Though India is enriched with several mammoth software organizations, 98.8 percent of our electronic components are being imported from abroad, as most of India's hardware firms act simply as augmenting service warehouses, especially when complex semiconductor processes are involved. In fact, every semiconductor company can only afford a very few senior professionals and a bunch of juniors, as there is barely a talent pool of 25,000 all over India. Noting that it requires many skilled seasoned professionals with hands-on experience to handle complex designs when a customer seeks high-end technology services, there are only a handful of vendors who can deliver a turnkey solution. BlackPepper Technologies stands out even amongst these select few vendors with its unique capability of delivering turnkey solutions with the highest amount of predictability and delivery quality in the shortest turnaround time; owing to its unique employee ownership model, which has bestowed it with the top ten percent of the talent available in the semiconductor industry.

While most hardware-oriented consulting firms are being acquired by software behemoths, BlackPepper stands apart by getting even more deeply entrenched into the semiconductor space. "We are flattered at the attention that we - as an acquisition target - constantly receive from these major players; however we would like to reiterate that we are, quite simply, not for sale. This gives our customer base the confidence that BlackPepper's proven excellence in its chosen focus areas is not going to be diluted by an acquisition by larger software oriented companies. It also gives us the mindspace to execute our carefully charted long-term plans with precision and freedom. Our stated plan of record is to go IPO," asserts Sujeeth Joseph, CTO, BlackPepper, who was Director of Architecture for SanDisk's Removable Products Group and was Chief Architect of Wipro's Semiconductor BU.

The Go-to-provider

Having assembled a top class engineering team from the OEM and ODM spaces with abundant experience in executing SOCs, BlackPepper has emerged as the go-to provider for handling & implementing complex SOCs that are critical in terms of meeting power, performance and area targets, typically in IoT, automotive, wireless & healthcare domains. It is one of the very few houses in India that is capable of accomplishing a 'true' concept-to-end product offering which integrates everything from algorithms and ASIC/silicon implementation to high volume production including industrial design under one roof. This explains BlackPepper's impressive client list which comprises of eight out of ten top semiconductor organizations.

"EYWA, our home-grown technology framework, simply removes sub optimality from the design process. This is what plagues the design process in many of our competitors. EYWA is a unique combination of various technology components that consolidate principles of network protocols, human capability mapping and physical resource modelling into one single integrated platform. This brings forth a product (be it hardware, software, silicon or an actual end product) with higher quality,lower cost and gets realised predictably on time," explains Manoj Sundareswaran, Executive VP, BlackPepper, who was a key contributor in Infineon India's Engineering division.