The Hindu Business Line : Innovation to fore at Texas Instruments meet

Infotainment dominates: Mr Vishal Borker, head of the Digital Media Group, NextBit Computing, unveils the Internet protocol-based universal set-top box solution at Texas Instruments’ Developers’ meet in Bangalore. –

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore, Dec. 2 India’s footprint now extends across the entire spectrum of tasks involved in the making of a compelling consumer or industrial electronics product - from concept to circuit design to chip and board realisation, all the way to the creation of a fully functional reference design that potential manufacturing customers can tweak to roll out the item in large numbers.

This was the message palpable at the 10th annual developer event of the US-based digital signal processing (DSP) chip maker, Texas Instruments, which concluded here on Friday.

While the two-day conference saw a large number of technical presentations that appealed mainly to fellow-geeks, the exhibition held on the sidelines of the event was a virtual Indian tech mela.

It showcased a plethora of product innovations where Indian developers, many of them start-ups, displayed compelling applications for a global market, fuelled by TI’s broad range of specialist processor chips. Dr Biswadeep ( ‘Bobby’) Mitra, Managing Director of TI India, told Business Line, “A lot of the innovation is happening right here in India - and we try to partner with these small companies and support them in developing innovative applications".

A Chennai-based product engineering player, NextBit Computing, just three years old, showed its flagship product, a versatile ‘universal’ set-top box based on Internet Protocol, that allows manufacturers or content providers to mix and match applications such as video on demand, Internet radio and Web browsing.

NextBit’s Technical Head for Digital Media, Mr Vishal Borker, told Business Line, the technology was being used by a number of content providers here and abroad, including a prominent European hotel chain.

The Bangalore-based Ittiam Systems showcased its most recent product: a multi-channel, multi-format video server, that multiplexed the feeds from eight video surveillance cameras for each TI processor chip used, and streamed them for recording and processing with 70-fold compression.

A Bangalore start-up, Vinjey Software Systems, can legitimately claim to be the first any where to create embedded solutions for audio products such as music players using Open Source standards like Ogg Vorbis, challenging the formats like MP3 and WMA.

The Ahmedabad-based e-Infochips, had a product that seemed to complement the Ittiam technology: its e-IntelliServe is a highly scalable video server that usefully integrates with legacy -- that is the older analog TV-type -- closed circuit television systems and saves cabling costs by converting the feeds into an Internet Protocol based digital stream. More usefully for the nascent security industry, the product comes with software that ‘smartly’ helps analyse the video files, correlating them with events, detecting suspicious activity like intrusion.

From Hyderabad, another Indian ingenuity-driven global player, HelloSoft, has extended its Internet telephony portfolio with products for fixed-mobile convergence solutions.

Wipro’s product engineering offerings included a futuristic drive-by-wire solution for cars that integrated the onboard computer with many drive and collision-avoidance features. Also displayed was an innovative docking station that did more than recharge a hand-held device like a smart phone: It enabled direct video download to a TV monitor and direct feed from digital camera to printer.

SlingMedia, the India- fuelled US company whose SlingBox, has become the hottest Christmas buy this year in North America, showed the latest version of the place-and-time-shifting TV technology where the content from the TV at home can be viewed on a mobile phone anywhere in the world.

As an indicator of how pervasive digital signal processing has become -- creating a separate niche in the job market -- Cranes Software showcased a series of ready -to-use development kits for TI -based solutions as well as affordable (Rs 500) training videos for prospective engineering students.