News Article
Freescale opens R&D Centre in East Kilbride
Freescale Semiconductor announced the formal opening of its newly established Research and Development Centre of Excellence (CoE) in East Kilbride, Scotland. This leading edge R&D program employs more than 170 highly skilled employees primarily involved in the development of new products for Freescale's automotive customers worldwide. A significant part of the team is also focused on the networking and industrial markets.
Freescale has invested during 2011 on major building works and developing key aspects of the East Kilbride site, including the design and build of a 5,000 sq. ft. New Product Introduction (NPI) test area. The NPI area accommodates capital equipment used during the product test development, evaluation, characterisation, reliability assessment and qualification of state of the art embedded microcontrollers (MCUs) used in the automotive market segment. NPI is a critical step in the semiconductor industry that ensures products are launched on schedule with the highest level of quality.
"The East Kilbride team has been key to our success in establishing a strong and established legacy in the automotive market and the creation of the new CoE recognizes this valuable contribution," said Alan Campbell, senior vice president and chief financial officer for Freescale. "Freescale's world class portfolio of MCUs continues to be adopted by the leading vehicle OEM's around the world, such as BMW, Mercedes, Audi, General Motors, Ford and Honda. These products enable greater levels of comfort, safety and enhanced entertainment options in the car as well as improving fuel efficiency and reducing emissions.
The East Kilbride teams recently played an instrumental role in the market launch of several key automotive products, such as the single chip solution for high performance graphics dashboards, emission control and fuel efficiency products and several active safety applications such as airbag, chassis control and radar based driving assistance systems.
The primary mission for the East Kilbride team is MCU development for the automotive market. Additional R&D activity is split between networking and Industrial focused teams. There is a close collaboration between the teams resulting in high profile projects such as Connected Car and the Industrial Communication Platform.
The Centre of Excellence will enable further collaboration across teams to investigate new projects, explore prospective and emerging business areas, and enable new market opportunities for the company worldwide.
