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There is a lot of excitement around the semiconductor industry in India and it is very justified. The industry has come a long way from the early eighties when a few companies set up India Design Centres to offshore non-critical design work to India. Over the past 20 years, we have seen India emerge as a force to reckon with in design and development of chip, package, board, and embedded software. Today, we have a thriving ecosystem with major Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM), IP providers, EDA, design services firms, Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) establishing an Indian presence. The industry can now be viewed as three intersecting sub-ecosystems in "Design", "Product Definition", and "Manufacturing". Delving into each of these sub-systems in greater detail is important for a better understanding of where our industry’s future lies.
Design
India has proven experience in verification, cutting-edge digital, analog and mixed signal design. The country’s rapidly developing VLSI and embedded software industry allows companies to efficiently engage in hardware software co-development and verification. An evolved ecosystem, coupled with highly competitive business models offered by design services firms, is helping us own end-to-end design and leverage the local ecosystem to harness time-to-market advantages. Product definition Further, with the consumptive base in India growing rapidly both at the mid-income segment as well as at the proverbial base-of-the-pyramid, I believe there are tremendous opportunities for Indian entrepreneurs to leverage proximity to this emerging market and innovate to define and build products to address their needs and aspirations.
Market proximity can help designers understand consumer needs better, and manufacturers can experience tremendous productivity and cost benefits. As an emerging market, India’s needs are unique. With 800 Million people in Rural or semi-urban areas that need to be integrated into the formal economy for India to realize it’s goal of sustained 9+% GDP growth over the next couple of decades, there are tremendous challenges and opportunities. It makes business sense for the industry to collaborate more closely to address the needs of this target market and then extend that to other developing economies around the world. There are tremendous opportunities in verticals such as education, entertainment, communication, healthcare, energy, automobiles and consumer.
With OEMs setting up shop in India, their EMS partners have followed. Recent momentum in India’s EMS and Original Design Manufacturing (ODM) industry suggests these companies are building electronic equipment for OEMs for the Indian market. Clearly, India’s electronics ecosystem is gearing to meet domestic demand.
Manufacturing With the announcement of the Semiconductor Policy by the Indian government last year we have observed an increased impetus to the semiconductor and related high-tech electronics manufacturing segment. We have also intercepted another macro trend around clean energy and I expect India to emerge as a global leader in harnessing solar energy over the next several years. While large, industrial-scale fabs in India may require some more time to take off, we should not discount the momentum seen with ATMP plants and solar fabs. ATMP plants make sense as they enable faster time-to-market and allow companies to pass on cost benefits to consumers. India has also witnessed the mushrooming of several companies investing in Solar PV fabs. Solar PV fab activity will help strengthen the ecosystem, infrastructure and manpower that is required for the more resource intensive semiconductor fabs.
I see this as a journey. Global semiconductor hubs like Taiwan and China have taken their own routes to develop their semiconductor ecosystems, and I believe ATMP plants and solar PV fabs could be India’s route to establishing a full semiconductor ‘fab’ locally.
In conclusion The Indian semiconductor industry has made giant strides in the past decade and I expect that it is a trend that will continue. Technology conferences, especially the VLSI Design Conferences, have played a vital role as catalysts in sharing knowledge and best practices, thereby enabling the progress we have seen over the past two decades.
Going forward I believe we are poised for tremendous new and unprecedented opportunities in building on our core-strengths. We will see the landscape maturing in terms of product development for the Indian market, as well as maturing of the manufacturing space through solar fabs and ATMP plants.
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Jaswinder
Ahuja, Jaswinder S. Ahuja is a Corporate Vice President and the Managing Director of Cadence Design Systems in India. Jaswinder leads Cadence’s India Operating Region. He is also responsible for defining the globalization strategy for Cadence and developing R&D centers in Russia, Taiwan and China. From 2002 to 2004 Jaswinder was based at Cadence headquarters in San Jose, California and was responsible for establishing and leading the Strategic R&D partnerships and the R&D Central Operations functions for the company. Jaswinder started his career with Cadence in 1988 as a software engineer and has led the India operations since 1996. Under his leadership the India center has grown from an R&D site of around 120 to a corporate resource center of over 700 employees across R&D, Corporate IT support, Global Customer Care and Field Operations. He has led the India center to be recognized for its operational excellence and as the #1 IT Employer in India among the small companies for four years in a row from 2002 to 2006 based on the DQ-IDC annual best employer surveys. Jaswinder serves on the board of advisors of FirstRain, Inc. and Zafesoft, Inc., and is the Chairman and a member of the Executive Council of the India Semiconductor Association.
Jaswinder has a B.Tech in Electronics Engineering from IT-BHU, Varanasi
and an MS in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston,
USA. He also holds an Executive MBA from Stanford University, USA. |
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| Posted On : 29th July 2008 |
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