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April 13, 2023

STMicroelectronics transforms research and development, manufacturing, supply chain, and internal processes with Azure

STMicroelectronics believes technology can unlock capabilities to grow its business and streamline its processes. The company is always looking for ways to be more innovative and stay ahead of future trends. By utilizing Microsoft Azure high-performance computing and other Microsoft technologies, the organization is advancing its research and development, transforming its supply chain, scaling manufacturing, and giving its employees the right tools to secure its position as a world leader in semiconductor solutions.

STMicroelectronics

“Technology is evolving fast. The value we get with Microsoft as a pioneer in this technology evolution is the capability to grow and having the right team to support our roadmap.”

Matteo Barbazza, Chief Digital Officer, STMicroelectronics

A need to innovate for the future

A global high-tech company that creates semiconductor technologies, STMicroelectronics boasts a powerful brand statement: “We create semiconductor technologies that make sustainable change possible.” The company designs and manufactures microchips that go into everything from mobile phones and computers to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. “You probably have a lot of our products in your pocket, in your car, in your home without even knowing it,” says Chouaib Rokbi, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development, Digital Transformation and IT at STMicroelectronics. “You will not see our name on these products, but our products are in the big brands that everybody knows.”

The company believes technology can unlock solutions to today's most complex social and environmental challenges to create smarter and greener products across industries. “Technology plays a key role in helping to solve environmental and social challenges,” says Rokbi. “That is why our semiconductor technologies start with our employees, our customers, and our partners. Together, we design and build products, solutions, and ecosystems that support a more sustainable future.”

To continue making sustainable change possible, semiconductor manufacturers need to innovate to keep pace with technology transformation across other industries—automotive electrification solutions; digitalization solutions to make driving smarter and safer; power and energy management solutions to address increasing global energy demand while reducing environmental impact; and IoT transformation and big data solutions to make reliable technologies accessible for companies across the globe.

“In the semiconductor industry, you need to be recognized as innovative,” says Matteo Barbazza, Chief Digital Officer at STMicroelectronics. “Building a chip is extremely complicated from design to production. Our supply chain is very complex because we have close to 13,000 products, and we have hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. The demand for semiconductors is increasing a lot.”

As STMicroelectronics looked toward the future, the company recognized the need to transform its technology infrastructure to meet its goals for growth and innovation—including the technology managing its supply chain and driving its research and development efforts. “When we started this journey, our goal was to outgrow our market by two times,” says Rokbi. “What we’ve been doing over the past five years by expanding into other markets has been meeting that goal, but we wanted to find other ways to continue that pace over the next five years.”

“We want to grow from $16 billion in revenue in 2022 to $20 billion between 2025 and 2027,” says Barbazza. “So, what we’ve been looking at is how digital transformation can help enable this. We need to inject productivity, which means automation, robotization, and intelligence via our data platform.”

Microsoft technologies pave the way for innovation

With semiconductor demand increasing day after day across the industry, STMicroelectronics knew it would be challenging to keep pace with its growth without the right technology in place to support tracking and streamlining the supply chain, advancing research and development, and empowering employees to be more effective. “Digitalization is extremely important because it allows us to be faster, more efficient, and consume fewer resources,” says Rokbi. “Our goal is to serve our customers at the highest standard possible by matching supply with demand.”

STMicroelectronics looked to Microsoft to help build solutions for future growth—SAP on Azure for supply chain and demand forecasting, Microsoft Azure high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate research and development, and Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Power Platform to help its employees to work more efficiently. 

“The problem we were facing with our supply chain was that our products were in high demand,” says Rokbi. “But we were putting the wrong products on the shelves. Stocking strategies that worked 20 years ago were fine, but in 2020, we needed to adapt to a more volatile world. We needed a technology solution that would enable us to move from a zero-stock philosophy to one that put the right stock in the right place.”

“The tremendous quantity of transaction data in SAP for our product inventory was problematic,” says Barbazza. “Now that SAP is in Azure, we are able to process a high volume of transactions with much more granularity, which allows us to be more flexible in our supply chain.” 

“With SAP on Azure, we can access the inventory data that gives us visibility to see where the demand is going and which market we want to serve,” says Rokbi. “It's impossible to accomplish this without being at the edge of this digitalization because of the massive data we have to handle.”

In addition to transforming its supply chain, STMicroelectronics has worked with Microsoft to advance research and development. Microsoft brought in industry and product experts to identify needs and help architect solutions. The company developed governance policies to manage continuous engagement, feedback, improvement, and innovation for the future. 

“We are growing very quickly,” says Barbazza. “Our on-premises server farm is limited in terms of capacity, while the cloud is not. We found the right solution with Microsoft because Azure HPC gives us the flexibility and scalability needed to accelerate the design phase of new products. Reducing time to market is impossible without companies like Microsoft.”

STMicroelectronics is also using tools from Synopsys, Cadence, and other CAD vendors in Azure which provides STMicroelectronics with a competitive advantage, helping designers to run highly complex jobs with better performance.

“The processing power is one of the most important things” says Anna Palo, Digital Design Architect at STMicroelectronics. “With Azure HPC, we can run more jobs and tasks in parallel. We reduce time to market by increasing efficiency and the quality of the product that we release. This solution helps us do that and reduce the risk of a delivery delay.”

The company is also using Teams and Power Platform extensively to evolve internal processes. “You need to digitalize and enhance your processes,” says Rokbi. “This enhances the employee experience and reduces the number of tedious tasks. Using Teams and Microsoft Power Platform, we’ve modernized our employee engagement and interaction. We are able to communicate and engage our people at scale using all the different channels—video, sound, and text. The employee experience has been enhanced, and we’ve used automation to integrate the ecosystem and streamline the services we’re using.”

Continuing to innovate

With these new solutions in place, STMicroelectronics is on the path toward meeting its growth goals. “Because of HPC, we’ve sped time to market significantly,” says Barbazza. “We now have better visibility into our inventory, we can more reliably forecast the demand to match our manufacturing and production. Plus, we now have better visibility into our manufacturing data analytics, and we can use artificial intelligence to track improvement in our manufacturing yield, which is our most important KPI.”

Moving forward, STMicroelectronics is working with Microsoft to continue to innovate. "Technology is evolving fast,” says Barbazza. “The value we get with Microsoft as a pioneer in this technology evolution is the capability to grow and having the right team to support our roadmap."

Find out more about STMicroelectronics on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“With Azure high-performance computing, we can run more jobs and tasks in parallel. We reduce the time to market by increasing the efficiency and the quality of the product that we release. This solution helps us to improve the product quality and reduce the risk of a delivery delay.”

Anna Palo, Digital Design Architect, STMicroelectronics

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