCore architecture have a certain impact, but Bauer believes that the core market is difficult to shake the Infineon customer final purchase decision factors based on function and price, rather than if this product has second sources of supply.

Bauer said, "when customers in the selection of micro controller, Bosch, SIEMENS VDO and Magneti Marelli, is the mainstream market standard. If (ST and Carle) to provide the same products to the market, the price war is inevitable."

Interestingly, STMicroelectronics and Infineon have similar contractual arrangements. The Italian joint venture chipmaker Infineon manufacturing technology license according to the 16 controller, although the specific terms of the contract and fly think of Carle PowerPC are different. The license is restricted to the kernel, and STMicroelectronics uses its own technology in the peripheral unit.

SIM card market: limited applications, large capacity will not become mainstream

In addition, held recently at the Embedded World trade exhibition, Spansion company also give Infineon the weakness of a heavy blow. The company has decided to integrate flash memory into other suppliers of SIM cards, looking forward to open large capacity micro storage module market applications.

But according to Bauer, whether the SIM card needs a few megabytes of storage capacity is also very difficult to say. Infineon positioning itself in the world's largest SIM card supplier, but has not yet seen the market demand for large capacity SIM card. Now most of the SIN card capacity is 64Kbytes, Infineon currently provides the maximum capacity of 400kbytes. And Bauer pointed out that the large capacity SIM card chip only a small part of the market."

Bauer feel SIM card for digital cameras, mobile phone and other multimedia storage devices, is not the best. Especially for mobile applications, will face digital rights management (DRM), content distribution management and content protection storage and many other issues. Bauer said, "even if some applications can use the SIM card security mechanism, but the storage capacity of data in the standard flash media implementation will be the better choice." In addition, he also said that the SIM card for the trusted platform module (TPM) is not the best choice, the module should be integrated into the phone motherboard.

Semiconductor: stripped memory business, logic chip production capacity

Manufacturing in the semiconductor, Infineon is taking the logic chip manufacturing to Fab light (fab-lite) conversion strategy, and stripped of its memory business.

Now, because the manufacturing process of memory successfully migrate to the logic chip manufacturing, manufacturing logic chip Fab possible in the original production of memory. When asked about the impact of Bauer stripping memory business said, "in some factories, manufacturing logic and memory chip production line will co-exist for a period of time, such as in Dresden (Dresden) 200 mm fab."

Manufacturing base continues to expand at the same time, Infineon power electronics, analog and mixed signal components. The company is building a wafer fab in Malaysia, specializing in the production of chips and discrete devices.

Bauer said that in the foreseeable future, for investment in production equipment has sufficient capacity to bring logic chip products. I do not have the resources for the production of logic products insomnia."