Japanese semiconductor manufacturer Renesas, a global leader in microcontrollers, analog, power and SoC, is acquiring India’s fabless Steradian Semiconductors. Bengaluru headquartered Steradian is into 4D imaging radar solutions, and the acquisition will help Renesas expand its reach in the radar market and boost automotive and industrial sensing solution offerings. This will be an all-cash deal, expected to close by the end of 2022.

Radars can accurately detect objects over long distances, day or night, even during harsh weather or other adverse environmental conditions. With advancements of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) in the automotive market, the automotive sensor fusion demand is growing to allow precise and accurate object detection of vehicles’ surroundings by combining data from multiple sensors, such as cameras, radar and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). For these reasons, radar is considered an essential sensing technology for ADAS, and the number of radar sensors installed in vehicles is expected to triple over the next five years. Acquiring Steradian’s radar technology will help Renesas expand its automotive product portfolio and cater to such growth potential.

“Radar is an indispensable technology for ADAS, which uses a complex combination of various sensors,” says Hidetoshi Shibata, President and CEO of Renesas. “The addition of Steradian's superb radar technology and engineering talent will allow us to extend our leadership in the automotive segments. We will also leverage their technology for industrial applications to drive our mid- to long-term business growth in both segments,” Shibata said.

Steradian has extensive expertise in radar technology and is operating in the 76-81 GHz band. Its powerful 4D radar transceivers offer a high level of integration in a small form factor and high power efficiency. Renesas will leverage Steradian's design assets and expertise to develop automotive radar products, with plans to start sample shipments by the end of 2022. The company aims to develop complete automotive radar solutions that combine ADAS SoCs (System-on-Chips) for processing radar signals, power management ICs (PMICs), and timing products together with software for object recognition.

"Renesas' industry-leading portfolio of embedded solutions and broad customer base serve as an ideal foundation to maximize Steradian’s radar technology worldwide,” said Gireesh Rajendran, CEO of Steradian. “By working together with the Renesas team, we will continue to develop innovative radar solutions that deliver the high performance, small footprint and low power consumption that our customers desire,” he added. 

Renesas and Steradian have been collaborating since 2018, mainly in industrial applications. Steradian's radar technology is expected to be adopted in home security systems such as surveillance, traffic monitoring for people, cars and motorcycles, HMI (Human-Machine Interface) systems such as gesture recognition and docking systems in airport terminals. Steradian provides targeted solutions for these applications by offering transceiver ICs, turnkey modules that include antennas, and software stacks for object recognition.

Renesas has been actively collaborating in the Indian semiconductor space as well. In June this year, Renesas entered into a strategic partnership with two Tata Group companies - Tata Motors Ltd. (TML) and Tejas Networks Ltd. (Tejas). This strategic partnership will focus on the development of semiconductor solutions for technologies across automotive, IoT and 5G Systems. In addition, Renesas and Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) are also partnering by establishing a Joint System Solution Development Center in Bangalore, which will focus on comprehensive system solutions for the IoT, Infrastructure, Industrial and Automotive segments by leveraging Renesas’ semiconductor solutions and TCS’ industry experience.

Also read: Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta joins hands with Foxconn to manufacture semiconductors

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