India’s evolution into a high-tech product design center

The past 30 years have seen the Indian technology industry move up the value chain from being an onsite provider of IT services to a global offshore delivery hub used not only by Indian companies but also by multinational companies (MNCs) from all over the world. The evolution further led to the off-shoring of innovation with the creation of MNC R&D labs as well as Indian companies stepping up efforts in building products through in-house R&D.

In addition to this, with the rapid growth of the Indian economy and opening up of the Indian market, we have a large, fast-growing and a very demanding market which is driving the requirements for new age products. This combination of having a high growth domestic market and a rich talent pool in technology has led to India evolving to becoming a center of excellence in hi-tech product design.

India’s design strengths
One of the enabling factors for this evolution has been the growing prowess of Indians in engineering software and VLSI design. India has a rapidly growing engineering software design industry for domains such as consumer electronics, telecom, automotive, and computer-aided design (CAD), etc. India also has a strong talent pool in VLSI design, which has enabled the development of IC design centers and fabless ASIC houses. These capabilities have created a vibrant ecosystem for designing world-class technology products in India.

India’s strengths in logic, math and analytical skills have led to rapid strides in designing complex software systems, driving the tremendous growth of the Indian software industry. India today is a leading provider of software solutions for a wide range of applications in different domains such as banking and financial services, automotive, telecom, retail, manufacturing and healthcare, to name a few.

In a parallel development, due to sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) tools and the growth in the complexity of IC/ASICs, VLSI design has evolved from a complex circuit and chip layout design activity to a high-level system and logic-design activity. Hardware design languages have made the front-end of the IC design process similar to software development. It is no surprise that India has emerged as one of the leaders in IC/ASIC design in recent years.

System design and manufacturing of high-tech products, on the other hand, has seen relatively slower growth in India during this period. These have recently started gathering pace, fuelled by strong domestic consumption and growth of a manufacturing eco-system.

Indian manufacturing industry
Today, Indian companies are stepping up to be serious players in the global technology product markets with top notch in-house R&D. Tejas Networks is an example of this phenomenon. Our company manufactures carrier-class packet optical transmission products. We pioneered the development of cost effective, next-generation SDH/SONET and Carrier Ethernet products that enable telecom carriers to build converged networks for voice, data, and video transmission.

Tejas’ products enable customers to reduce their capex and also simplify their network operations, thereby reducing operating costs as well as increasing the velocity of new service delivery. Tejas has played a key role in helping design innovative products and network architectures that telecom operators have used to build networks that offer the lowest cost telecom services in the world.

Leveraging Indian innovation
Tejas has leveraged the design skills described earlier very effectively, to build products that are differentiated by the flexibility of operation. Tejas’ products are developed based on a fully programmable product platform, implemented using a combination of network processors, programmable semiconductor devices (FPGAs) and embedded processors. This product flexibility is manifested in several ways, examples being:
- software programmable service interfaces for TDM, packet and OTU services;
- flexible combination of switching fabrics between TDM, packet and OTU, determined by traffic mix;
- flexible transport of services over TDM or packet network infrastructure on the same platform; and,
- flexible choice transport protocols (SONET, SDH, PBB, PBT, MPLS-TP) on the same platform.

All of these provide a unique solution (Tejas’ Future Proof Transport Architecture – FPTA) to future-proofing of carrier networks as they evolve from the existing 2G networks to 3G/4G/LTE.

FPTA provides a programmable solution which is designed to meet the needs of carriers today, while providing service providers a migration path to meet the emerging service needs of tomorrow. Networks built on these products can be upgraded seamlessly to support new capabilities, such as the migration from carrying data over TDM (Ethernet over native SDH) to carrying TDM over data (E1/T1 circuit emulated over Ethernet) in a graded fashion. This enables the transition to a much more cost-effective packet-based transport, when data traffic becomes dominant in the network.

A phased transition process is illustrated in Figure 1, with the carrier upgrading to Ethernet-based 3G backhaul network in a manner that leverages their existing installed base, without having to resort to wholesale network disruptions while supporting these services. In this example, this is achieved through the addition of a Carrier-Ethernet service card (ELAN04) to an existing POTP (TJ100ME) network element and re-programming the switch fabric and PDH traffic processing logic.

Impact of design innovation
Tejas has been one of the first indigenous telecom equipment manufacturers in India. Carriers have leveraged Tejas’ unique design technology and product architecture to build future-proof networks in a cost-effective way, meeting the demands of one the lowest cost telecom services market in the world.

Tejas’ products have also seen wide commercial success globally, with over 150,000 network elements deployed in over 50 countries across the world.

Tejas has been one of the new generation Indian companies developing innovative technology products for global markets. However, we see this as the beginning of a long-term trend. Fueled by a strong domestic market and cutting-edge design skills in software, semiconductor and systems, India is poised to emerge as a global hub for leading-edge product design and manufacturing in the near future.


Author Information
Arnob Roy is the President – Engineering, for Tejas Networks.
Captions

Figure 1: The TJ100ME is an ultra-compact, carrier class, and cost effective bandwidth provisioning equipment designed to manage and deliver services from the optical core to the access.


Figure 2: Tejas Networks’ ELAN series of Carrier Ethernet service cards can be used to increase network capacities seamlessly and offer new revenue-generating services. For operators who have already invested in traditional optical networking technologies like SDH, the ELAN product allows them to upgrade SDH networks to add Carrier Ethernet capabilities with incremental capex additions.