Growing from 60 to 600 plus people in a short span of three years in an extremely mature and competitive industry sounds like a dream. Well, it all happened at SmartPlay, a technology services provider based out of U.S. and India. By mid 2008, global economic crisis had started affecting every industry in general and the semiconductor industry in particular. With low profit margins and high cost of operations, even the industry giants were not spared the impact of recession. While most companies struggled to keep themselves afloat, Pradeep Vajram took a bold step by setting up SmartPlay, an End-to-End design services company. The decision indeed was bold for this was a space with several already well established players.

So what prompted him? Lack of depth in value addition provided by existing service players to their customers, he says.

With over 20 years of experience and stints at LSI Logic and Qualcomm, Vajram is fully aware of the needs and demands of the semiconductor industry. It was during his tenure as VP engineering at Qualcomm, where he headed its India semiconductor division that he came across the challenges faced by the semiconductor industry. While looking for service providers in this space, he saw a gap between customers’ requirements and service providers’ offerings. Most of the chip design service providers in the industry did not have the ability to provide value-added end-to-end design solutions. This inspired Vajram to found SmartPlay.

With this, Vajram stepped-in in an extremely challenging and dynamic semiconductor marketplace to fill the void and support the customers with end-to-end design solutions and strong technology expertise. Thus began the journey of SmartPlay, which still stays true to its conceptual vision of providing end-to-end solutions (semiconductor, embedded software and system design) services.

End-to-end Services