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April - 2016 - issue > Cover Story

Open-Silicon: Hardwired for Success

SI Team
Friday, April 1, 2016
SI Team
Hardwired for Success

The conference room at the Open-Silicon office in Milpitas, CA is fast transforming into a 'Deliberation Chamber'. A consultation on the nuances of a silicon chip upgrade between the company's design team and the product architects of their IDM client is fast gaining momentum. One of the architects, evidently oblivious to the animated discussion surrounding him, reaches out for a notepad and quietly begins to define the upgrade that will soon be his company's next generation product. Talks levitate to action-the embedded micro-processor needs replacement along with the interface, number of video channels need to double, the audio processing unit needs to be able to handle Dolby surround sound, internal memory size needs to cope with real time video streaming and so on. Within hours, the team has a Gantt chart showing dependencies and timelines of various tasks that would have to be done to create the final product. Such scenes are played over many times at a company that thrives on transforming Ideas into Products that make a difference in the lives of millions of people worldwide.

Needless to say, there is a clear rationale why many OEMs and IDMs want to engage with prominent players such as Open-Silicon for chip-design as opposed to doing the design in house. To pursue a successful design within their organization, a company would have to get through a long check-list that is both arduous and risky-from hiring competent designers with correct skill-set, to purchasing tools, to overseeing contracts with various vendors, to making sure they are covered from prospective legal 'liability' that may arise while buying Intellectual Property (IP). Through the knowledge gathered over 100s of years of combined experience in designing chips, Open-Silicon takes care of all such risks of creating an ASIC from specification to high volume manufacturing. "At Open-Silicon we take care of everything from scratch to finish, allowing the clients to focus on selling their products rather than making them," assures Taher Madraswala, President and CEO of Open-Silicon.

During a recent project with an IDM client, Open-Silicon delivered a seamless upgrade to a product line in 14 months-beginning from the base design of an older product. The number of wires that the Open-Silicon designers had to maneuver through in the chip were tenfold of that found in a Boeing aircraft. "A delivery time of 14 months is ant-years in the semiconductor space," states Madraswala. Such an accomplishment is by no means an accident; it's by design, achieved through years of experience and skills honed along a long road. In order to truly fathom Madraswala's 'ant-years' statement, one must delve deep into the path adopted by Open-Silicon and the intricacies involved in successful chip design.

Open-Silicon has shipped over 115 million chips. The company has over 310 designs under its belt, having worked for more than 150 unique customers from tier-one system manufacturers, and Fortune 500 companies to startups. "Our clientele ranges from networking, computing, consumer and mobile, to tele-communication, storage, digital signal processing and more." The company's designs have been implemented in approximately 100 different end applications ranging from network processors and aircraft flight display electronics to digital cameras and wearables.


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