What has made India the design hub, according to some in the industry, is the saving of 33 per cent to 50 per cent in engineering costs. However, there are others who believe that no matter now dramatic these savings may seem, such considerations do not percolate down to the street price of the chip. Finally, the net price of a chip designed in India will be no different from another coming out of a design shop in the Silicon Valley of USA. The question that remains then is, ‘What attracts the MNCs to India?’
The answer, according to experts, is that it is a lot easier to build a team in India, and when you give customers a product ahead of time, they are prepared to pay a premium for it. The other reasons are the potential market that is expected to come up in the next five years in India and the proximity to the high chip consuming industry in the Asia Pacific region.
Other players in the region are Arcus Technology, SAS, DCM and Usha Matra. The close relation of software with chip designing is what makes the situation ideal for India-situated design companies. The development of a semiconductor chip based VLSI (very large scale integrated circuit) requires an enormous development of software. This is where India has a marked edge over other developing countries.
Another factor that has aided designing has been the availability of electronic design software and design automation. This assistance is offered by companies like Apara Design Automation, Wipro Infotech, Digipro Design Automation, Future Techno Designs Pte Ltd, NIIT, Usha Matra etc.
Among the public sector undertakings, Indian Telephone Industries had, by the mid-1990s, set up a tiny 200 wafer-a-week, 10cm (4-inch), 3-micron fab for ASIC production, and has since made significant headway over the years.
Bharat Electronics Ltd branched away from its traditional defence focus earlier this decade and is an important volume producer of ICs. It signed on SGS Thomson Microelectronics to help boost its fabrication output from 15 million to 100 million units using the 15cm (6-inch) wafer and 1.5-micron technology, and has been graduating from strength to strength since then.
The private sector achievements read like a book of records in electronics. Texas Instruments India, like many multinational subsidiaries in the country, has invested heavily in VLSI facilities. Its centre for design is one of the largest in the world. It recently designed a completely Indian core chip called Ankoor. It is the first US company to have designed a core processor (a chip loaded with software) completely in India. As far as memory chips are concerned, the first full-chip memory design for 4M DRAM in India was completed as early as 1993. An 8M flash memory chip has also been designed in India.
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