ROHM’s most northerly site in Oulu, Finland
08/14/2018
Where all software development for ROHM’s components happens
The city of Oulu in the North of Finland is with a little over 200,000 inhabitants the country’s fifth biggest city. It is most popular for hosting the annual Air Guitar World Championship. And since November 2014 one of ROHM Semiconductor Europe's offices is located in Oulu.
But semiconductors are seldomly used when playing Air Guitar. So, what brought ROHM to one of the most northerly cities of Europe?
Apart from its cultural significance, Oulu is well known to be a technological city. 17,000 students make the University of Oulu the second biggest in Finland. Nokia is one of the biggest employers in the area. And new technologies such as 5G, LTE, and NFC are tested at a community-wide scale, making the city a so called “living lab”.
ROHM was especially interested in the Finnish software skills. Today, most electronic products are based on software platforms. So, semiconductor companies also face a growing demand for software support for their products. To meet this demand, ROHM decided to open an office dedicated to software development. In Japan, it was very difficult to find good software engineers. So a search for a fitting location in Europe begun. Oulu was the obvious choice, since Finland is well known in Japan to be a country of excellent software engineers.
Software for the whole group
Soon the Finnish team started to develop three types of software for the whole ROHM group:
- Platform integration helps using ROHM components with different operating systems and CPUs
- Algorithms give additional value to the components
- Application Development provides Evaluation Kits with concrete solutions, so customers can start using ROHM devices quickly.
The software is used in a wide range of applications. Among these, smartphones and other mobile devices like laptops or tablets still belong to the most important areas. The number of features inside the small box being a smartphone is still increasing. This means more and more components, and this in turn means more software drivers. The software engineers at ROHM have lots of experience in developing Windows drivers for laptops or tablets and also for the different smartphone operating systems. They are constantly working on providing the newest drivers for ROHM components to contribute to their customers’ development.
A main aspect is the integration of sensors, like accelerometers, magnetometers, gyro-sensors and ambient light sensors. For example, accelerometers are used to detect when a device is rotated, so the display orientation can be adjusted accordingly. An ambient light sensor can be used to adjust the screen brightness for good reading comfort in all possible lighting situations. For this to work, software drivers need to get the sensor data available to the operating system.
But other fields like automotive and industrial are getting increasingly important for software development, too. There is for example the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The advantage for the software engineers is that the IIoT is basically nothing new: A smart factory is just a network system, connecting different things. In this way smart cars, smart buildings and smart factories are the same from a software point of view. That means: software engineers can use existing solutions for upcoming new applications. They can “copy and paste” their existing know-how to create new solutions.
Open for everyone
Most of the code produced in Finland is open source. Everyone can download the source code and test it immediately, regardless if they are students or owners of a small company. Many customers use the drivers as a code basis for building their own drivers. They don’t need to worry about requirements of the OS. For example, Linux and Android drivers need to fulfill certain Google requirements. Of course, these are met by ROHM’s drivers, so the customers can focus on their own application development without worrying about the system compatibility.
In this way ROHM addresses all kinds of customers: From mass production players like Samsung or Sony to medium and even small companies.
A growing team
2014 the team started from zero, today 15 people are developing software in Oulu. And the growth will not stop any time soon as the head count shall be increased to around 25 in the upcoming years. The young generation consists of former students from the University of Oulu and other universities. To draw the students’ attention to the Japanese company, ROHM regularly organizes several events in Oulu, like a gaming hackathon.
The first Oulu 3D Sensor Game Jam took place in 2017. 50 people joined the event, and the result was a game prototype using some of ROHM’s sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, pressure sensors, and others. But the idea even goes one step further: The technologies used in gaming can be used for more than just entertainment. They can be easily adapted for applications in education or in medical care, for example.
Surrounded by this highly technological spirit, chances are good that ROHM Semiconductor's Finnish office will continue to develop many promising software projects in the future.