The Hindu Business Line : TI India bullish on semiconductors

TEXAS Instruments India (TI India) is bullish on the growing Indian market for semiconductors driven by areas of digital entertainment, broadband, mobile phones, telecom sector along with other technology applications.

The Managing Director of TI India, Dr Biswadeep Mitra, said India was witnessing an unprecedented growth in mobile phones and in December alone about 3.2 million phone connections were added as per reports from the Cellular Operators Association of India. A growth of this nature will possibly ensure that India achieves its targeted growth of 200 million phones by 2007.

Dr Mitra, who was here to attend the VLSI conference, said, "This growth, coupled with the plans to locate mobile phone manufacturing units in India, has opened up new opportunities for an integrated solutions provider like TI."

Theareas include mobile handset manufacturing companies, measurement equipment for end telecom products, convergence of technologies, wireless broadband applications and digital media projection systems and televisions among others.

TI India is working on a cross-range of technologies since its inception in India and is in the process of further expanding its partners.

Refraining to comment on the numbers, Dr Mitra said that the company currently has about 1,300 employees. The challenge is to ensure that the products created match up to global standards. A fault in nanometre technology could potentially cost upwards of $2 million, he said.

Citing the emergence of semiconductor segment in India, Dr Mitra said the industry was working on a plan to ensure that by 2010 there would be a steady flow of trained manpower that can meet industry requirement.

"Two clear trends have emerged in the semiconductor industry. One relates to the concept of single chip that packs a lot of features and 90 nanometre technologies. As a part of TI solution, we have developed a single chip for mobile application that helps stream digital video. Phone packed with these chips would be out later this year," he said.

India is poised for digital cinema revolution with digital light processing technology. Sathyam Theatres began using this technology with Star Wars II and many others are likely to follow. The same technology can be potentially used in projection system and next-generation television sets, he added.