India Riding Wave of Confidence With Chip Design Ecosystem – EE Times
After years of experience as the design center for the major global chip companies, India’s startup ecosystem is riding a wave of confidence, as the country’s policymakers have fast-tracked policies to boost the ecosystem both around design and manufacturing. This was evident at India Electronics Week, a conference and exhibition held last week in Bangalore.
EE Times had the opportunity to take the pulse of the community to see how it was faring. The scorecard seemed to be very positive.
We spoke with Madhusudan G.S., the CEO and co-founder of InCore, about India’s ambitions, the current state of the industry and what the country needs to do to become a global chip design innovator and powerhouse. InCore is a processor startup that spun out of the Shakti program.
He told us how the Shakti processor project succeeded fairly well, creating a world-class processor architecture team in India. He sees a time in the near future when innovation and intellectual-property creation will come out of India, with slightly lower-value manufacturing being carried out elsewhere.
“We want to prove we can conceptualize products for the world, design them, manufacture them and sell them around the world,” he said. “We’ve got to create startups that create products, and people need to be taught how to conceptualize a product.”
The innovator got into what is wrong with chip design today, citing the missing ingredient: product management.
That is one reason he created InCore—intending to reduce to three months the time it takes to bring something from concept to GDSII.
“I want to revolutionize and democratize the building of an SoC—currently, it’s too manpower-heavy,” he said. “We need to reduce that human element by 80%. That’s the problem InCore is solving, using RISC-V as a base.”
Nitin Dahad is Editor in Chief of embedded.com, as well as a correspondent for EE Times. An electronic engineering graduate from City University, he’s been an engineer, journalist and entrepreneur. He was part of ARC International’s startup team and took it public, and he co-founded a publication called The Chilli in the early 2000s. Nitin has also worked with National Semiconductor, GEC Plessey Semiconductors, Dialog Semiconductor, Marconi Instruments, Coresonic, Center for Integrated Photonics, IDENT Technology and Jennic. Nitin also held a role with government promoting U.K. technology globally in the U.S., Brazil, Middle East and Africa, and India. Follow Nitin on LinkedIn
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