Renesas Grows India Design Centre as CG Power OSAT Partnership Deepens

Renesas Expands India Engineering and Localisation as CG Power Partnership Matures

Renesas Electronics, the Japanese IDM company that supplies microcontrollers, SoCs, and analog and power devices primarily to automotive and industrial customers, is expanding its India engineering centre in Bengaluru in tandem with the maturation of its OSAT joint venture with CG Power and Stars Microelectronics at Sanand, Gujarat. The expanded India team is taking on increased responsibility for pre-silicon verification of automotive microcontroller designs, application software and middleware development for specific Indian automotive platforms, and field application engineering support for Indian automotive OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers. The dual expansion of design responsibility and manufacturing partnership in India reflects Renesas's growing strategic commitment to the country as both a production location and a market.

Design Centre Responsibilities and Indian Engineering Depth

The Bengaluru team's expanded mandate covers verification of Renesas's RL78 and RH850 microcontroller families, which are widely used in automotive body control, powertrain management, and ADAS domain controller applications. Verification is the process of confirming that a chip's RTL description behaves correctly across all specified operating conditions before it is committed to silicon, and it is one of the most engineering-intensive phases of chip development. Renesas is also assigning India-based teams to develop the software libraries, AUTOSAR stacks, and functional safety middleware that automotive customers use to build applications on Renesas microcontrollers, making the Bengaluru centre a supplier of software IP as well as silicon design services. This software development role is particularly valuable because the quality and comprehensiveness of software support is increasingly a key criterion in automotive chip vendor selection decisions.

CG Power Partnership Scale and G2 Implications

As the CG Power joint venture approaches its G2 expansion phase, which targets 14.5 million packaged semiconductor units per day at Sanand, the volume of Renesas products flowing through the facility will increase substantially. Renesas supplies wafers from its Japanese fabs to the Sanand joint venture as bare dice, which are then packaged and tested at the CG Power facility and shipped to customers, completing a supply chain that now has a domestic India packaging step. The G2 expansion increases the share of Renesas's global packaging that flows through the Sanand facility and strengthens the strategic case for Renesas to deepen its India engagement more broadly. The company has indicated it is evaluating whether additional product families beyond the current portfolio of automotive microcontrollers and power devices could be added to the Sanand facility's production programme as G2 capacity becomes available.

India Market Strategy and Localisation

Renesas serves India's automotive and industrial electronics markets through a distribution network and direct sales to major OEM and Tier-1 accounts. The company is developing India-specific application reference designs for EV charging, battery management systems, and motor control applications that are tailored to the requirements of Indian EV manufacturers, whose vehicle architectures and regulatory requirements differ from European and North American markets in ways that affect semiconductor selection. Field application engineers in the expanded Bengaluru team will work directly with Indian OEM engineering teams to deploy these reference designs, reducing the development time required for customers to design Renesas chips into new vehicle programmes. This customer proximity is a standard competitive requirement in the automotive chip market and Renesas's investment in India FAE capacity is necessary to compete effectively against STMicroelectronics, NXP, and Infineon, all of which are similarly expanding their India customer support teams.