The Hindu Business Line : Drawing on software

Do those words ring a bell? Sure, they should, coming from Star Trek. How simple it was to transport human beings from one spot to another in a TV soap. To do that even today remains in the realm of science fiction.

Recently, according to Rajeev Madhavan, CEO, Magma Design Automation, the US Government conducted a study according to which, to transport one human being, it would take 10 to the power 28 KB of storage, energy equal to 330 1-megaton thermonuclear bombs and 31.2 trillion years to access the data! That sets the ground for us to look at where India stands in the level of software and automation in the semiconductor value chain. From the ISA summit at Bangalore, it became evident that India's strength lay in software and that that strength was slowly seeping into design of the hardware. As one speaker at the summit put it, "All our hardware designers are actually software programmers who write code!"

Software and design are now interdependent. This impacts existing business models in the semiconductor industry with opportunity for increased risk-sharing among software, design and manufacturing. Software plays a vital role in each of the three components of the semiconductor value chain. You have chips designed to specifically meet the needs of consumer appliances that bet on electronic design automation. Sequence Design Inc, with an India-presence, is an example of a company that works on nanometer System-on-Chip products that helps clients such as Texas Instruments reduce time to market.

You then have design in a fab-less state. That is you design chips for more complex functions such as the architecture inside a mobile phone. You could even be the outsourced partner for producing the chip with your design specifications. You could make the design, send it across to foundries in Taiwan or China for manufacture and ship it directly to clients in the West. The Hyderabad-based Moschip Semiconductor is an example of such a model, and so is Conexant Systems. Third comes the retention of intellectual property (IP) relating to silicon.

Here's where time to market plays a critical role. This revenue model has been tested in the software space, evident from the success of the product development outsourcing model.

An example of IP ownership relating to a particular product is Bangalore-based Sasken Technologies' business model. It is actually shifting from a licence to a royalty model for its the sale and use of (software) intellectual property in clients' end products. It should be easily replicable in the silicon arena.

Interplay of software and design

Says Chris Rowen, president and CEO, TenSilica Inc, "Application needs drive design. Devices that are media-centric (such as the iPod), voice centric (mobile phones) and data centric (laptops) see a rapid change in features that places the extra demand of flexibility on chips, rather systems on a chip." With power limiting chip speeds, chip designers face that flexibility-efficiency paradox, he says. In other words, you want better battery life, better performance and better efficiency but chip designers' flexibility to offer those are now being limited to days and hours instead of a year, as was the case earlier.

He says that given the level of software that goes into design, it is possible, for Tensilica now, to generate processor designs in a matter of `One Hour.' This stems from its recognition of the fact that one-size-fits-all kinds of processors are not the norm and there is a huge market potential for high-function, low-energy products. Recently, TenSilica announced its own research and development centre in Pune. Nagendra Cherukupalli, vice-president, Cypress Semiconductor, says the interplay of software and design has helped his company cut cycle time from 67 days to an astonishing 17 days. Cycle time here is the time taken to make design chips that meet customer expectation.

He says this interplay of software and design presents an opportunity for electronic design automation companies to partner with design houses to develop custom software for products across a platform. And, the more software on a chip, the less the bill of material or BoM, as the industry calls it. Says Cherukupalli, in one instance, it was able to reduce 90 components in a board to just 28 components.

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