The Hindu Business Line : Scoring in telecom tests

With the Indian mobile industry emerging among the world's fastest growing markets, the test and measurement services have been recalibrated to the next level.

Shankar Roy Choudhury, General Manager, Agilent Technologies, provides insights into new test and measurement services for the telecom market, from both the development perspective and for manufacturers.

The $5.1-billion Agilent is a global leader in test and measurement solutions for technology, telecom, life sciences and defence and aerospace segments.

Excerpts from a chat with eWorld.

India has emerged as a major centre for mobile innovation. How do you perceive this market?

India's mobile subscriber growth has captured the imagination of global handset majors, who have set up manufacturing facilities in India. Apart from catering to the Indian market, these players are also using their India base as a sourcing hub for low-cost handsets for exporting to other countries.

However, much ahead of this manufacturing wave, global network equipment manufacturers and other reference design houses started investing heavily in setting up their R&D operations and establishing centres of excellence in India. The rich talent pool in India is a major contributor to this market phenomenon.

Initially, they started working on projects related to various pieces of software. Now many of them have moved up the value chain and are increasingly taking up bigger projects around design validation and integration. As India offers quality output at a much lower cost, this is only going to grow and get further strengthened. With R&D and design capabilities in place, setting up a manufacturing base in India becomes the next logical step. In this context, we see tremendous business potential for a vast range of solutions for wireless applications in emerging areas and in lowering the cost of test in wireless device manufacturing.

It must be a designer's delight and challenge to pack new features in mobile phones?

As mobile devices get complex, designers are packing newer features. The new generation Internet-ready devices will offer not only voice communication and data and e-mail download on the move; they will also allow video download through IP-TV (Internet protocol-TV) services. The radio feature on some of these devices has to support multiple cellular formats and wireless technologies. All these bring in huge challenges for testing and validation, both in the design phase as well as in manufacturing. New factors need to be considered to ensure the reliability and interoperability of the products.

Our design software tools are integrated with the real world validation and verification solutions that allow them to dramatically improve design cycle and cut down on iterations.

Agilent supports various cellular formats and provides designers a "network in a box". This allows them to test the operation of phones offering features such as high data throughput or video and multi media services (mms) in live network conditions that can be simulated.

The portfolio of wireless test solutions offers value to engineers working on emerging communication technologies such as 3G, WiMAX, Wireless LAN, Bluetooth, UWB and MIMO either at system or at component level.

As new wireless technologies emerge, how are designers addressing convergence?

New technologies are extremely complex to test and they form the core of the above mentioned emerging communication standards. Agilent has tools that allow rigorous testing of these technologies.

Do you see India emerging as a hub for network equipment manufacturers?

The telecom hardware ecosystem has begun to evolve in India. This ecosystem comprises original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and electronic manufacturing services (EMS). Slowly, but surely, telecom equipment manufacturers are likely to bring in their component suppliers to complete the entire manufacturing ecosystem.

The telecom sector is one of the fastest growing sectors and with the subscriber base burgeoning, we expect capital expenditure on mobile network deployment in India to grow significantly over the next couple of years. Overall demand for telecom equipment will also grow considerably as most mobile service providers have sizable expansion plans.

With the Government making it mandatory for global telecom equipment makers to manufacture equipment in India if they decide to bid for orders from state-run carriers, the industry will get a further boost.

While the cost of mobile phones is coming down, more features are being packed into them. How is test and measurement coping with this challenge?

Ultra low-cost phones are already a reality in India. This poses a great challenge for test and measurement vendors as manufacturers' investment in this space is coming down due to the immense pressures on margins. The cost of test becomes an important element in such cases.

Instruments are reusable across different technologies, offering cost savings. Moreover, the same set of instruments can be used in R&D, manufacturing and repair phase.

Thus test software codes developed by an R&D team can be leveraged and reused down the product life cycle.

In addition, the measurement team works closely with global network equipment manufacturers to help them optimise their test strategy in such cases.

As the wireless boom continues to dominate the Indian market, there will be a huge requirement for well-trained wireless engineers.

Through education initiatives, Agilent's design and test tools play a critical role in training budding engineers in engineering colleges. In addition, technology training programmes help operators and manufacturers to groom new recruits.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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