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March - 2015 - issue > 20 Most Promising Semiconductor Companies 2015
GigaCom Semiconductor Creating Innovative Building Blocks for SOCs
SI Team
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Nurturing young minds by giving them proper guidance and providing opportunity to help them explore the realm of technology is something Venkata Simhadri, President and CEO of GigaCom Semiconductor, takes pride in doing. When Simhadri was starting up with GigaCom, he focused on building a team comprising experts in the field of semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) and a group of young college graduates. With headquarters at San Jose, California, Simhadri built a design center in Visakhapatnam, a place different from the traditional destinations in India. GigaCom setup an amalgamation of young dynamics
and experienced minds to develop standard based interfaces along with Link Layers and integrating the IP into complex SOCs.

But capturing a well-established semiconductor IP market poses a bigger challenge, especially when the company is a startup. "Nobody will license our IP until we fabricate it, test it, and characterize it completely," notes Simhadri. "It is a time consuming process and also very expensive one. It needs deep pockets and patience." To overcome this, GigaCom licensed some of the core technology from industry leaders instead of developing it from scratch. This Partnership with established players in the industry has helped GigaCom to get into generating
IP and characterizing it. When the market is full of semiconductor IP companies, GigaCom's
differentiating factor is that they provide both analog and digital components integrated together in a single solution. There are other IP vendors who provide only analog or digital solution and many times customers end up getting those components from two different places,and integrate it themselves. It is more resource consuming process apart from being error-prone as well.

"Our integrated solution saves both time and money of our customers," remarks Simhadri. Apart from providing integrated solutions,Simhadri believes that customized solutions are the
demand of the customers. "Often, big IP vendors develop a solution that can be used in any standard application. But if one takes the same solution and uses it as is, they may be wasting more space and area," explains Simhadri. "For only commuting from home to office and back, one would not want to buy a Hummer." GigaCom provides IP solutions that are customized as per user requirement so that their clients don't end up paying more for some features that they are not going to utilize. As the geometry is getting smaller and chips are getting bigger,
the customized solutions allow their clients to optimize their chipsets.

Gigacom's core SerDes technology serves as foundation for emerging standards and custom applications. "We are making sure that our solutions are very efficient in terms of power consumption and spatial consumption," expounds Simhadri. "Our team is incorporating right
design techniques and the right optimization techniques to make our IP very competitive in the market." Especially on the power side, GigaCom incorporated certain design techniques, which Simhadri claims is secret sauce that can lower the power consumption without compromising performance.

All this can only be possible once there is a dedicated team that works consistently to improve
products depending upon the market requirements. And one of the reasons for this is the location of GigaCom's headquarters. Situated at Silicon Valley, the company constantly
monitors the market requirements and builds upon it. "With the world moving away from traditional desk top computing, GigaCom is aiming to serve the needs for communication
between cloud, handheld devices and IOT," concludes Simhadri.
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