NXP Semiconductors has inaugurated the Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE) in Pune, India, in association with the International Institute of Information Technology (I2IT). Located at I2IT Pune Campus, this Center of Excellence will provide unique infrastructure and collaboration of the Industry and academia. The center will foster the innovation in the field of automotive electronics and will provide students, faculties, automotive OEMs, automotive sub-assembly suppliers and industries in the region with expert technical support for product development and research activities to address market demands.
In January 2011 the company announced the ‘Anubhav’ initiative that aims to set up state-of-the-art labs at top engineering institutes in India and the Automotive Center of Excellence is the next step towards that goal.
"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 I2IT students a chance to work closely with customers and OEMs to help them innovate and address market trends at the same time," said Drue Freeman, Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing, Automotive Business, NXP Semiconductors. "We are especially happy to partner with I2IT for this initiative, as it's one of the few institutes in India which has an exclusive curriculum dedicated for automotive engineering."
Padmashree Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, Chief Mentor at I2IT added, "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 the 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."
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 specialized automotive electronics domains and will also be used to conduct seminars, technology trainings and hands-on workshops.
