Bangalore is home for 47 of India’s 60 chip design firms, and they are doing cutting edge design work. As the world begins to recognise India’s chip design capabilities, this new industry is set to explode. Akhtar Pasha reports

In the early 90s, global chip giant Texas Instruments (TI) set up a chip design facility in Bangalore which went on to do cutting edge chip design work in the area of digital signal processing. TI’s seemingly inexplicable location choice paid off richly and today TI India has over 1000 people working on chip design. TI’s faith in Bangalore did much to put India on the world’s chip design map, and soon, other MNC chip design firms such as Analog Devices and National Semiconductor followed. And then it turned into a virtual stampede with most of the world’s big chip makers setting up shop in India’s garden city. Today, Bangalore boasts over 47 VLSI chip design firms, including biggies such as Motorola, Cypress Semico-nductor, IBM, Cisco, Ishoni Networks, Lara Networks, Lucent, and Sun. And inspired by their entry, a number of Indian firms too joined the chip design race: names such as Accel, C-DAC, Ittiam Systems, Wipro Infotech, GPS Usha, Silicon Automation Systems, Tata ELEXSI, Tejas Networks, U&I Scotty also serve to tell the world that India has what it takes to do cutting edge chip design work. Not surprisingly, firms that sell tools used in chip design called EDA tools also jumped into the fray and today Bangalore also hosts Synopses and Cadence, two of the biggest EDA firms worldwide.

India’s chip design industry is estimated to generate revenues of Rs 1500 crore ($ 300 million), which is still a small part of the global chip design market estimated by Gartner at around $ 668 million, but it is growing at a fast clip and will probably account for a larger share of the global market in 3-4 years. Design outsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon, driven mainly by consumer electronics firms who found it hard to get cost-effective designs from the big chip manufacturers; this trend will accelerate sharply as embedded chips get incorporated into more and more devices at the consumer and business ends. According to Gartner, the global chip design market is growing at 40 per cent CAGR, but that part of the market where India has an edge, viz software that is bundled with chips, is growing much faster at 140 per cent. Says Dr Pradip Kumar Dutta, managing director, Synopses (India), “The world is beginning to recognise that Indian chip design engineers are very good, probably better than those in many other countries that also compete in the chip design space. Yet their salaries are only 10 to 25 per cent of their counter parts in the US. That’s what gives India a huge competitive advantage in chip design, and that advantage will result in India’s share of the global chip design market increasing significantly over the years”. Currently, the US dominates the chip design space, but Taiwan, Ireland, Israel and Scotland are also significant players, but none of them can compete with India on price.

That most of India’s chip design firms are clustered in and around Bangalore city is probably no accident. Bangalore has 22 engineering colleges within the city and 15 more in the vicinity, in addition to having at least 15 private sector training firms offering VLSI design courses. A responsive bureaucracy, combined with simpler procedures has also helped.

Success stories
From all available evidence, Bangalore’s chip design firms are working at the cutting edge, developing chips used in the most advanced consumer and non-consumer products. Consider the following:

Texas Instruments India: TI’s core competence area is DSP (digital signal processing) core and application specific SoC (System on Chip) development. On the DSP core side, the TMS320C2700, code-named Ankoor, was completely developed in Bangalore IDC centre. The next generation of Ankoor, TMS320C2800, code-named Mantra, has also been designed here. Besides the cores, TI is also developing application specific DSP SoCs for Digital Motor Control, performance audio, video and imaging, 3G Wireless and Broadband communications markets. These are based on the TMS320C2000, TMS320C5000 and TMS320C6000 family of DSPs. Some of its customers are—Seagate, Maxtor, Sony, Pioneer, Lexmark, Nokia, Ericsson. TI India’s total investment into their R&D centre is Rs 128.11 crores.

Analog Devices, India Product Development Centre (IPDC): The focus of the development centre is on DSP, both DSP IC Design and DSP software development. It has invested US$ 10 million in setting up its IPDC. The company will continue to invest US$ 50 million over the next five years to expand its operations in India. The company designed 32 bit floating point DSPs—SHARC family of DSP at the India Product Development centre recently. Says S Karthik, VLSI design manager, Analog Devices IPDC, “Going forward the company has a roadmap to design 1 GFLOP DSPs and 10 GFLOP DSPs from India using the latest process technologies and design tools.” Customers include audio giants Sony, Kenwood and Denon and communications majors Lucent and 3COM. “We generate significant revenues for our parent company by developing products in India. In the last 5 years we have generated $200 million revenues based on products developed in India,” said Karthik.

National Semiconductors: National Semiconductor India Design centre is responsible for end-to-end design of deep sub-micron digital VLSI system-on-chips (SOC) for Information Appliances (IA), Wired network, and Wireless Network and Communications products. The SOC designs are primarily addressing the above market needs by developing deep sub micron 0.18/0.15Micron solutions with embedded 32-bit RISC cores and compiled DSP architectures and high performance bus architectures. National’s investment in its R&D centre is over $ 3 million per year. Their customers in wireless include Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens while their customers in Internet Appliances are 3COM and Sony.

According to K.Krishna Moorthy, head-design & engineering at National Semicon-ductor India Design centre, “The India Design centre is entrusted with the complete responsibility for some of the front-line custom solution products currently undertaken within National Corporation.” National estimates that more than 50 percent of its new revenue designs are going to come from A-PAC region and it will be economical and sensible to have the new design initiatives done out of India.

Ittiam Systems: Srini Rajan, chairman and CEO of Ittiam Systems (former head of TI’s IDC), recently floated Ittiam Systems. He raised VC funds to the tune of $5 million and has spent a significant amount in setting up its R&D centre in Bangalore. The company focuses on all aspects of DSP application development, including algorithm development, processor benchmarking and selection, optimised software implementation and reference board design with major markets in US and Europe. Ittiam is developing solutions for wireless, wireline, audio and video applications.

Changing Technology
As chip technology itself changes - most processors and other chips now use 0.13 micron technology (which permits upto 10 million gates per chip) as opposed the earlier 0.18 micron technology, (2-5 million gates per chip), Indian chip design firms have to constantly upgrade their design skills to stay in the race. Fortunately, chip designing lends itself to considerable level of automation with specialised EDA tools, and EDA vendors such as Cadence and Synopsis have launched tools compatible with 0.13 micron technology into the Indian market. Automation can be achieved at the implementation level because the chip implementation is primarily a “computer driven” process. “It is impossible to implement the modern chip without automation. Today, human intervention is only required to guarantee best quality of results (QoR),” says Dr Pradip. But even with these tools, the actual process of chip design is no cakewalk. On 0.18 micron technology, the traditional ‘two-end’ method of chip designing, in which the front end focused on synthesis and the back end on place and route worked very well.

This method does not work with 0.13 micron technology, because timing correlation between front end and back end is impossible to ensure, and that negates the higher speeds these chips are capable of. Consequently, this new generation of chips are built with the front end an back end elements distributed across the chip such that time lags are minimised. Additionally, 0.13 micron chips need to be built such that electron leakages leading to loss of signal integrity is prevented, and this requires a different construction altogether. That’s where designing ingenuity becomes very critical, but next generation implementation tools are impossible to do without too. As the trend to building system-on-chip (SoC) products which incorporate IP (intellectual property) from many vendors accelerates in the future, designing will become more complex and more critical, and so will tools. That’s the road map for Indian chip designers, and how well they drive on this road will determine their relative position in the global chip design industry.

Article on EDA
One factor that will help India in its quest for an increased share of the chip design pie is its expertise in tool development. Many software firms in India have acquired expertise in EDA tool development, and global tool vendors have also established large development centres in India. Synopses has invested Rs 120 crore into its India R&D centres and it will continue to invest Rs 50 lakh every year. IBM has invested $50 million in ASIC work. Cadence has also set up big development centres in Bangalore and Noida near Delhi. Tools are in themselves a large global market, aggregating a little over $2.5 billion in 2001, and projected to increase to $3.6 billion in 2002. According to Himanshu Singh, acting country manager, Cadence Design Systems India, Indian chip design firms alone buy $25-35 million worth of tools every year (across all platforms and all segments).

The global chip design market currently caters mainly to consumer electronics and some IT areas, but future growth areas will include telecom, wireless, broadband, automobile, medical equipment, aviation and internet appliances including embedded chips. India’s software expertise in these application verticals will also help domestic chip design firms to gain a bigger share of the pie.