Powai Labs: global leader in the making

Incubated in the crucible of innovation—IIT KReSIT—Powai Labs could be a disruptive force in the high-entry barrier EDA space, says SRIKANTH RP

According to rEAPAN tIKOO, a chip design company can get its chips validated at one-tenth of the existing cost using the products of Powai Labs

WHILE many successful technology companies in Silicon Valley trace their origins to an Indian hand, few Indian technology start-ups believe they can build successful companies in India. This is more so in the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool space where not a single Indian vendor has made even a minor impact. The lack of domain knowledge and a miniscule domestic market have been restricting the creation of a company with an Indian base. While the traditional EDA space has been dominated by two or three big players, there is an opportunity to break this hold if a start-up discovers a new way to solve the problem.

Powai Labs, a start-up company based at the IIT Mumbai campus, is aiming to do this by bringing down the cost of EDA tools with an innovative product. Chip design firms are currently hampered by the high cost of tools for verifying

and validating their designs. Typically, the big emulation boxes and simulation accelerators cater to a design size of 50 million ASIC gates at costs ranging from $2 million to $4 million per unit. This price tag makes the process of validating designs extremely prohibitive. There are no cost-effective options for companies which want to test smaller design sizes in the range of 2 million ASIC gates as they still have to test their designs on a bigger emulation box. This effectively means that the company ends up utilising a product that has a much higher capacity. Since the testing and validation process comprises around 70-80 percent of the actual product’s cost, controlling the cost of testing and validation is crucial to the cost of the end product.

Now Powai Labs is looking to disrupt the EDA space by offering tools that are so affordable that a chip design firm can give them to every engineer in the company. This means that instead of testing their designs on a big emulation box, a company can just buy emulation cards from Powai Labs and give one to each of its engineers. The product is appropriately titled IMAGE (I Made A Great Emulator).

Says Reapan Tikoo, chief executive officer, Powai Labs, “Today, there is no tool which can cater to the need for a desktop simulation accelerator. We see IMAGE 2.5 (2.5 million gates) and IMAGE 1.2 (1.2 million gates) fulfilling this need. We are selling IMAGE 2.5 at $75,000 and IMAGE 1.2 at $32,000. With our products, a chip design company can get its chips validated at one-tenth of the existing cost.” The price advantage arises because the company’s technology utilises off-the-shelf components. Tikoo also says that the product enhances the speed of simulation, thereby increasing the productivity of every engineer.

Significantly, unlike any other company, Powai Labs plans to support every client with a dedicated support engineer at each client site—at no extra cost. Not only does this increase customer satisfaction, it also provides Powai Labs with important feedback which it uses to enhance the features of its products. Since the start-up is currently working with top design houses, it hopes to incorporate what it learns into its products, which have been received very well in the industry. Three of the top five silicon design companies have already validated its products. A leading MNC expressed a desire to buy the company, but Tikoo politely refused as he believes that Powai Labs is on the verge of becoming a global player.

Besides the current two products, which are meant for the desktop, Powai Labs has a third, the IMAGE 50, under development. IMAGE 50 is meant for larger applications.

Because the company scores over competitors on parameters such as features, price and scalability, global analysts believe that Powai Labs has the potential to change the market for EDA tools, now worth around $450 million, and growing at 10 percent year-on-year.

Based on the price-features-performance equation, Tikoo believes that Powai Labs has the ability to become the number one player in the desktop space in the next two years, and one of the top three players in large capacity emulators. “By December this year we plan to have a support office in Bangalore to offer quick service to clients. It would also allow us to incorporate feedback into product development.”

While Powai Labs is still on the bank of a great future, the company’s path-breaking technology, along with presence of people like Madhav Desai—one of India’s best-known microelectronics experts—makes it a company to watch out for in the technology space.

srikanth@expresscomputeronline.com