Interview with Francis Foo, Vice President, Power Management & Multimarket, Infineon Technologies Asia Pacific. Francis is responsible for sales, marketing, business development, Centre of Competence (CoC) and application engineering for Infineon’s PMM Division across Asia Pacific region. Infineon’s Asia Pacific headquarters is based in Singapore with local presence in Australia, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Philippines.
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Please give a short outline about your recent products in Power management?
We are focusing on two main areas – – sensing & power devices. Infineon’s wide range of world-class power, sensor, and security products addresses today’s and tomorrow’s system solutions across power management and sensing applications.
XDP™ facilitates the development and implementation of high performance products with unique features by superior digital control algorithms and a broad flexibility of parameters to optimize the IC for the specific application use case. The digital design of the IC family supports a wide set of use cases for state-of-the-art technology. Easy-to-use development tools simplify the design-in of XDP™ products greatly and we are adding new generation products.
We have added a new member to its CoolMOS P7 family, the 950 V CoolMOS P7 Superjunction MOSFET. The device has been designed to meet more rigorous design requirements for lighting, smart meters, mobile chargers, notebook adapters, AUX power supplies and industrial SMPS applications. This solution delivers improved thermal and efficiency performance while providing a lower bill of materials and reduced production costs.
Our new generation Silicon Microphones XENSIV MEMS microphone IM69D130 has just initiated a new era of digital premium MEMS microphones, overcoming the traditional limitations of the audio signal chain. IM69D130 was designed for use cases that require low intrinsic noise (large SNR), wide dynamic range, low distortion, and a high acoustic overload point. All of this allows for extremely precise speech recognition. The next generation of MEMS microphones from Infineon, featuring a specially encapsulated dual-membrane technology, goes a step further, introducing many new features.
In addition Infineon Technologies is an important supplier of discrete semiconductor devices for the high-reliability community and has an excellent reputation in space community for over 40 years.
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Tell me about your innovative power architecture and your competitive advantage in this?
Our XDPTM digital control family, we are the pioneers in this type of digital power control. We are further continuing to develop new generation innovative digital power controller family. CoolMOSTM SJ MOSFETs, we continue to evolve despite that we have been leaders in this product.
Infineon`s products stand out for their reliability, their quality excellence and their innovative and leading edge technology. Our goal is to create competitive advantages for our customers by driving innovative power architectures, leadership in power density and enabling systems with best cost performance ratio.
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Infineon is shaping the future. Can you please discuss the future trends in PMM industry?
We are observing four mega trends affecting the market and at same time also for Infineon PMM, we are focused on areas such as: energy efficiency, emobility, Big data and IoT.
Energy Efficiency – The challenges of rising demand for energy and growing depletion of fossil resources call for smarter, more efficient ways of generating, transmitting and consuming energy. Semiconductors reduce the energy consumed by electronic devices, enabling systems that make the way we live and work greener. As the global leader in power semiconductors, Infineon’s products and solutions allow energy to be generated more efficiently and from renewable sources.
E-Mobility – Megatrends like demographic shifts, social change and urbanization are accentuating the need to manage rising public and private traffic volumes while mitigating the environmental and climate impact of this traffic. Sustainable, smart mobility solutions are essential given the growing scarcity of natural resources.
Through its semiconductors, Infineon is building more intelligence, responsiveness and autonomy into transport systems – enabling mobility solutions ranging from eBikes through hybrid and fully electric vehicles to underground and high-speed trains.
IoT & Big Data – In today’s digital world, more and more things are connected to the Internet. The volume of data generated, transferred and stored is rising day by day, so too is the need for high-speed and low-latency communication.
With its sensors, controllers, power devices and authentication products, Infineon enables smart, secure and power-efficient IoT solutions for smart devices, homes, cities, factories and vehicles. It provides cutting-edge power solutions for data centers and servers as well as leading RF chipsets supporting mission-critical infrastructures like 5G.
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What are the market segments addressed by Infineon with PMM solutions?
India is very attractive market and our major areas are EV, smart street lighting, UPS inverters, sensor applications like radar sensors, pressure sensors.
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Can you brief on your power management technology and research?
– Infineon Technologies AG is to build a new factory for power semiconductors. The market and technology leader in this segment will thereby create the foundation for long-term, profitable growth. A fully automated chip factory for manufacturing 300-millimeter thin wafers will be constructed at the Villach location in Austria alongside the existing production facility
– New technologies; MOSFET and power semiconductors are now expanding in CoolMOSTM and GaN
– Future for SiC and GaN technologies will complement each other as this will target new applications in addition to our already existing portfolio.
