SiNett picks B'lore for ASIC chip design

By siliconindia staff writer   |   Thursday, 04 December 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: SiNett (Silicon for Networking) Corporation, a fabless semi-conductor company focusing on WLAN for enterprises, has started a R&D center in Bangalore for ASIC chip design and related software development. "Ours is a pure R&D center and we are most certainly a product company. The Bangalore center will work in co-ordination with our base in the US to develop the chips but the entire software related to the same will be developed out of here. We have a total engineering workforce of 40 with 14 in Bangalore. We will be scaling up to 50 in Bangalore in 2004," said SiNett Corporation president and CEO Shiri Kadambi. He added that the company aims to bring its first chip into the market by the third quarter of 2004. The company which was formed in September 2002 with initial funding of $ 8 million from Matrix Venture Partners, Alliance Ventures and Clearstone Ventures, said that it will be investing close to $ 2 million in India, in the first year of operations. "We will concentrate on development of chips for WLAN in enterprise networks which demand more security and mobility while presenting issues of complexity, cost and time to market. We have developed a scalable, silicon architecture called SUMMiT, which we believe to be one of a kind in providing the best of services in enterprise networks. We have already filed seven patents from our US offices and will work to file more from the Bangalore center," said Kadambi. Though unwilling to mention names or geographies, Kadambi said that SiNett was in the concluding stages of deciding a partnership with a South East Asian based fab, for manufacturing of the chips. Replying to a question on FPGA and its future, Kadambi said, "we will be doing a bit of FPGA design here but it will constitute only 10 percent of the total work done. There are possibilities for FPGA becoming more important in the future but prices have to fall for that. We are talking about $4,000 for each chip, multiples of which will be needed on a board. Unless the prices fall therefore, we won’t see a major shift to FPGA." The company estimates the market size for its products to reach more than $ one billion by 2007. SiNett hopes to garner $100 million of this market by 2007. It expects to breakeven by 2004 and also make some profit in 2005.