According to an economic study by Goldman Sachs, India can manage a six percent plus growth rate for the next forty odd years. According to its projected GDP figures the Indian economy will rank third in the world by 2050.

“What does it take for India to be a semiconductor superpower? First would be talent. Yes, India has talent in all areas of design but chips are a different ballgame altogether,” says Bobby Mitra, MD, Texas Instruments. Chips require a chip off the experienced block of talent. The truth is that India lags here. The second factor involves the scaling down of the high entry barriers in the microelectronics region of the IT industry.

This factor has both good and bad sides. It’s bad because it requires heavy capital investment and expertise to enter this segment. The good part is that once a company is in and established, it is highly valued and it would be hard to dislodge it. The entry barrier is high because of the tool cost and the long-drawn cycle time to get the chips from abroad. For India to be a world-class player in chip ware design, the cycle time to get the chips from abroad and then getting them back to India to get it tested has to be reduced. An ideal situation would be to get the chips into India within a day after being manufactured. This is not a far-fetched goal.

The third factor is to have designers who are systems and application savvy. This front-end requirement is very critical if India has to make the grade. The numbers are growing but still very small. Indian IT engineers have created thousands of world-class products and filed numerous patents in chip design very critical for the companies that they work in.

Hence it is a paradox that the results, which are outstanding, do not have a supportive environment to nurture continuing progress.

The results have been achieved through a trip in a non-supportive ecosystem, which should not have been the case.

Sunil Nanda, Senior Director, Nvidia, believes India is not a major player in the semiconductor industry. “Well in the first place how does one categorize a player as ‘major’? It can be done through parameters like production capability, production capacity, number of fabless companies, number of patents filed and the number of engineers working in this industry,” points out Nanda.

India is nowhere near No.1 in any of the above parameters.

The focus of the people working in the semiconductor industry has to be sharp as it is good to be No.1 in a manageable area than be No.10 in ten areas. The above scenario should change if India has to fare well in different streams within the semiconductor vertical. Multiplication factor in the related areas or more precisely the ripple effect is very apparent here. For example for every, one chip design engineer, ten embedded software engineers are required along with a hundred people in various production related areas.

This makes it an industry in India, which can really create multiple employment opportunities and will bode well for the economy too.

The foundation for youngsters, who aspire to make a mark in the exciting sector of chip design, should be made stronger for India to be a fancied player. The academia must ensure the curriculum is world class and cutting edge. The research output on the chip design region from Indian Universities is not up to the mark when compared with its Asian counterparts like Taiwan and Korea.

Institutes such as The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) located at Bangalore, that focuses on research and advanced instruction should handle the imbalance.

“Starting a normal chip design company in Bangalore will take about a year especially for the formation of a core team. Which start up can afford that much time?” asks Ramesh Emani, President, Embedded Division, Wipro Tech. It’s happening because this is a nascent industry. The chip industry has a generation of experience that people have to go through.

Once a fresher comes out of engineering school it takes five years to understand the intricacies and lead a small team. Ten years down the line is what it takes to lead a project. Five more years of toil is required to lead multiple projects. Hence getting the right people for various positions in India is a difficult process, as the chip industry itself has not gone through the full time cycle here. This is one of the critical reasons why India is a lagging behind with respect to other major players in the world.

Even if the current situation is not rosy for India, a decade or two will see India in the top bracket. Indian returnees will be the major contributor of this growth phase as they have the right combination of risk taking appetite and professional network. Startups in the Silicon Valley have significant Indian contribution and this could be extended to India as well.

“The Chip industry may have been born out of IT Services industry, which includes embedded software, but it has to shed the services mentality and embrace the product culture for the right attitude towards growth,” advices Satya Gupta, VP Engineering, Open-Silicon.
Growth can happen only if there is the right attitude to match. “We are not second class but world class,” avers S.Karthik, MD, Analog Devices. Stable operating companies, which have been around for the last five years in India, do not see chip design as something secondary.

In fact Indian teams operating here have done everything from front end to product definition to production in the digital design domain. Cracks in this chip armor would be in the analog presence, which should be addressed to, as the planet is going wireless by the second; and weak test engineering presence along with sub par packaging services. We missed opportunities to Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines due to these factors.

Given the debate and discussion on the success of Indian chip designers abroad; along with chip design prospects for India and the drive to make it happen here; it can be said that maybe India is not there yet, but the Indians are there.