Spotlight

Mapping the customer’s designs

inSilica is poised to grow rapidly now that it has established an engineering team and put foundry and vendor partnerships in place. Vinutha V reports

In addition to chip design services, upgrading our existing capabilities is important. Mergers and acquisitions will be a focus area Uma Mahesh Director Silicon Engineering & Operations inSilica

India’s traditional advantage of low cost and high quality is coming to the fore even in high-entry-barrier fields such as chip design. Majors such as Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Motorola and IBM are already doing cutting-edge chip design work in India. As traditional giants are also outsourcing their chip design services to third-parties, a significant opportunity has opened up for Indian software companies. Consequently both the majors such as TCS and Wipro and a host of start-ups are offering chip design services. inSilica Semiconductors India is one such startup.

Founded in November 2002 by Vinod Dham—known as the Father of the Pentium—and Tushar Dave of New Path Ventures, inSilica is a fabless semiconductor player (it does not manufacture chips) delivering customer specific SoC (System on a Chip) services. It develops intellectual property and licences it to firms.

To gain domain expertise, inSilica has forged partnerships with foundry firms such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Chartered Semiconductors Manufacturing and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Magma and Mentor are its EDA (Electronic Design Automation) partners.

The chip design paradigm is shifting, hence chip design has become a complex process. The more time it takes to design a chip, the costlier the process. Faced with this challenge, chip majors are realising the need for outsourcing systems on a chip services. By offering Silicon Intellectual Property (SIP) services, inSilica wants to cash in on this opportunity. “Since we offer a one-stop solution by taking care of manufacturing and logistics, we give an edge to our customers. Our SoC business model gives them flexibility and reduce their costs,” says Uma Mahesh, the company’s Director of Silicon Engineering and Operations.

inSilica got its first round of funding of $10 million from venture capital firm New Path Venture in October 2003. Currently the company has 61 engineers doing chip design work at Bangalore. Functions such as sales and customer relationship meetings are executed from Santa Clara, US, the company’s HQ.

Flextronics adds muscle

Initially, the company was focussing on methodologies and design processes. March 2004 was a turning point when electronics manufacturing services firm, Flextronics, invested $10 million in inSilica. The funding helped inSilica to enhance its IP

portfolio while continuing to expand its existing design and manufacturing operations. Additionally, Flextronics chose inSilica to provide it and its OEM partners with design services. What’s significant is that Flextronics outsourced its silicon design services to an Indian firm for the first time.

“Flextronics utilises our expertise in mixed signal and radio frequency (RF) design. For us, the partnership has opened up a huge opportunity to serve its customers,” says Mahesh. With the partnership, inSilica can gain expertise by providing services to Flextronics’ customers who are mobile phone, game box and networking equipment manufacturers.

Designing flexibility

inSilica says that by using the company’s proprietary design methodologies, the performance and utilisation capabilities of a chip increases by a significant amount. Under this engagement, the customer provides inSilica with the product requirements, and inSilica offers its customers flexible options for designing chips. “We allow our customers to interface with any level of chip designing, be it at the design specification level or gate level,” says Mahesh. Another strength of inSilica is its partnership with foundry players, and assembly and test vendors; these partnerships allow the company the flexibility to offer custom I/O (Input-Output) requirements and custom-packaging services.

In January 2005, to enhance its imaging capabilities, inSilica bought a design house, an offshoot of Flextronics. Comments Mahesh, “In addition to providing chip design services, upgrading our existing capabilities is very important. Mergers and acquisitions will be a continuous focus area for us.”

In for the long haul

Since its inception, inSilica has developed mixed signal and RF IP for wireless devices. It has worked on RF chips for WLAN, and large mixed signal test chips. In 2004, the company developed a chip for imaging for mobile phone cameras. Currently, the company is working on an 18 mm chip for network security. inSilica is also in the process of developing chips for videos and display screens, including mobile phones, televisions and digital cameras.

Till last year the company was on a spending spree, and made investments for developing different technologies. In the coming year inSilica aims to see a substantial growth in revenue; it plans to reach $10 million. Even more ambitious is its plan of clocking $100 million in 2009. “Having put the methodologies and engineering team in place, we believe that we can reach the target with the support of foundry and vendor partnerships,” says Mahesh. inSilica is looking at focussing on wireless technologies with low-power consumption and imaging in mobile technology, especially MPEG-4 and MPEG-7. The company is also concentrating on developing technologies related to display screens.

At present the company has two customers, Flextronics and Nevis Networks, a Santa Clara-based company that manufactures router networking gears. To tap global opportunities, the company has appointed representatives in the US and Europe. It is also looking at opening a development centre in India. As far as Bangalore is concerned, inSilica plans to increase its employee strength of 73 to over 100 by the end of 2005.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com