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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

November - 2006 - issue > Made in India

Ankoor Sprouts Indian Product development

Sanjeev Jain
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Sanjeev Jain
In October, 1995, Sham Banerji, Design Manager with Texas Instruments, landed in Bangalore from Houston, Texas, with a mission to build the first ever Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chip from India.

During those days, the two-decade-old Texas Instruments India was flush with success in developing analog and ASIC designs. Bolstered by its track record, TI India was convinced that it could get a new DSP chip designed completely in India.

It did. The result was Ankoor.

Ankoor—meaning sprout in Hindi—was a result of the demand for small and fast converters from analog signals or waves to digital or binary and back, with some signal processing in between. Its advantage was that it was the first chip that combined the function of a DSP and a micro-controller unit, thus freeing up the real estate in hardware. It found its way into hard disk drives, industrial control, medical electronics, scanners, printer, automobile electronics and robotics.

Banerji had to assemble a new 35-member team and was instructed to hire experts from within India with only a few expatriates to fall back on. While Banerji himself was a microprocessor designer, a VLSI test expert came in from France and a couple of others from Cyrix and the state funded Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL). The rest of the team comprised new recruits and TI India engineers working in other departments. Alex Tessorolo, an Australian and a TI veteran was the architect, while a Customer Project Manager was assigned in the U.S. TI sent in inputs from potential customers and its own suggestions.


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