The Hindu Business Line : Cadence Design bullish on India

It is working towards creating an ecosystem for common standards and is in the process of partnering with the academia to groom and nurture talent in this growing area.

Mr Himanshu Singh, Executive Director, India and SAARC, said: "With the increasing number of design start-ups coming out of India, Cadence India is focused on partnering with customers and supporting them through their design and tape-out process and continue to focus on R&D initiatives."

The company continues to expand and consolidate its presence in India. It has so far invested over $160 million and employs over 750 people at Noida, Delhi, and Bangalore.

University programme

The company is engaged with over 100 Universities through Cadence's University programme that goes beyond technology.

According to Mr Singh, the Indian semiconductor industry is in a very exciting phase and poised to witness enormous growth.

An ISA-Frost & Sullivan report has said that the electronics equipment consumption market will grow to over $300 billion by 2015.

As semiconductors form the heart of electronics equipment, this is a tremendous opportunity for the Indian semiconductor industry.

The semiconductor ecosystem is developing and maturing. Around the core semiconductor companies are satellites of IP companies, design services, test companies, University research labs, EDA companies, IDCs, and application development.

POWER FORWARD

Cadence has embarked on a `Power Forward Initiative' in association with AMD, ARM, ATI Technologies, Freescale Semiconductor, Fujitsu, NEC Electronics, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

This initiative works towards enabling design and production of more power-efficient electronic devices.

Power continues to be a design challenge for the industry, particularly as designs move towards geometries of 90 nm and lower. The group aims to begin the industry open standardisation process starting in 2007.

"EDA companies can help their semiconductor, embedded design customers prosper in today's competitive global design environment by helping them focus on design for specific vertical markets or market segment applications," he said.

MANPOWER CONCERNS

According to a survey by the VLSI society, every year less than 1,000 students graduating with bachelor's degrees specialise in semiconductors, i.e., less than one per cent of graduating engineers in India possess industry-relevant skills.

"If India were to achieve the growth projected by the ISA-Frost & Sullivan report, we would need three million engineers by 2010. Cadence is involved in the entire spectrum of engagements to help address the concern of skilled manpower."