India's strengths and advantages in design

A design can be that of a marketable product or a system solution (hardware + software) or chip (VLSI/System on Chip) or a software package. As such, the mind set should be that competencies and capabilities needed for each of these are different.

System design
The design strength of India for system solutions, VLSI/SoC and software are as good as or even better than that of other Asian countries, including China and Taiwan. The USP of India as a design country is the availability of a large pool of engineers with strong background in technical domains like electronics, integrated circuits, computer science, and software engineering with very good logical and analytical skills, English language competency and flexible attitude. The fact that all this is available at relatively lower cost strengthens this USP further. This scenario leads to higher value for invested money.

Present day system solutions involve multi-million-gate systems-on-chip (SoCs) and embedded software with millions of lines of codes, operating at speeds greater than 100MHz. Architecting and designing embedded systems of this complexity calls for developing robust methodologies and processes and teams adhering to them in letter and spirit. Many a times, designs of this scale are done by different teams often spread over design centres. In this scenario, even configuration management and version controls become extremely critical. In the end, documentation for transfer and exchange of know-how and know why for optimal utilization of legacy IPs across designs is the step which closes the loop. All of the above are a must for successful, consistent and repeatable design project execution.

Adhering to well defined design methodologies, processes and standards and documenting is another specific strength of Indian designers. These can be generic frameworks or models like CMM, CMMi, ISO or corporate internal systems.

Another virtue required in this fast changing technical arena is flexibility and capability to adapt to the new domains and skill sets. In virtually all application domains like mobile communications, connectivity, home entertainment, automotive electronics, identification, medical electronics, technology is changing rapidly and the designers need to be on their toes to learn and adapt these on a daily basis. With high ambition levels to contribute and grow, Indian designers proved themselves to be very suitable and valuable in these fast changing domains.

In a nutshell, India with a large pool of relatively inexpensive design engineers having excellent technical skills, analytical capabilities, process orientation, flexibility and English proficiency, has proved itself to be an extremely valuable country for designing electronic and embedded systems. The fact that all most all MNCs have their captive design centres in India and/or using Indian design service houses for their global designs is a testimony for this USP.

Though India proved itself to be a global design house for design of all types of VLSI and embedded system solutions in all application areas, its special contribution is in design of digital and embedded software solutions, including integration, verification and validation. This is due to the high number of electronics and software engineering students coming out of institutes at bachelors and masters levels and also availability of a large number of training centres to make them industry ready. The special manpower development program of government and contributions of industry associations like ISA, NASSCOM, and VLSI Society of India also helped in improving skills and competency of engineers and make them more valuable to design industry. With more and more institutes producing post graduates students in VLSI and embedded systems design, this situation would improve further.

Product design
In case of product design, China scores better than India primarily due to its large number of OEMs and ODMs, availability of local product manufacturing infrastructure and huge domestic market size.

Architecting and designing electronic and embedded products needs thorough understanding of functionality, operating conditions, the other mechanical, hardware and software systems with which it needs to interact, the environment in which the system needs to function (like temperature, humidity, electrical noise) and end-user needs and perceptions. There may be significant critical implicit requirements which might not have been specified clearly which need to be addressed. This calls for understanding the big picture and cultural aspects and not just the technical specs.

Designing involves defining unambiguous way of realizing the functionality through optimal utilization of resources like maximum processing time, available Intellectual Property (IP) blocks and CAD (hardware and software tool) environment. From a project perspective, budget, project cycle time and other infrastructure form boundary conditions. Designing for testability, debug, reliability, manufacturability, yield etc are also crucial, even though they do not form a part of specifications to be met.

Thus, design of production ready reference design is a step further to system solution design for proof of concept or proving design. India is getting better in appreciating all of the above which is needed for effective product design but needs to catch up significantly still.

NXP’s fit
At NXP’s India development centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, the 750 strong hardware and software design teams focus on developing very complex and state-of-the-art system solutions including 45nm SoCs and embedded software for diverse, leading application domains like digital TV, set-top box (STB), identification (RFID tags and contactless smartcards), NFC-based mobile e-purse, automotive electronics, and emerging applications in green energy. In the VLSI domain, this involves architecture and design of SoCs in both front end and physical design cycles in up to 45nm CMoS technologies. In embedded software, these include device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, middleware, and application SW including protocols and Operating System Abstraction Layers (OSAL). Thus, the design cycle being executed in NXP India spans from specification to tape out to prototype development with all hardware boards and software.

NXP India teams not only design and develop system solution products but also fully own them up to customer integration and support. The design teams go well beyond execution and during their journey invent ideas leading to patents. In the past five years, NXP India engineers generated 300+ ideas leading to 50+ patents thus contributing handsomely to NXP’s intellectual property.

Apart from designing and developing electronic and embedded system solutions for global markets, NXP India engineers also conceive and develop solutions for Indian and/or emerging markets. Few examples are solutions for immobilizers for two wheelers, identification solutions for e-passports, contact less smartcards for ticketing applications, etc.

NXP’s contribution
Apart from contributing through developing competencies in house and executing design projects, NXP contributes to Indian technical and academic community through sponsoring academic research projects and master’s students, participation in technical conferences and associations like VLSI Society of India and India Semiconductor Association. Thus NXP is helping the design ecosystem to grow in size and capability.

Design achievements
There are a number of designs done in NXP which are very complex and have great business significance. These include platform based system solutions in the digital TV, STB and automotive infotainment application domains for a number of global customers. A few examples are: IPSTB based solutions on STB225 platform which supports HD triple play, H.264 HD, VC1, WM9, and DiVX among the popular video codecs; 45nm multimillion gate SoCs for digital TVs; and contactless smart card and RFID solutions for India-specific applications.

NXP


Author Information

Dr. N.S. Murty is the Director for New Business Initiatives at NXP Semiconductors, Bangalore, India.