According to Nikkei Asia, Renesas Electronics executive Sailesh Chittipeddi said in an interview that the company manufactures most of the chips in its own fab, but advanced process nodes will be outsourced to foundries such as TSMC.

"For the longer term, as you move to more advanced nodes, we will have to rely on third parties," Sailesh Chittipeddi told Nikkei Asia. The company can only produce chips with a transistor size of 40 nanometers or larger, a level considered a mature technology in the chip industry. "We have to rely on foundry partners for anything finer geometry than 40nm," he said.

"We diversify our chip outsourcing and will not rely on one region or one country to supply our products." He added.

Chittipeddi is responsible for the company's non-automotive business, which accounts for more than half of Renesas Electronics' revenue and two-thirds of the company's profits. The company has been actively diversifying into areas other than automotive chips, completing three multi-billion dollar acquisitions in four years - Intersil in 2017, Integrated Device Technology in 2019, and Dialog Semiconductor in 2021. These acquisitions helped Renesas Electronics become a global chip manufacturer.

"Our global competitiveness is stronger than ever before. In the past, we only focused on a very narrow market segment." Chittipeddi said.

For many years, Renesas has focused on the stable but low-margin market of automotive analog chips. Its main competitors are large companies in the analog chip market such as Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and Analog Devices. However, Chittipeddi emphasized that Renesas’ goal is not to compete head-on with these giant in the market, and that the company will still focus on niche market segments.