Avnet (NYSE:AVT) is a trans-national electronics distributor of electronic parts, enterprise computing, storage products and embedded subsystems. Incorporated in the year 1955, Avnet is known worldwide for its unmatched design capability and is the only distributor with a state-of-art design center to undertake turnkey designs. The organization has a workforce of 3073 employees in 49 offices across the Asia-Pacific region. The Indian contingent consists of highly qualified and skilled personnel with 85 percent of the employees holding engineering degrees. It delivers leading technologies to 6,000 engineers in 36 locations world-wide.

Ramani Sundaresan, Managing Director of Avnet Electronics Marketing, India, is responsible for formulating and executing strategies to grow the business in the fast growing India market. He is working towards making Avnet EM India as the premier distributor in the region and driving consistent profitable growth with a strong and knowledgeable sales force, marketing and field application teams. He has also developed teams to strengthen supply chain support to local and global manufacturers in India and enhance application design and solution support across local and global OEM’s and design houses.

Major Achievements in India
Almost 60 percent of two wheelers in India use the clusters, and half of the fully automatic washing machines use control boards manufactured by Avnet. The designs have been adopted by many customers and some have been deployed to the number of millions; a testimony to Avnet's design success. The company does not have a separate design organization as it is a collective effort from both the business and design teams, who work hand in hand to achieve the vision and mission of the organization. To get an FPGA to interface the memory in a very high performance DDR3 running at 1066 MHz is a challenge for a lot of designers. Avnet teaches designers how to implement such complex issues successfully. Powering up FPGAs is not a trivial matter owing to very tight tolerances and it is a real challenge which even expert companies are facing difficulty in developing power solutions for these devices. The development kits offered are developed by Avnet and they gain experience in designing and building to help customers with the knowledge gained via developing those kits, and not like their competitors who do on a contract basis. Selling these kits is a main starting point for our customers.

Major Design Challenges
Power and memory are the two most common challenges faced by FPGA designers. There are always challenges in new technology and differential implementation of products. ZYNQ, an extensible all programmable processing platform from Xilinx, poses new challenges especially in the aspect of software. Most FPGA designers are not software experts, so now the organization is building a bigger team of expertise within the customer base who will work together to develop solutions. ZYNQ is very different from off the shelf products Avnet custom architects the devices which influence and affect the software. Avnet engages in alerting the customer at the designer phase itself as to positively influence his choice of components so that the client purchases robust devices which have good scalability and shelf life.