Zero defects in four years: Infineon receives highest quality award from Toyota’s Hirose Plant

unich, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan – 27 April 2018 – Achieving zero defects in automobile electronics is becoming increasingly important in light of many new functionalities such as automated driving. Today Infineon Technologies AG (FSE: IFX/OTCQX: IFNNY) received an award from Toyota for continuously outstanding product quality: The automaker’s Hirose plant presented its Honor Quality Award to the Munich-based chip maker for its CAN transceivers – devices that enable various electronic control units (ECU) in the car to exchange data.

“Automotive chips from Infineon are designed from the start to meet the demanding requirements of car applications,” said Frank Auer, Head of Quality Management for the Power Supply and Network ICs business line at Infineon. Together with Masayuki Takazawa, Head of Quality Management at Infineon Japan, he represented Infineon at the award ceremony. “We also integrate the latest findings in order to continually improve even established products along with their production processes,” said Auer. In addition, Infineon ensures its ability to supply by offering most wafer and packaging technologies from multiple locations.

“Reliability and flawless product quality are particularly important in Japan,” said Takazawa. “That’s one of the reasons why we have continuously gained market share in recent years.” According to the market research firm Strategy Analytics, Infineon rose from fifth to fourth place on the list of the largest automotive semiconductor suppliers in Japan in 2017. “The award from Toyota’s Hirose Plant strengthens our commitment to quality leadership,” said Takazawa.

The Toyota Hirose Plant regularly honors suppliers for their quality. Infineon supplies transceivers for the controller area network (CAN) in vehicles to the plant. Various ECUs in the car use this network to communicate with each other for things such as drivetrain, safety and convenience functions.

This is the tenth time that Infineon has received an award from the Toyota Hirose Plant for flawless quality. With four consecutive zero-defect years, the company now qualified for the highest award level, Honor Quality Award, for the second time in its 16-year history as a supplier to the plant.

Infineon has been developing and producing network ICs for automotive applications for over 20 years and is today one of the leading producers worldwide. The company offers a comprehensive portfolio of standard and OEM-specific products that covers various bus segments such as CAN FD, CAN with Partial Networking, classical CAN, LIN, and FlexRay. For the latest CAN FD protocol variant with 5 Mbps, Infineon offers TLE925x transceivers as per ISO11898-2:2016 as well as system basis chips (SBC) in the TLE9278 Multi-CAN Power-SBC family. The TC3xx multi-core microcontrollers in the AURIX™ family have up to 12 CAN FD channels that comply with ISO11898-1:2015.

Picture: Frank Auer, Head of Quality Management for the Power Supply and Network ICs business line at Infineon: “Automotive chips from Infineon are designed from the start to meet the demanding requirements of car applications.”