Digital India: Freescale to enable smart products

NEW DELHI: US-based semiconductor company Freescale that has R&D facility in India, said that it is enabling its partners to bring smart products to facilitate the government’s Rs1.13 lakh crore Digital India initiative.

Freescale maintains digital networking and automotive R&D centres with a 1,000 strong employee base in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Noida, and offers a plethora of reference designs to enable smart products that leverages sensors, processors and microcontrollers.

The government’s idea of a Digital India has received massive support both from organizations and individuals. "Companies are now investing heavily in this ambitious project,” Freescale India country sales manager Baskar Dhandapani told ET.

"As an industry partner to transform this vision into a reality, we are working with our ecosystem partners and enabling them across categories in digital networking and automotive domains to help them create the compelling smart products for digital era," he said.

To facilitate the government’s idea to move every single citizen to the digital world, fast internet speeds are required to download and upload data, for which the country needs to move beyond 3G to 4G, the executive added.

Since the formation of new government at Centre in May 2014, Freescale feels that the projects such as the National Optic Fibre Network and National Knowledge Network have gathered stream.

The US company sees the ambitious ‘Make for India’ call as a transformational project that could facilitate making for world, although Freescale said it doesn't have any plans to manufacture in India as of now.

“Freescale is not manufacturing in India as of now. With the investments done in the past in our manufacturing sites, we are self-sufficient with the capacity,” Dhandapani said.

In tandem with Digital India umbrella program, Internet of Things ( IoT), is another gigantic opportunity, the company believes.

“Like wearable to monitor health, many other sensors for home and building automation are becoming mainstream. As a result, there is going to be a lot of data,” the Freescale executive said.

Lately, Freescale has helped payments platform company Ezetapp deliver inclusive banking and mobile payment solutions through its Kinetis microcontroller platform.