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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.

February - 2008 - issue > Company Spotlight

Sankalp: Innovating analog mixed signal solutions

Vimali Swamy
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Vimali Swamy
A team of engineers at Sankalp was engaged with a major customer working on state of the art 45nm memory modules. They had a daunting task of delivering eight modules, which were delayed by two months at the time of engagement. The team was young and new to this technology and everybody was skeptical about his or her success. Once the work started they realized it was not as easy as expected. The team put their thinking hats together and came out with innovative ideas - to reduce cycle time and to avoid iterations for quality - and went ahead with implementation. Eventually the team completed the project well within the deadline and also lived up to the customer expectation on quality. The effort was not only applauded by the local customer but also recognized by the U.S. counterpart and they went ahead to use those innovations for their own benefit and productivity improvement.

This is the kind of exciting environment in which the engineers at Sankalp work each day. For a company started two years back with a clear vision to engage in the challenging opportunity to design integrated circuits (IC) in the analog/ mixed signal space, Sankalp Semiconductor has strengthened its position as a service provider to some of the largest semiconductor companies in the world.

“With the evolution of the System-on-Chip (SoC), new doors have opened for chip designers,” explains Vivek Pawar, CEO of the company. “We plan to tap this opportunity”, he adds. Pawar led the Mixed Signal Technology Center, Texas Instruments, before he co-founded Sankalp with five others.

Today, Sankalp is engaged in some of the very challenging chip designs in analog, mixed signal space that includes areas like Successive Approximation A/D converter, Pipeline ADC, Analog Input multiplexers, LVDS, DC-DC converters, Low Drop Out regulators, and many more. Engineers at Sankalp work towards providing analog design service and solutions for IC manufacturers by means of methodology innovations and automations. They work on chips that vary from 180 nm to 45 nm. They have recently started working on 32 nm chips as well. Customers get engaged with Sankalp at different levels of service. “While many seek our complete service, some others want just a specific part such as automation, development, or layout development,” says Pawar. Either way, the chips that Sankalp designs find their way into multiple domains such as telecom, microprocessors, automobile, broadband, networking, and bio-medical.

But, what sets apart Sankalp from other players in the design space? “We hope to distinguish ourselves with the methodologies and automations by which we want to foster innovation and co-innovation to deliver our services with benchmark quality and time to market,” quips Mrinal Das, VP-Engineering. Working on a complex area such as analog mixed signal design means there should be checklists at each stage to ensure quality and avoid iterations due to errors. Methodologies are developed for the various stages of design, layout, and reviews to ensure consistency in the quality of the output irrespective of the person doing it. Thus, Sankalp provides higher impact and value to its customers in whatever domain they are engaged in.


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