BlackPepper Technologies: Driving the Next Era of Innovation

Jei Narayanan, COO Manoj Sundareswaran, EVP-Delivery Hari Puravankara, Founder & CEO Salesh Kumar, VP of Strategic Initiatives

In the last ten years, the semiconductor industry has gone through a significant transformation—including its overall ecosystem, the stakeholders, and the role they play—which has resulted in faster growth rates in major end-use applications (such as smartphones, PCs, and tablets) and expanded reach into new market opportunities. Realizing the existing untapped business potential for rapid product development in the global semiconductor industry, Hari Puravankara founded BlackPepper Technologies in 2010 with a vision to create a full-fledged hardware company spanning out of India that can harness ideas from the unlikeliest of sources and transform them into commercially viable products. With the evolution of the fabless manufacturing within the semiconductor industry, Black Pepper—a trusted design partner for a dozen Tier-1 semiconductor companies—aims to democratize manufacturing innovation by transforming ideas into tangible products and inculcate the spirit of innovation among all.

Centered on the core mission—“To create an organization that is fundamentally rooted in hardware and recognized as the gold standard in product realization”— BlackPepper is uniquely positioned to offer comprehensive turnkey solutions across the spectrum of consumer electronics, wireless and Internet of Things devices.

Leveraging over several hundred years of collective experience, Pepperites—BlackPepper’s dynamic team— collaborates with clients in their product-realization journey, and helps in turning ‘barely-there’ ideas into a form-factor-ready product, fully manufacturable, and ready to be drop-shipped in high volumes. “BlackPepper is known for setting new benchmarks in quality, reliability, and turnaround time (TAT) using proven engineering and management techniques, which has become the way of life for Pepperites,” says Puravankara, founder and CEO of BlackPepper Technologies. One of the company’s homegrown offering, EYWA—an integrated technology platform—leverages a unique framework to allowing optimization of human and compute resources and enables complex designs to converge to closure predictably. “We intend to imprint our logo on the end-to-end system design in all the products that we will be churning out of our company,” says Manoj Sundareswaran, EVP of Delivery.

The company’s distinct functional units include logic design and verification, design for test, physical design, board design, analog and mixed-signal design, post-silicon validation, yield optimization, supply chain management, industrial design and embedded software.
BlackPepper's AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and DL (deep learning) driven solutions cater to applications such as ADAS, predictive machine monitoring, and autonomous platforms.

BlackPepper is actively transforming itself into a company that is squarely at the heart of the product end user experience. They currently cater to five critical segments—automotive, defense, telecom, healthcare, and industrial automation. The company boasts of significant design contributions and substantial market impact for the customers in each of these segments. They have not only continued to develop and create value for their esteemed client base but have also created a reputation of long-lasting partnerships with the clients owing to their value-generating solutions. “Our customers currently span across Tier 1 to Tier 3 companies with a various grade of design complexities,” says Jei Narayanan, COO of BlackPepper.

Illustrating the unique value proposition of BlackPepper, VP of Strategic Initiatives Salesh Kumar explains, “We have taken various strategic calls that have ensured the aligned focus is never compromised or diluted due to any dynamic change agents.” With plans to be a global leader, BlackPepper is headed to spread their roots across Singapore, Malaysia, Israel, Europe and the US. The company will transition to end-to-end system design, including Industrial Design (ID). “We already have clear intent from our customers to design an end-to-end product for automotive, smart LEDs, agriculture, healthcare and smart cities,” concludes Kumar.