The UK arm of a major Japanese chip maker, built on the former Dialog Semiconductor, with engineering sites in Reading and Swindon that design power and mixed-signal chips.
Renesas is one of the world's larger semiconductor companies, and its UK operation grew out of Dialog Semiconductor. Renesas's own job pages describe microcontrollers, system-on-chip products and analogue and power products for automotive, industrial, infrastructure and Internet of Things markets. Dialog, which designed integrated circuits for managing power in mobile devices and for Bluetooth and audio, was bought by Renesas in 2021 and is now part of it. The chips are designed in the UK and made by outside factories.
Dialog was created in 1985 as IMP (UK) Limited, the European arm of an American chip firm, and later became part of a German group before becoming independent in 1998. Wikipedia describes it as an Anglo-German company with its operational headquarters in Reading, UK. For years its power management chips were supplied to Apple. Renesas's job pages state a mission of "To Make Our Lives Easier" and a culture it calls TAGIE: transparent, agile, global, innovative and entrepreneurial. The company says it has roughly 21,000 employees in more than 30 countries.
In the UK, a 2021 regional business article called Dialog a Swindon and Reading-based chip maker, with about 250 staff at sites in Reading, Swindon and Edinburgh out of more than 2,000 people across 15 countries. About 77% of its employees at that time worked in engineering functions. A current Renesas job listing is based in Swindon, in a Central Engineering Organisation that builds common chip-design methods and software tool flows. We have not checked which UK sites are still open or what current UK headcount is, so use those figures as 2021 snapshots.
Culture information is limited to what Renesas says in its job listings: its TAGIE values, and an emphasis on a global team. Dialog's chief executive during the 2021 sale was Dr Jalal Bagherli. We did not find a UK-specific culture page or staff stories, so you may want to ask about the day-to-day working life of UK engineers if you meet the team at a careers fair or university event.
The UK teams hold mostly engineering roles. The listing we read was for a digital methodology engineer, who works on the tools and processes other chip designers use. Others include analogue and digital circuit designers, verification engineers, process engineers, software and firmware engineers, and operations staff. A degree in electronics, physics, maths or computer science is the usual route, and internships in microelectronics have been advertised in Swindon.
Website: www.renesas.com
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