India is home to the largest design centers in the world

India’s famed design prowess is not a recent phenomenon; over two decades ago, the possibility of semiconductor design in India emerged as an option to a few global companies who set up their R&D centers in the country. What attracted them to India?

While other South East Asian counterparts have emerged as hubs for electronic manufacturing, India has emerged as the hub for electronic design. Analysts have debated and discussed the issue at length, and these are some of the distinguishing factors that make India an attractive destination:
a. Cost arbitrage: Cost is a major factor contributing to the rise of offshoring design services.
b. Intellectual capital: As per estimates, over 500,000 Indian engineers graduate every year. In terms of numbers, India’s engineering and scientific community is the second largest in the world. There is a strong emphasis on Math and Science in Indian educational systems.
c. Scalability of talent: I’m often asked whether countries in Eastern Europe or Israel will pose a threat to India’s success. It looks unlikely when one considers the sheer scale of the engineering talent available here.
d. Evolving ecosystem: The first global majors established their presence in the 80’s, since then the country’s electronic design environment has evolved. Today the ecosystem is thriving with IP providers, integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), design services firms, electronic manufacturing services (EMS) companies, EDA vendors, and fabless semiconductor firms setting up a local presence.
e. Favorable business environment: India is among the largest and one of the most stable democracies in the world. The government has been encouraging open markets and proactively working with the industry. India has a respected judiciary system with strict laws to protect intellectual property (IP).
f. Culture of entrepreneurship: At first, there were only a few engineers-turned-entrepreneurs who started their ventures after gaining work experience from global firms in India or overseas. This trickle has became a full fledged wave as many Silicon Valley engineers with roots in India are creating startups with some of the design operations based in India.

Today India is home to some of the largest design centers in the world. Indian engineers have moved up the value chain – from testing to new product development projects. Local design teams are proving their abilities in end-to-end designs. It is no wonder that most companies are hiring large number of designers for their Indian centers, as they expand their R&D operations and move critical projects to the country.

We have progressed substantially on the design front. India is emerging as a major design center for integrated circuits (ICs); field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and systems-on-chips (SoCs). We have honed our capabilities in very large scale integration (VLSI) design and embedded software development. We could potentially capture a larger share of the global market by focusing on VLSI design and embedded software.

The numbers back it up: According to the India Semiconductor Association (ISA) and Frost & Sullivan, the Indian semiconductor and embedded design industry will grow from $3.25 billion in 2005 to $14.42 billion in 2010 and to $43.07 billion in 2015. The engineering workforce required to generate the projected revenues in 2015 is about 77,000 engineers in VLSI and a much larger number of 669,885 in embedded design. Clearly, we are doing a lot of work in the embedded space. A recent news report estimates that about 80 percent of the electronics engineering professionals are employed in embedded systems development and not VLSI that was the primary focus area for most electronics engineers. The shift has been gradual, and ISA-Frost & Sullivan estimates say that India will further increase its focus on embedded systems design.

At Freescale India, the story is the same. When I returned to India after having worked in the semiconductor sector in the US, it was a revelation for me to see the industry buzzing with energy with the belief that great things could be achieved.

Freescale’s India Design Centers at Noida and Bangalore are home to over 1,000 engineers, up from 150 in 2004. Freescale India is a Center of Excellence for IP development and SoC design, being one of the two centers in this region, apart from China.

While our primary focus was on wireless and mobility technologies, we have expanded to include teams working on all of Freescale’s business groups. Today we have several “made in India” products to our credit. Our team has been driving many design initiatives — from mobile platforms that are suited to 3G and processors that help next-generation broadband to microcontrollers that power intelligent automobiles.

Let’s start with the award-winning MXC platform, which was voted “The Best Applications Processor in 2005” by a prominent microprocessor magazine. The architecture was the result of 24 months of intense R&D by Freescale engineers. Since 2004, the India team has played a key role in the baseband, design specification, and validation for MXC technology.

We also have an industry first to our credit: a 32-bit microcontroller that delivers USB On-The-Go and flash memory in a single chip solution. This design was developed in collaboration with Freescale’s Australia team.

We have made valuable contributions to the networking systems group. We developed the industry’s first voice-enabled Gigabit Passive Optical Networking (GPON) SoC, where our silicon design and verification teams played a key role. The other two solutions were completely designed in India. These include the MPC8313E processor that can securely distribute and process multiple streams of rich multimedia content throughout the home and the MPC8323E, a processor designed for the consumer and small-office/home-office networking equipment market, both launched at the Freescale Technology Forum in India in 2006.

Our next goal is to expand the Center of Excellence (CoE) for Wireless and Mobility Software which develops software for cellular platforms, strengthening our leadership in next-generation mobile platform technologies — a key growth area for Freescale.

The Freescale sales team is collaborating closely with Indian design houses that are exploring products unique to India. The Indian market offers huge potential in various segments, including energy and power management with inverters, energy meters, UPS systems, and automobile electronics. With handset vendors setting up manufacturing operations in India, this segment is also coming into its own.