India is well-positioned in the electronic design industry due to its intrinsic strength in software design, which was started very early in the country. India has mastered and established large client bases throughout the world when compared with other Asian countries including China.
Many independent design companies have evolved in India, building their systems expertise as well as expanding their client lists over a relatively small number of years. Having developed strong business relationships with these clients, it has been a natural choice for those existing and new end clients who were looking for partners to develop hardware and complete systems beyond just software, to first look at these Indian companies who have all the potential, required capabilities, and skill sets to deliver. These companies now have proven track records.
Over the past two decades, the electronics design industry has been driven by a tremendous advancement and phenomenal growth in VLSI semiconductor chips and embedded software. Further, the end-products and their applications have become more and more digital and programmable. This means the firmware and software shape the key features. As a result, India is becoming the preferred destination for all types of software development, chip design and system design by global companies worldwide.
To support this, the entire ecosystem was developed in the country, such as EDA tools, board design companies as well as the supply chain. With this support, Indian companies have world-class capabilities for state-of-the-art product design in a wide range of electronic applications – telecommunications (both wireline and wireless) equipment, industrial control products, computer and storage products, digital consumer products, medical equipment, automotive electronics, and military and aerospace electronic products.
India’s electronic design market today can be divided into three major segments that reflect their key strengths:
1. Global Multi-national Companies (MNC): Include product design companies both hardware and software domain and fabless semiconductor companies having their R&D centers in India such as Cisco, Juniper, GEHC, Intel, AMD, TI, ADI, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, NSN, and ALU to name a few.
2. Design services companies such as Wipro, HCL, TCS, and Mindtree, who are handling many complex designs for many global customers. These design services companies have moved up the value chain and won prestigious projects that have worldwide impact.
3. Government organizations, public sector units (PSUs) and private product design companies who are working on various defense/military, industrial and communication products designs such as BEL, HAL, ITI, BHEL, and ECIL. The Indian government has increased its focus on the telecom market as well as strengthened their push into military and aerospace programs. The respective R&D centers and labs are handling more complex system designs with industry partnership.
Coupled with the track records of above three segments, India’s growing economy and domestic market size is making it a preferred destination for semiconductor and embedded designs.
India’s strengths and competitive advantagesAmong the Asian countries, India has many competitive advantages in the electronics design space. Following are a couple of key points about these advantages:
Highly skilled manpowerIndian universities and colleges produce over 300,000 engineers and about 2.5 million graduates every year apart from a huge number of college-trained, English-speaking graduates in other fields. The country’s knowledge base ensures that complex designs on newer platforms for a variety of vertical domains are increasingly being developed at local R&D facilities in India. Less expensive labor is not the issue. India’s competitive edge is its large, available talent base and design capabilities. Global companies are keen to tap these resources available in India. Its pool of excellent technical skills both in software and hardware domain, its base of English speaking populace with an increasing disposable income and its burgeoning market have all combined to enable India to emerge as a viable partner to global industry.
Intellectual property protectionIndia has excellent track record in Intellectual Property Protection (IPR) and a credible IPR framework that attracts many multi-national companies to start their own engineering design centers or work with Indian design service companies to develop their complete system solutions and products in-country.
Economy and local industryThe growing Indian middle class consumer base with their increasing disposable incomes has created a large demand for various products such as video gaming, TVs, telecommunication, retail, automotive and other consumer products. The ISA–Frost & Sullivan report predicts that the electronic equipment consumption will expand to $363 billion by 2015 with a growing CAGR of 29.8 percent. The Government of India is committed to enabling foreign investors to discover India as a partner with whom they can work in synergy to achieve their objectives of growth and profitability.
Based on the local demand, the telecom industry in India has undergone an incredible evolution in the recent years. The country is now ranked third worldwide in terms of having the largest telecommunication network after China and the US. With the ongoing investments into infrastructure deployment, the country is projected to become the second largest telecom market globally in the next few years. The India mobile subscriber base is set to exceed 771 million connections by 2013, growing at a CAGR of 14.3 percent in the same period from 452 million connections this year according to a recent Gartner, Inc. study.
Altera’s technology leadershipAltera continues its strong investment in new product development to serve our customers in focus market segments that exist in India by supplying state-of-the-art design tools and programmable logic devices to our customers. Altera is at the forefront of technology, being the first semiconductor company in the industry to start volume shipments of the first 40nm Stratix IV GT FPGA devices and also the only FPGA company providing PLDs with embedded high speed transceivers capable of running up to 11.3Gbps data rates. The Stratix IV GT FPGA with up to 24 transceivers supports an 11.3Gbps data rate (and additional 24 channels supporting 8.5Gbps). This is the ideal product targeting the most demanding communication applications such as 40G/100Gigabit Ethernet, providing direct interface with 100G CFP optical modules, as indicated in Figure 1.
Going forward, Altera intends to maintain our technology leadership and provide the benefits of the most state-of-the-art technology in the industry to our existing and future customers in India.
Apart from Stratix IV GT FPGA, the Stratix IV EP4SE820 FPGA is the industry's highest density, highest performance and lowest power FPGA in its class. The EP4SE820 FPGA is ideally suited for a variety of high-end digital applications that require resource-rich FPGAs, including ASIC Prototyping and emulation, wireline, wireless, military and computer & storage applications. Altera’s Stratix IV E FPGAs feature four devices ranging in density from 230K to 820K logic elements (LEs). The density, performance and power-saving features in the EP4SE820 FPGA enable customers to simplify their design partitioning, accelerate their verification cycle, and reduce their total system power. This 820K LE FPGA gives ASIC-prototyping designers the ability to implement much larger ASIC designs on a single FPGA.
Altera university program Altera works with Indian university and engineering college professors and lecturers to help teach students about digital technology. Altera’s University Program provides a variety of teaching materials, including state-of-the-art computer aided design (CAD) software tools, best-in-class teaching hardware (in the form of laboratory boards), tutorials that introduce students and lecturers to Altera's tools and hardware, and “ready-to-teach'” laboratory exercises that can be employed in university-level digital logic and computer organization courses. These materials are provided with the goal of graduating engineering students that are well-trained on digital circuit designs, PLD design methodologies, embedded / DSP technologies, etc. Altera is helping to provide a large number of talented electronics engineering resources for hardware systems design, chip designs, and verifications.
Design and support servicesAltera continues to partner with various design service companies in India. We organize regular trainings with their designers on our latest tools, device features and solutions to make sure they are well equipped with the necessary knowledge required to perform their system/product design tasks.
Altera’s distribution partners such as Arrow Electronics India and WT Microelectronics India have dedicated teams of Altera certified field support engineers who work closely with the local government defense/aerospace/industrial companies and other private companies to support their product developments and enable them in creating products and solutions.
There are many innovative new products designed by Indian companies in various fields like communications, industrial, medical, military and defense. Examples include a fuel dispenser system being used in petrol stations, thermal printer designs used in shopping malls for receipts printing, LED-based outdoor display boards, railway passenger information display systems, infant care and patient monitoring systems, radar signal processing systems, military encryption systems, and more where Altera devices and solutions are being used. With the technological advances in programmable logic, our FPGAs and CPLDs have moved to the “heart of the system” in a very wide range of applications. With the inherent advantages of programmable logic we see an ever-increasing number of designs moving to our devices to realize these advantages and reach the market quickly and more cost-efficiently.
Author InformationGangatharan Gopal is the Country Manager for Altera India.
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