New opportunities opening up

Of the $3.25 billion design market in India in 2005, embedded software contributed 78 percent at $2.53 billion; VLSI, 18 percent at $0.58 billion; and hardware/board design, 4 percent at $0.14 billion. (Figures from Frost & Sullivan.) The research company projects that the design market in India will grow to $43 billion in 2015, with embedded software contributing 84 percent at $36.34 billion; VLSI, 12 percent at $5.09 billion; and hardware/board design, 4 percent at $1.64 billion.

India is looking forward to becoming a major power in the global design industry. I see two recent factors further building up India's design dreams. The first is India's advent into semiconductor manufacturing. I am not sure whether India will go the Taiwan or Malaysia way by heading into fab at this stage when there is a global capacity glut. While Taiwan has been immensely successful as a foundry player, Malaysia's Silterra and 1st Silicon are often at the center of controversies ranging on whether it was the right decision to invest into foundries. Whether or not Indian foundries-SemIndia and IEMC-succeed into catapulting India as a global semiconductor manufacturer, they will create huge opportunities in semiconductor designing. Besides these two foundries, more are said to be on the way, including one of Intel. The second factor favoring India's design ambitions is the emergence of R&D outsourcing as a strategic option. Traditionally, companies have played the R&D card close to their chests. Even when manufacturing was getting outsourced, R&D remained a closely guarded secret. This is changing. MNCs are increasingly setting up R&D facilities in India, which should enable the country acquire leading edge designing skills.

This supplement describes some innovative products designed and developed in India.

India Supplement Articles Challenges and solutions for next-gen processor based system designs By Sarang Shelke, Co-Founder and Director, Technology; and Subodh Patil, Co-Founder and Director, Business Development; Poseidon Design Systems R&D outsourcing in the semiconductor industry By V. Ramakrishna, Marketing Lead, Semiconductors & Consumer Electronics, Product Engineering Soluti Configurable silicon intellectual property By Vinod Deshmukh, Executive Vice President & CTO, R&D Services, MindTree Consulting System architecture for network media player By Satheesh S., Principal Engineer and Member of Technical Staff; and Jagadeeswaran R., Lead Engineer; Ittiam Systems Pte Ltd Post layout EDA platform addresses sub-100nm manufacturing challenge By Kamal Aggarwal, VP, Strategy & Marketing, SoftJin Technologies Pte Ltd Empowering electronics design innovation By Jaswinder Ahuja, Corporate Vice President and Managing Director, Cadence Design Systems (India) Pte Ltd. Cost-effective FPGA-based SDH multiplexers By Razak Mohammedali, Product Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific, Altera Corporation; and Vinod Babu, C Full life cycle IP development By Samskrut Konduru, Industrial, Consumer, Automotive Solutions Group, Xilinx Traversing the scope of design innovation By Ganesh Guruswamy, Country Manager and Director, Freescale Semiconductor (India) Pte Ltd Accelerated product development cycle with GSD By Soumendra Ghosh, Manager, Application Engineering, National Instruments, India SoC platforms: New drivers for the electronics industry By Vivek Sharma, Vice-President EMR, and Director, STMicroelectronics India Design Center India rides the innovation wave by Chitra Giridhar, EDN Asia Bangalore Correspondent