The number of design starts in India is estimated to grow by 23 percent from 516 in 2007 to 635 in 2008. (All figures from In-Stat.) In 2007, 40 percent of the design starts were at 90nm and 20 percent at 65nm, and the remaining 40 percent at higher nodes. In 2008 the number of design starts at 65nm is estimated to grow to 30 percent, and at 45nm or less at 5 percent. These figures place India far ahead of China, where most of the designs are still above 90nm, and also ahead of other star performers in the Asian design industry, such as Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. Many Indian design houses are ARM approved, work on processor/DSP-based designs, and are well versed in developing reusable components.
In terms of application areas, communications is the top contributor to India’s design industry with 36 percent revenue share at $494 million in 2007. This segment will continue to dominate, reaching $1,406 million in 2012 at CAGR of 23.2 percent.
One limitation of the Indian design industry continues to be its excessive dependence upon digital designs. In 2007, 84 percent of the designs were purely in the digital space. This is likely to limit India’s potential as a design powerhouse because more and more designs are moving towards mixed signals. In 2007 merely 6 percent of the designs done in India were mixed signal designs, and 10 percent, analog. The low number of analog/mixed signal designs is primarily because of inadequate skills and poor availability of talent in analog/mixed signals. Indian companies are trying to address this problem. On the one hand they are buying over companies with mixed/analog expertise, and on the other, the industry and the academia are working hand in hand to gain this expertise. This supplement brings to you some of the great designs done in India both by Indian design houses and captive design houses. The selection of the stories is based on giving the reader a flavor of the broad range of design activities in the country.
