New Automotive Centre of Excellence founded in Pune to foster automotive research and product development

“Pune has emerged as an important automotive hub in the country and is home to excellent academic institutions on embedded systems. By setting up the first ever Automotive Centre of Excellence in the country for university students, we hope to foster automotive research in the Pune metropolitan area. We want to give I 2 IT students a chance to work closely with customers and OEMs to help them innovate and address market trends at same time,” said Mr. Drue Freeman, Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing, Automotive Business, NXP Semiconductors. “We are especially happy to partner with I 2 IT for this initiative, as it’s one of the few institutes in India which has an exclusive curriculum dedicated for automotive engineering.”

Speaking on the association with NXP, Padmashree Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, Chief Mentor at I 2 IT said, “As a world-class institute, we pride ourselves on giving our students opportunities to work closely with industry. We plan to work with some of the leading companies to allow our students to work on live projects related to automotive domain. We are confident that our association with a leading semiconductors company like NXP will tremendously benefit our students and faculty, specializing in this domain and also create unique opportunity for Industry Institute collaboration.”

NXP and I 2 IT have jointly decided to establish ‘Automotive Centre of Excellence’ (ACE). The center will be used for teaching and working on industry projects in the fields of High Performance Mixed Signal (HPMS) solutions for application in automotive electronics and other industrial domains. ACE at I 2 IT will foster talent, facilitate technology absorption, knowledge generation and focus in chosen domain to develop application and solution for specific markets like India.

Through the Centre, NXP will provide electronic product development facilities for local OEMs and other customers in the region. The ACE will have tools, software, and hardware facilities for specialised automotive electronics domains such as Infotainment, Telematics, Car Access and Immobilisers, In-Vehicle-Networking (IVN), Sensors, and General Purpose semiconductor devices. ACE will also be used to conduct seminars, technology trainings & hands-on workshops in the campus by NXP, I 2 IT and industry experts. NXP will work closely with the I 2 IT to incorporate NXP technology into the academic curriculum to familiarize students & faculty with NXP‘s HPMS product portfolio.

NXP is global market leader in car entertainment, in-vehicle networking, car access and immobilizers. 50 percent of all cars use NXP immobilizers to prevent car theft, one in three cars produced worldwide has an NXP sensor on board, and every brand of car that uses in-vehicle networking features NXP transceivers. Its research and development focuses on CO2 reduction and connected mobility.