Scaling the design pyramid: India’s designs advantages

The competitive strength of a company, region or a country in electronic design is largely perceived along two parameters: the inherent technical capabilities to take a large or complete ownership of product, and the process and project strength to increase the overall scope of the projects. Examining these two parameters can help place design teams at varying levels of service offerings maturity from the design perspective.

The design services value pyramid (Figure 1) classifies the various stages a design engineering entity would ideally undergo to reach a level where it can flawlessly execute complex designs in global teams:

Value Engineering
Value Engineering (VE) normally the first stride towards gaining system expertise is the systematic application of recognized techniques which identify the function of a product or service, and provide the necessary function reliably at lowest overall cost. For example, Wipro identified an additional savings of approximately $700,000 (5 percent) per annum through VE for the manufacturer of point of sale terminals typically used in a retail store environment. The challenge was to reduce the cost of the terminal while maintaining compatibility with installed devices ensuring zero impact on spares and maintaining overall specs so as not to impact marketing. In addition, the goal was to maintain overall architecture without changing interfaces of common components.

Participation and contribution in new product development
Owing to the entrenched expertise, contributing to the next new product designs forms the logical leap. It is because of the sound product knowledge that is brought to the table, in the form of design assumptions, implications it has on field, key trade-offs that happened during designs, etc. For example, as an ‘Extended Engineering’ partner, Wipro’s project team worked with a client to realize the vision of revolutionizing the gaming experience forever. Wipro quickly put together a team of expert VLSI and board design engineers and resources for the COT ASIC development. With nearly 300 man-months of effort, spread over close to 18 months, Wipro delivered first-time-right ASIC and reference designs.

Wipro’s involvement in ASIC development covered micro-architecture, custom package design, IP selection and integration, logic design and functional verification, system modeling, physical design, design for test, manufacturing test development and debug support, silicon validation, device characterization support and production support.

Wipro also developed reference cards, helped with characterization and compliance testing, and is involved in handoff to the end-of-line testing at OEM manufacturers.

As Wipro has a rich experience with complex ASIC and system development projects, a history of 100 percent first-pass silicon successes, strong design methodology and quality processes, they ensured significant development time containment.

Visualization and modeling for roadmap of future products
Contributing to roadmap requires much more expertise on the emerging technologies areas as well as the total grasp of the current product lines. It would require understanding of product’s positions in the market place, relative advantages with respect to the competitors products, built-in obsolescence, customizations hooks to be built-in, protecting the key design-ins with a secured encapsulations etc. This is a clear case of strategic leap in to customer’s domain.

For example, Wipro did MP3 player design on a very low cost DSP platform. When the product was launched by Wipro’s customer in the market, it was a huge success. Hence, based on the similar but higher end platform where audacious technical goals were set, which includes host of codec to be supported (WMA, MP3Pro, etc.) besides developing a specialized debugger, Wipro was involved in the road map discussions, key design decisions and evolving the critical post-field enhancement strategy. It was possible due to the entrenched expertise in the specific platform, tools and grasp of field challenges that were observed during the less complex implementation. As a project, it went on for four and a half years with systematic roadmaps and scheduled implementations. Enough care was also taken to account for the emerging standards during that forecasted periods.

Design process transformation
This is effectively the peak of the design pyramid where the process and the methodology itself are structured in a way to achieve the business objectives.

Design is both noun and verb. As a noun, it is what the user perceives. As a verb, it is the process by which design produces that perception. Hence, the process and methodology by which designs are done is very critical. If contributions are done at that level, it represents the peak of design services leading to transformation in the way designs are realized.

For example, EagleWision is Wipro’s in-house methodology that addresses the design and later the implementation flow. Depending on the given project, customization of this process happens systematically with the customer’s end product in mind. This is one simple case of customization at the process level.

Another example is that, for a Tier-1 semiconductor company, Wipro changed the manner in which verification was done—from dynamic simulation to property based verification.

Moving up the design services value pyramid
In the past 30 years, product design services firms in India have constantly innovated and progressed through the value pyramid. There are a number of parameters that have contributed to this growth:

1. Technical capability
a) Basic supply of raw engineering talent in large numbers: According to the Minister of State for Human Resource Development, there is an intake of about 450,000 engineering students all over India in 2008.
b) Specialized institutes such as Indian Institute of Technology, National Institute of Design, National Institute of Technology, etc., continue to infuse innovation within the arduous curriculum.
c) The overall product development ecosystem has over the past few years bridged most gaps and now design firms can quickly provide prototype designs and even manufacture in small volume volumes for validation.

2. Local market opportunity and requirements understanding
a) Ability to come up with customized design to suit the end-user applications, specifically in the low-cost market segment.
b) India as a market is vastly heterogeneous. While the market may be big (say cell phones), it is a collection of multiple market segments. Hence, ability to address a broad range is critical. It is “economies of scale AND economies of choices” – not OR.
c) The standard engineering principle is “form follows function.” However in India it could re-state as “end user applications follow the design.” For instance, in the mobile phone market, while the platform could be nearly identical, it is usually designed from “market backward perspective.” An example could be a mobile phone that doubles up as a media player or as an excellent camera companion. This perspective influences the design focus and hence changes the implementation.

3. Secure global product development
Last but not the least, India’s focus on IP and patent has been one of its key strengths. In India, the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of computer software is covered under the Copyright Law and is protected under the provisions of Indian Copyright Act 1957. Major changes to Indian Copyright Law were introduced in 1994 and came into effect from 1995. These changes or amendments make the Indian Copyright law one of the toughest in the world.

While India’s offerings are on a broad range, some countries in Asia offer a very specific and specialized service, which is usually not addressed by India; for example, Taiwan on foundries. Therefore taking a holistic look, it is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

About the Author
Madhu Parthasarathy is the General Manager - DSP/Multimedia, Product Engineering Services, of Wipro Technologies. He can be reached at madhu.parthasarathy@wipro.com.