• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Port Info

• Ships in Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• Business Line
• The Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

Rukmini Priyadarshini

This UK-based microprocessor company is impressed by Indian talent. Here are its plans for India.

ARM's technology is on most electronic devices the world uses. With a near total market penetration, what could be ARM's reasons for an India design and development centre?

Atul Arora, President, commercial operations, speaks to eWorld on the company's plans for India.

Last year, ARM acquired Artisan and used the latter's India centre as a start for its Indian operations.

That 40-person centre will have over 160 people by year-end. Clearly, talent is the single-biggest reason for the growth of the India design and development centre.

The company headquartered in Cambridge, UK, has about 450 people at HQ and the second largest concentration of technical people at Sunnyvale, California.

"India is set to rival these in talent terms,'' Arora says, adding he is determined the company's India operations will grow in technical-people terms most rapidly.

"However, what is amazing is not just the concentration of technological talent in our Indian centre but that Bangalore has the largest group of people working on and familiar with ARM technologies."

Even in Cambridge, it is unlikely the company would find such an ecosystem around ARM, says Arora.ARM's microprocessors are used widely in markets such as automotive, consumer entertainment, imaging, microcontrollers, networking, storage, security and wireless.

Arora says ARM plans to move design and development services, as wells as sales, marketing and PR functions so the India centre is a full-fledged operation.

ARM India currently does physical IP designs that are `productised' here to international design specifications - building libraries, testing the chipset, validating it, etc.

The company also offers services for classic ARM products.

"We also plan to have a classic ARM product division here - essentially, the aim is to grow in all areas of ARM in the India centre," says Arora.

In the Indian market, ARM caters to its global clients' local operations since much of the cutting-edge development work of customer companies is happening out of their India development centres.

The ecosystem is very favourable to expose its latest technologies to potential clients here, says the company.

ARM is also set to boost its partnerships with Indian companies, be they up-and-coming fabless semiconductor companies - ARM is working with Moschip and Telesera, for instance - or be they independent software vendors (ISVs) doing product development work for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) - Wipro, Sasken and MindTree, GlobalEdge and Sarayu.

According to ARM, there are about 2,000 engineers in Bangalore alone working on ARM and about 5,000 in India.

The company also plans an initiative with academic institutions where universities can download platform libraries free of charge from the Web, acquire development tools at nominal prices, and even get their faculty trained.

priya@thehindu.co.in

Picture by V.V. Krishnan

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Balancing act

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line