Freescale Semiconductor has opened a major semiconductor R&D facility at East Kilbride in Scotland and has  invested £1.2m  in its Centre of Excellence.  During 2011 ispending went  on major building works and developing key aspects of the  site, including the design and build of a 5,000 sq. ft. New Product Introduction (NPI) test area.

The NPI area houses capital equipment used during product test development, evaluation, characterisation, reliability assessment and qualification of state of the art embedded microcontrollers (MCUs) used in the automotive market. NPI is a critical step  that ensures controller 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 inthe automotive market and the creation of the new CoE recognizes this valuable contribution,” said Alan Campbell, (right) senior VP and CFO  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,  as the single chip solution for high performance graphics dashboards, emission control and fuel efficiency products as well as 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 has also joint research programmes with the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow looking at multicore design and driver assistance systems technologies. 

The R&D facility is situated on the site of the former East Kilbride manufacturing plant set up  by Motorola in 1969.  Freescale was spun off in 2004 and  which discontinued manufacturing at the site in 2009.