Sequence India to produce low-power software for Japan
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 09 September 2003, 19:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: "The India center for design will soon be producing next-generation low-power software for the Japanese market", said Vic Kulkarni, president & CEO of Sequence Design Inc. The company today opened its India operations here in Noida. "With a strong R&D base here in India, I hope the India center soon starts creating specifications for System on Chip (SoC) and not just follow them from its U.S. counterpart. We also expect this center to implement, launch and also provide the post-sales support from here" said Kulkarni in a tête-à-tête with Silicon India. Vic Kulkarni, a veteran in the semi-conductor and EDA space was here to set up Sequence's operations in the Indian sub-continent. He felt that the opening up of the company's Indian operations was inevitable as its major clients-ST and Cisco are starting their design activities in India, while Cadence has long been here in the space. The company plans to invest $2-10m over the next two-three years. Kulkarni said that the Indian arm would soon provide post-sales support to Sequence Design's clients worldwide. Currently with 30 people on board or in the process of being hired, And with the growing success of the company, he plans to increase the headcount to 50 by next year. Though, there has not been any employee relocation from the U.S. office, Kulkarni did not dismiss the idea of relocating anyone who would want to return -(we are siliconindia). Apart from developing SoC and low-power software, the Indian hub would also do product validation, quality assurance, web marketing and collateral production. He predicted that India could play a pivotal role in the ongoing SoC revolution and nano technologies as the demand for higher-level design solutions are growing by the day. Kulkarni did see a future for the domestic market in the EDA space that Sequence is in. "The multinationals prefer to purchase in the U.S. and then license it out in the Indian sub-continent, but the new class of companies-start-ups in the wireless design space-will purchase it out here. At the same time, this will be fueled by the VC funding." According to him, companies like Insilica-that has an office in the Silicon Valley as well as in Bangalore-would make their purchases here in India. The company already has associations with Interra and QualCore Logic, while the former provides Sequence with engineering consultancy, the later has a SoC design center in Hyderabad. Sequence is among the select companies addressing the area of power management software focused at the architectural and performance levels. "With the insatiable demand for low power solutions, the semiconductor industry has moved from 180 nm to the 90nm fabrication. The cost of creating a 90 nm fab is $ 3 billion, while the 200 nm costs about $ 500 million. As the geometries of silicon are reduced, the manufacturing cost touches the roof", said Kulkarni. This meant that the 90 nm could only be afforded by the big names like that of Toshiba, Motorola, TSMC to name a few. "Manufacturing a 90 nm fabrication involves 280 steps and each step has to be foolproof and 100 per cent correct, any defect in one step, the chip will not work", he further added. "Timing is everything. As the design size shrinks, the chip frequencies will increase, more and more attention is required to interconnect timing optimization and design", Kulkarni asserted.

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