The success of India as a design country lies largely in the availability of engineers with strong backgrounds in technical domains such as electronics, integrated circuits, computer science, and software engineering. Fluency in the English language is also an important contributing factor. All these are available at relatively lower costs as compared to the US and Europe.
Architecting electronics and embedded systems demands a thorough understanding of functionalities, operating conditions, as well as hardware and software systems. There may be significant critical requirements that may not have been specified clearly and which need to be addressed. This requires a thorough understanding of the design process.
Designing involves defining unambiguous ways of realizing the functionalities through optimal utilization of resources such as maximum processing time, available Intellectual Property (IP) blocks and CAD (hardware and software tool) environment. From a project perspective, budget, project cycle time and other infrastructure form boundary conditions. Designing for testability, debug, reliability, manufacturability, yield, etc. are also crucial, even though they do not form part of the specifications to be met.
Complexity
Present day solutions involve multi-million gate Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) having embedded software of millions of lines of code and operating at speeds greater than 100MHz. Architecting and designing embedded systems of this complexity calls for developing robust methodologies and processes, and a strict adherence to these by teams. More often than not, teams that are often spread across continents usually do designs of this scale. In this scenario, even configuration management and version controls become extremely critical. In the end, documentation for transfer and exchange of know-how and optimal utilization of legacy IPs is the step that closes this loop.
Adhering to well defined design methodologies, processes and standards and documentation is another specific strength of Indian designers. These can be generic frameworks or models such as CMM, CMMi, ISO or corporate internal systems.
Another virtue required in this fast changing technical arena is flexibility and capability to adapt to the new domains and skill sets. In virtually all application domains like mobile communications, connectivity, home entertainment, automotive electronics, identification, and medical electronics, technology is changing rapidly and the designers need to be on their toes to learn and adapt on daily basis. With high ambition levels, Indian designers are proving to be a very suitable and invaluable in these fast changing domains.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, India with a large pool of relatively inexpensive design engineers having excellent technical skills, analytical capabilities, process orientation, flexibility and English proficiency, has proven itself to be extremely valuable country for deigning electronic and embedded systems. The fact that nearly all MNCs have their captive design centers in India or are using Indian design service houses for their global designs is a testimony for this USP.
Though India has proven to be a global design house for design of all types of VLSI and embedded system products in all application areas, its special advantage is in digital design, embedded software development, integration, verification and validation. This is due to the high number of electronics and software engineering students coming out of institutes at Bachelor’s and Master’s levels, and the availability of a large number of training centers to make them industry ready. The special manpower development program of the government and industry associations such as ISA, NASSCOM, VLSI Society of India have also helped improve the skills and competency of engineers and make them more valuable to the design industry.
You can reach Dr. N.S.Murty at nagavolu.murty@nxp.com
