India: A global design hub for the semiconductor industry

There is a tremendous electronic opportunity ahead in India. With rapid economic growth prospects and relatively low levels of electronics penetration in most market segments, India is entering an explosive semiconductor growth phase. Stellar semiconductor companies with solid business models, agile development strategies and requisite product roadmaps are poised for excellent market success.

Not so long ago – in what seems now like a different era – semiconductor companies had end-to-end, in-house, competence for delivering chips including design, manufacturing, packaging, assembly, testing, and logistics. Driven by necessity, this changed rapidly through the ‘80s and ‘90s, to make way for innovative business models such as the fabless semiconductor model. Companies such as Xilinx convincingly demonstrated the power of the fabless model by successfully delivering semiconductor products that changed the industry. These companies enabled rapid, innovative and efficient delivery of products to market by focusing on their core area of expertise.

A combination of increasing financial constraints, rapidly changing market forces and the need to sustain deep technology innovation have forced semiconductor companies to further focus on doing more with less. These companies are looking at cost-effective product development strategies that offer flexibility and time-to-market advantages.

To highlight a trend, designing with ASICs is becoming prohibitively expensive owing to the fixed costs associated with it. The development costs for a typical ASIC jumped from approximately $20 million on 90nm technology to $60 million on 40nm technology within a short span of three years. Incurring this cost is justified only for ultra high-volume applications and companies are now, more than ever before, looking at increasingly attractive alternatives such as FPGAs.

The future is FPGA
According to a recent report by Gartner, ASICs are further slated to be supplanted by FPGAs in multiple domains in 2009. With several companies terminating designs due to cost pressures, the report estimates a 22 percent decline in ASIC designs by the end of this year. FPGAs, on the other hand, are increasingly becoming an attractive option, with their ability to address higher capacity, higher performance and added features.

Targeted designs further make it easier for designers to adopt and apply FPGAs to their applications. Xilinx provides Target Design Platforms that enable customers to spend less time developing the infrastructure of an application and more time creating their unique value in the design.

The India R&D centre at Hyderabad is Xilinx’s largest R&D facility outside of the United States and plays an important role in the company’s overall product development. It is a critical and broad contributor for our present and next generation products that support our Targeted Design Platforms. The centre has competencies that range from IC design, IP development, SW development, systems and applications development. It has successfully enabled delivery of our leading-edge products at 40nm and is already deep into design for our next technology node.

Ecosystem excellence, partnerships with academia
As companies look for ways to do more with less, it is imperative to continue to focus efforts on their areas of expertise, and create the routes to source non-core requirements from the most efficient channels. To put it into geographical perspective, an example could be getting the design done in India, manufacturing in Taiwan, and testing and packaging in Singapore.

With talent being recognized as a key advantage that India enjoys, industry, academia, and the Government have initiated a number of programs to ensure that the next generation of semiconductor design specialists are ready to take on globally competitive roles with minimal transition periods. Semiconductor companies could probably be seen as the gold standard in terms of how we actually reach to educational institutions and students – through knowledge-sharing, train-the-trainers, equipping them with real-world products and scenarios, and much more.

At Xilinx, we have participated in numerous initiatives that help bridge the industry-academia divide, and continue to take leadership roles in relevant opportunities. Through the Xilinx University Program, we have ongoing initiatives at several IITs, IISc Bangalore and several other leading engineering institutions of the country to provide access to Xilinx’s full suite of FPGA design tools and necessary hardware development boards both for teaching and research. We also actively share best practices from Universities around the world with the Indian academia.

Conclusion
There is a tremendous opportunity for programmable technology in India, especially with the emergence of rapidly growing new markets in diverse domains such as communications, defense, healthcare, green electronics and computing. The country plays host to a vibrant and rapidly growing ecosystem. This allows us to tap into excellent engineering talent and helps strengthen our global R&D competence that is able to support the broad requirements of Xilinx’s targeted design platform strategy.

Author Information
Vamsi Boppana is the Chief Technology Officer of Xilinx India.