Bangalore: A demand slump in the global semiconductor industry notwithstanding, Indian R&D centres of global chip majors are playing crucial role in designing products for global rollouts. Over the past few months, Indian centres have seen greater proportion of value-added semiconductor design being carried out while in some cases, the captives have handled end-to-end product design.

The value-addition tops India’s growing reputation as a chip design back-end even thought the country is yet to boast of a major fab or manufacturing unit. LSI Corporation India’s MD and veep, Pravin Desale, explains it succinctly: “The complexity of designs and platforms developed in MNC captives have grown. Earlier, most of them were leveraged to provide point activities: Few parts of the workflow and not end-toend delivery. Gradually, the value chain has expanded from product specification and architecture to integration at customer site and pre and post-sales support.”

Industry watchers say while design centres have gained in expertise to move up the value chain, a greater focus on local markets/emerging geographies is also fuelling development of global-level products. Since at a future date, a ready locally-designed product can always expedite go-to-market strategy.

Echoes Sanjiv Keskar, country manager-sales , FreeScale Semiconductor, “We are noticing a paradigm shift wherein the products designed in India are serving the global market. This is limited at the moment but is likely to grow.” FreeScale’s MCF52xx microcontroller catering to rising demand for larger memory and more connectivity, was one whose design was owned and executed fully from the India design centre.

AMD’s corporate vice-president of central engineering, Jeff VerHeul, says: “As part of our globalised strategy, the India R&D centre has been collaborating with other centres for latest cutting edge products. AMD’s first 45nanometre procesor , Shanghai, is a result of a closely coordinated effort between India and the US — a reflection of the strategic role that India plays in global design activities.”

AMD started its hardware design team in Hyderabad in mid-2008 following an acquisition and it now accounts for almost 50-60 % of the physical design work for the firm including high-end graphic design.

To boot, Intel’s India centre has designed the global major’s first six-core x86 microprocessor, the Xeon 7400 series . The team had planned and executed end-to-end design including front-end design, pre-silicon logic validation and back-end design. Sources say this was the first time a microprocessor was created in a design laboratory in India but an e-mail questionnaire to Intel remained unanswered.

Engineers at Analog Device’s India product development centre work on highperformance analog design, embedded software development , among other things and are involved in all stages of integrated circuit development from ‘concept to silicon to production’.

“The India centre is the home of the SHARC family of processor products, used in home and automotive audio systems . Engineers here work closely with the global team to develop high performance signal processing products for worldwide markets,” says S Karthik, engineering director of ADI’s India centre.

Concludes Biswadip Mitra, MD, TI India , which has had a research centre in Bangalore since 1985: “The TI analog front end semiconductor devices (AFE) is a chip family whose development was largely carried out by engineers in TI India . Today, there is hardly any TI chip that is not touched by engineers at TI India.”

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