CYPRESS 3.0 strategy is gradually gaining momentum

Cypress has been in China for 21 years. In 2017, its global sales reached US$2.33 billion, of which sales in China accounted for about 40% of the global total. 

Cypress launched the CYPRESS 3.0 strategy in 2016. Under the leadership of new president and CEO Hassane El-Khoury, it focused on high-growth areas such as the Internet of Things, automotive electronics, and Industry 4.0, and began to invest more resources in the world's fastest-growing market, China.

Cypress has a leading position in many market segments, including: the world's number one in automotive instrument panel MCU; the world's number one in WiFi+Bluetooth combination solutions; the world's number one in automotive-grade human-machine interface (touch) solutions; the world's number one in automotive NOR flash memory solutions; the world's number one in USB Type-C connection and fast charging solutions, and so on.

Recently, Cypress held a media communication meeting in Beijing. Wen Junpei, Asia Pacific Marketing Director of Cypress Semiconductor's Automotive Electronics Division, Lin Ming, China Marketing Director of the IoT Computing and Wireless Division, and Cao Min, China Marketing Manager of the Storage Division, attended the meeting and shared with EEWorld reporters the digitalization/intelligentization trends and industry development prospects in the fields of automobiles, industry, communications, medical care, the Internet of Things, consumer electronics, and the key points and application cases of Cypress's product solutions.

Wen Junpei, Marketing Director, Asia Pacific, Automotive Electronics Division, Cypress Semiconductor

Lin Ming, Marketing Director of China Region, IoT Computing and Wireless Business Unit, Cypress Semiconductor

Cao Min, China Marketing Manager of Cypress Semiconductor's Storage Division, attended

Four major trends and six major opportunities in the automotive field

Mr. Wen Junpei first introduced: "At present, there are four major transformation trends in the automotive field: one is high connectivity; two is driving automation; three is human-machine interaction; and four is electric drive. These transformation trends are closely related to semiconductors."

"There will be more and more electronic control units (ECUs) inside cars, which are connected to form a small network for communication and computing. People and cars will have a lot of connections and interactions through voice, mobile apps, etc., such as waking up the car facilities through voice and opening the car door through mobile apps. People use the car's networking function to access content services such as movies and videos, and drivers and passengers can share the content on their personal devices on the car screen for other people to enjoy. The car stays connected to the outside environment, charges, and realizes autonomous driving."

"In this way, cars have changed from mechanized means of transportation to intelligent living spaces. With a large number of connections, a large amount of data, and a large amount of computing, the demand for semiconductors will continue to grow. According to estimates, in 2018, the semiconductor content of a car accounted for about US$300 to US$1,000. By 2023, the semiconductor content of a car will account for US$400 to US$1,500. From 2018 to 2023, compared with the overall semiconductor market compound growth rate of only about 2%, the annual compound growth rate of automotive semiconductors will reach 7%."

From Cypress's perspective, it can provide automotive-grade Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/Bluetooth low energy, and USB connections for cars, as well as automotive-grade microcontrollers (MCUs), human-computer interaction solutions, and storage products, and has a very large market space.

An important strategy of Cypress in the automotive market is to provide scalable platform solutions, deliver a full range of chip products, provide automotive-grade, high-quality components, and allow customers to reuse software. A set of software can be used for entry-level to high-end configurations, for several generations of models, and even for different brand series of a manufacturer. To this end, Cypress will invest $60 million to $100 million in each platform to create mature products and greatly reduce risks.

Regarding solutions, Mr. Wen Junpei continued: "In the global automotive market, Cypress's product solutions have six major opportunities: First, the instrument cluster MCU market, Cypress's Traveo II currently has a market share of 37%, and the potential market opportunity in the future is about $1 billion per year. Second, in the body MCU market, Cypress currently has a market share of 7%, and the potential opportunity in the future is estimated to reach $1.7 billion per year. Third, in the field of HMI human-machine interaction, Cypress's MCU market share is 46%, and the business opportunity in this field is estimated to reach $31 per vehicle in 2023. Fourth, in the storage field, Cypress's NOR flash memory currently has a market share of nearly 70%, which is recognized by all autonomous driving platforms and all autonomous driving processors. 50% of autonomous driving platforms fully use Cypress. The business opportunity in this field is estimated to reach $45 per vehicle in 2023. Fifth, in wireless connection, Cypress currently has a market share of 34%. The business opportunity in this field is estimated to reach $33 per vehicle in 2023. Sixth, in the field of wired connection, USB-C charging will be popular in cars, and Cypress's USB-C chip business opportunities will gradually increase to $6 per vehicle by 2023. "

Another trump card of Cypress in the Internet of Everything (IoT)

In the PC era, the number of connected devices was at the level of 100 million, in the broadband network era, it was at the level of 500 million, in the smartphone era, it was at the level of 1 billion, and now in the IoT era, the number of connected devices is at the level of 10 billion. The market space is huge, and Cypress decided to seize this opportunity.

Mr. Lin Ming said: "From the perspective of IoT, Cypress divides semiconductor demand into four aspects: connectivity, computing, human-computer interaction, and software. Connectivity is Cypress's primary opportunity in this field. Because as mentioned earlier, Cypress has advantages in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy, and USB-C wired connections."

In terms of IoT cloud computing, Cypress divides it into two sub-sectors: one is the application field that requires a microcontroller, with Cypress PSOC as the main product; the other is the human-computer interaction field, which is aimed at touch devices, wearable devices, mobile phones, digital cameras, smart speakers, voice-controlled devices, etc. In addition to MCU, Cypress can also provide touch chips, touch screen chips, voice processing chips and other solutions.

In terms of software, Cypress provides customers with IoT development kits, allowing customers to quickly develop their own applications. Cypress provides a software package called ModusToolbox, which combines the functions of Cypress PSOC's programming tool PSOC Creator and wireless connection development tool WICED, making it convenient for IoT customers to use. Cypress provides a rich middleware suite that supports Amazon's microcontroller operating system FreeRTOS and Alibaba's IoT operating system AliOS Things, making it easy to connect to Amazon Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. ModusToolbox puts all these middleware and drivers on the open source platform GitHub for customer convenience.

Safety and reliability: Cypress's features and advantages

Memory chips are Cypress's earliest flagship products. When Cypress was founded in 1982, it appeared as a memory chip supplier. The memory chips provided by Cypress are not the storage used in consumer electronics such as mobile phones and notebooks. Such products are usually provided by companies such as Samsung and Toshiba. Cypress mainly provides highly reliable, low-power, and durable industrial-grade storage, and provides the industry's most comprehensive storage product portfolio, covering NOR Flash, SRAM, NVRAM, eNVM, etc.

Mr. Cao Min pointed out: "Cypress's memory chips are in an absolute leading market position in many segments. For example, all mainstream automotive electronics manufacturers including Continental, Harman, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Bosch, etc. have cooperated with Cypress; well-known industrial automation manufacturers such as Hikvision, Rockwell, Honeywell, Schneider, ABB, etc., network and communication manufacturers such as Huawei, ZTE, Brocade, Ericsson, Cisco, Fujitsu, Agilent, etc., as well as Dell, HP, IBM, Boeing, Microsoft, Canon, Toshiba, etc., are all using Cypress's memory chips. In some market segments, Cypress's market share even exceeds 90%."

"Industry and other professional fields have special requirements for safety, reliability and durability. Cars cannot be affected by chip problems when starting and driving, let alone safety accidents. Once a communication base station is installed, it needs to operate 24/7, especially base stations installed in environments like Mount Everest. They must not fail within their service life. Chips used in pacemakers must be able to operate stably until the end of the patient's life. Extreme cold, high temperature, corrosion, impact, and power saving are all tests that chips must withstand in industrial environments."

"In this regard, Cypress's products, led by storage, provide a product portfolio of exceptional security, reliability, and durability. Cypress's storage products have a PPM assessment indicator, which is the number of defective products in 1 million pieces. Taking Cypress's automotive NOR flash memory as an example, this indicator was 4 in the fourth quarter of 2015, and has shown a downward trend in recent years, falling below 1 in the fourth quarter of 2017. The goal for 2019 is to fall below 0.5. Because of its reliable product quality, Cypress won the Toyota Motor Best Supplier Award."