A year ago, Microchip – long known in the industry as a solid but somewhat traditional microcontroller supplier – took what Greg Robinson describes as “a very deep look in the mirror.” The company didn’t like what it saw.
In a candid conversation, Greg Robinson, Corporate VP MCU, WSG, and Dev Tools at Microchip, walked through how the company has been reshaping itself: structurally, technologically, and in terms of how it wants customers to see it over the next decade.
“A year ago, Microchip took a very deep look in the mirror, and we didn’t like what we saw. So we, over the last year, we’ve restructured strategy, restructured organisational structures, basically gone through a lot of change within the corporation to realign it to a company that we’re happy with today.”
The restructuring began with an acknowledgement that years of acquisitions and organic growth had left the company fragmented.
Between 2008 and 2020, Microchip acquired 16 different companies. While those acquisitions expanded the portfolio, they also created “a lot of chaos and a lot of silos across those different business units,” Robinson says.
The response has been a top-to-bottom rationalisation:
Around 20–30 separate business units have been consolidated into five strategic “pillars”:
- Microcontrollers
- Analog & Power
- Connectivity & Networking
- Compute
- AI/ML
Within this structure, Robinson leads the Microcontroller pillar, which now brings together what used to be three separate P&L units (8‑bit, 16‑bit, 32‑bit MCUs), as well as development tools and wireless.
“If you went back a year ago, we had three different business units that had P&L responsibilities for 16‑bit, 8‑bit, and 32‑bit. One of the things we did was we broke down those silos … and merged them all into one organisation. And what that really brings us is our capability of having a single product strategy all the way from our very low‑end 8‑bit all the way up to our very high‑end 32‑bit.”
Wireless has also been deliberately folded into the MCU pillar, on the simple observation that “every wireless device has a microcontroller that sits next to it”. Aligning these under one roof is intended to tighten hardware and software roadmaps and shorten time to market.
Security, functional safety, and 5V
Microchip’s new MCU strategy is built around a few clear priorities: security, functional safety, 5V capability, and cost-effective migration from 8‑bit to 32‑bit.
Robinson is clear about how the landscape has shifted for Microchip’s customers: “If you look at what our customers did 5-10 years ago, they developed algorithms for motor control … lighting, touch sensors. Now today, in order for our customers [to] launch products in the market, they have to develop what their core competency is, but they also have to now have security added to their devices … just as a barrier of entry into the marketplace.”
Rather than leaving each customer to reinvent security and functional safety stacks, Microchip wants to ship more of that capability as software packages:
- Pre‑built security and CRA‑related software components
- Functional safety (‘Fusa’) support as part of the platform
- Allowing customers to focus on their differentiated application logic
“We really want to focus on the software side of that, and provide our customers with packages of software so they don’t have to develop [them] themselves.”
On the hardware side, Microchip is leaning into its legacy strengths while modernising the platform:
- 5V operation remains central, especially for traditional 8‑bit applications
- As customers migrate to 32‑bit, Microchip wants to offer 32‑bit devices that still support 5V, easing redesign and reuse
- The company is emphasising small pin counts, pinout compatibility, and cost efficiency to carry over the virtues that made PIC and AVR successful
Microchip has also pruned its technology stack. Where Robinson’s unit once worked on six different process nodes, that’s now down to three carefully chosen nodes, which he says will support product continuity for “10-15, possibly 20 years.”
ARM, RISC‑V and a clearer long-term roadmap
Architecture-wise, Microchip is hedging intelligently.
“We will be an Arm house, and we’ll continue to develop Arm, but we are also going to go down the RISC‑V path … Microchip as a whole missed the Arm market, and I’m not going to miss the RISC‑V market.”
The plan is to start a RISC‑V design this summer, adding that to an existing Arm portfolio. This dual‑track approach is about giving customers flexibility while ensuring Microchip doesn’t repeat past strategic hesitations.
This sits alongside the process-node focus, where each of the three nodes is tuned for a different performance/market tier – low, mid, and high end – providing a more transparent migration path over time.
AI everywhere
AI is another major theme that cuts across Microchip’s pillars.
On the silicon side, Robinson outlines a two‑step AI strategy:
1. Today: exploit existing MCU performance (MOPS-level) with software-only AI, enabling use cases like:
- Glass break detection
- Predictive maintenance
without needing dedicated NPUs.
2. Next: introduce dedicated NPU-based devices:
- First product, starting in April, delivering “10s of GOPS” of performance
- Future devices targeting around 300 GOPS on more advanced nodes
Microchip’s new AI/ML business unit plays a central role here. For now, its primary mission is consulting: helping other pillars define AI strategy, choosing partners, and even working directly with customers to build and optimise models. This unit championed Microchip’s decision to partner with Ceva for scalable MPU IP, usable from low-end MCUs up to high-end FPGAs with a common toolchain.
Open tools, VS code, and AI-assisted development
If the hardware story is about integration and focus, the tools story is about openness.
Historically, Microchip’s world revolved around MPLAB X, a proprietary IDE that Robinson readily describes as a closed ecosystem. That stance has now flipped.
“A year ago, if somebody asked me what I would prefer them to be designing in, [I’d say] MPLAB X … there was no third-party partners, or anybody else that was allowed in that ecosystem. Today, what we tell our customers is: design wherever you’re designing today.”
Over the past year, Microchip has worked with IAR, Keil, SEGGER, Lauterbach, Python-based flows, and others to get Microchip devices and IP into third‑party environments. Licensed key IP (like its AI chatbot and device configurators) to these partners so that engineers using IAR or Keil can access the same experience they would have in MPLAB X. It’s also adopted CMSIS‑DAP‑style open hardware interfaces on its tools so the same debug hardware can plug seamlessly into different IDEs.
At the same time, Microchip has embraced VS Code as its forward-looking primary environment: “Everything going forward is VS Code … VS Code is equivalent to our proprietary ecosystem … Right now they’re equal. VS Code will grow … and the reason we did that is kids coming out of college all know VS Code.”
Perhaps the most distinctive tool innovation is Microchip’s AI code assist – a chatbot embedded inside the development tools.
Unlike general-purpose assistants: “This is 100% grounded in Microchip content … This will go into the Microchip databases and pull out Microchip code that’s already been written. Or, if it has to write its own code, it’s writing it from the data sheets that we provided.”
Microchip has vectorised all its documentation and code examples into internal MCP databases. The same infrastructure is being opened up so that partners – or even customers – can build their own chatbots on top of Microchip’s grounded content, using the LLM of their choice.
From “old 8‑Bit” to cutting-edge perception
In many ways, the restructuring is as much about perception as it is about products.
Robinson is very clear about the image he wants to leave behind – and the one he wants to build: “If I asked my customers today, or even probably a year ago, what comes to their mind [when thinking of Microchip], they’re going to say an 8‑bit microcontroller. So it’s old, it’s not up to date. What I’d like [them] to start thinking about is Microchip is very advanced now.”
He points to:
- Products running on 3nm processes, “cutting edge in the industry today”
- A broadened portfolio across analog, microcontrollers, MPUs, FPGAs, AI/ML, and security
- A more flexible, customer‑centric development environment driven by VS Code and open ecosystems
“Everything they thought of us a year ago – I want that to be a 180‑degree shift of what they think about us today.”
The coming year, with new low-end MCU launches, dedicated AI devices, and more visible tools innovation, will show how far that transformation has progressed – and whether the market is ready to see Microchip not as a legacy 8‑bit player, but as a modern, AI‑aware embedded platform company.
