The Hindu Business Line : Igniting IT with embedded systems

The first ever Embedded Systems Conference was held in India this month. Anand Parthasarathy reports on the desi directions in fabless design that the event signposted.

The winning team at Ittiam

A senior citizen at Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, with her pension book and the smart card embedded with RFID identification.

Out of the box design

A suitcase kit from ARM and WiPOS from Wipro.

If you can’t fabricate it, embed it’ — this might well be the mantra of India’s burgeoning semiconductor industry. Embedded systems — a dedicated mix of hardware and software to address specific applications — has emerged as almost a ‘speciality of the house’ for India-based developers. The significant turnover in this niche, over $3.7 billion in 2006, saw the world’s biggest forum for embedded professionals — the (International) Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) organised by the media house, CMP — emerge in a first ever Indian edition in Bangalore, earlier this month.

In her opening remarks, Poornima Shenoy, President of the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA), reminded the thousand-strong audience of engineers that over 71 per cent of the India-based companies working in embedded applications were home-grown outfits — and included such globally respected names as TCS, Ittiam, Wipro and Satyam. The embedded business accounted for over 81 per cent of all jobs in the semiconductor industry here. According to the ISA-Frost & Sullivan report published last year, 81 per cent of jobs in Indian semiconductor and electronics chip design are in the embedded space and this is expected to become 86 per cent by 2015.

M.N. Vidyashankar, IT Secretary, Karnataka — a State that is home to possibly the largest concentration of ‘embedded’ designers — attributed this to a deregulated telecom environment as well as the galloping Internet traffic. The West Bengal Information Technology Minister, Debesh Das, asked the embedded developer community not to just address the needs of the well-off user, but to also come up with cost-effective solutions for earthy applications in medicare, flood warning and soil testing.

Gregg Lowe, Senior Vice-President for Analog Systems with Texas Instruments, seems to agree with Dr Das: “Remote Diagnostics is a fantastic future that will be led by India,” he says. Indian bio-medical developers are already creating embedded solutions in vital areas such as pacemakers and tomographic scanning.

Lowe announced at the conference that TI had just released the ‘world’s first floating point digital signal controller’ — a chip completely designed and developed by its India-based engineers. The product has applications in solar and other un-interruptible power supplies.

Intel, the world leader in computer chips, is currently celebrating 30 years of presence in embedded systems and at ESC, Joe Jensen, General Manager for its US-based Embedded Markets, announced the first India-specific embedded solution to flow from its R&D centre in this country: a reference design for a Point of Sale (POS) terminal that used a fan-less hardware package suited to local environmental challenges.

Sporting an extremely compact and award-winning hardware unit developed by the Taiwan-based Elitegroup Computer Systems, it has already been turned into practical solutions by Indian players such as the Bangalore-based Protocol Solutions and the Ahmedabad-based X-Change POS.

In its own realisation, called WiPOS, Wipro has added a key feature of its own: It has migrated the system to a Linux operating system — Xubuntu 7.04 distribution… subtle recognition that if POS machines are to appeal to the corner ‘kirana’ shop, they must pare software costs to the minimum.

Another global semiconductor company, the Netherlands-based NXP, founded by Philips, used ESC to unveil a compelling chip that showed how something ‘embedded’ for an advanced market can be tweaked with minimal software change to create an earthy application for the developing world. NXP is contracted to supply smart chips based on Near Field Communication (a secure, contactless data communication technology with ranges comparable to Bluetooth) to many of the 35 countries that are currently in the process of changing over to computer-readable electronic passports that store the complete biometric identification of the holder. The same chip has been deployed in dozens of villages in Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh and the North-Eastern States, as part of a mobile-phone-based branchless micro-banking solution, ‘Zero’ created by the Mumbai-based technology developer, A Little World, and a voluntary agency, Zero Micro-finance and savings support organisation (ZMF). The application reduces the infrastructure of a ‘portable’ bank to a smart mobile phone on whose memory chip the entire account data is stored; an optional printer and biometric thumb print reader.

Recently, for the first time, senior citizens in some villages in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, received their pensions through Zero, after flashing their smart cards, fuelled by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and containing their digital ‘angoota chaap’ or thumb print.

A Noida-based startup, founded in 2000 by IIT-Delhi graduates, and led by Jatin Sharma, has quietly made its mark in the embedded space with some ‘cool tools’ in areas such as security and cryptography. Kritikal Solutions showcased a chip that fuels a novel vehicle alarm system now available in India under the brand ‘Amsahi’. Once integrated into the car’s existing alarm service, it uses the GSM mobile phone band to send the owner an SMS alert if the vehicle is moved — and using cellular triangulation, it also tracks a (presumably stolen) vehicle and provides an update of its whereabouts. The system can also be integrated to a Global Positioning System (GPS)-based satellite navigator. Costing less than Rs 10,000, the system is being fitted into many cars sold in India, as a dealer add-on.

Pune is another emerging powerhouse: Oasis Technologies has positioned itself as a single-board computer and embedded specialist with a range of offerings for the ARM architecture. And KPIT Cummins has found and created a niche in automotive applications: driver safety, body electronics, engine management.

It is a canny move coming at a time when car owners are demanding the same sophisticated electronics that they enjoy with their home entertainment systems.

The first pure play fabless semiconductor product company, the Hyderabad and Santa Clara (California)-based MosChip, had an interesting product that should appeal to small offices as well as ‘connected’ homes, which increasingly need to link multiple PCs with TV and entertainment systems as well as alarms. The MCS8140 Network USB processor helps connect multiple devices using a central Universal Serial Bus server… a cost-effective solution for those who don’t want to go for the more expensive enterprise networking solutions.

Bangalore is home to tried and tested players in the embedded space, such as Mistral which works closely with the research arms of the Ministry of Defence — one of the big users of embedded solutions. In recent weeks, it has created real-time operating systems for civilian aircraft, using the same basic platform that powers the Boeing next generation Dreamliner 7E7. Another respected name, Sasken, has just completed work that will enable Inmarsat to offer a combined satellite-cum-GSM cellular phone.

Since 1986, Electro Systems Associates (ESA) has been turning out real-time embedded systems and design aids that allow other designers to create their own solutions swiftly, reliably.

Indeed, popular ‘cores’ such as ARM have readily available ‘suitcase’ design kits in which one can tweak dozens of emulation modules and millions of programmable dates to test-run a new design. Such programmable logic design typically uses field programmable gate arrays or FPGAs as basic building blocks to realise designs that can subsequently be frozen in silicon as an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. (ASIC). FPGA versus ASIC is an old controversy and there is no clear winner or loser. “This is a volume game. To realise one of our designs as an ASIC, it would cost between $1 and $2 million — and at least six months additional development time,” explains Srini Rajam, founder-CEO of Ittiam Systems. “FPGAs give us the means to create the device quickly and to offer it to our manufacturing customers in a form that could go into the end product. In fact, quite a few of our creations run as FPGAs in the hands of the consumer.”

Rajam should know: For the last three years running, Ittiam has been adjudged the world’s most preferred supplier of intellectual property in digital signal processors by the independent chip industry watcher Forward Concepts. In 2007, Ittiam became the first company anywhere to receive the Wi-Fi Certified stamp for its complete wireless Internet solution from the Wi-Fi Alliance representing over 250 of the world’s players.

The Indian semiconductor industry is worth some $4.6 billion. The absence of a significant silicon fabrication industry — till now — has not turned out to be the crisis many feared. Rather, India’s skilled designers have taken to an embedded — and fabless — route to the future.

Already, an embedded system is turning out to be the tail wagging the semiconductor dog, with software and firmware worth $3.7 billion. It is — to use a phrase made famous by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine — a Long Tail … low on quantity of individual products, but high on the variety and range of the offerings. And like the tail of Hanuman, India’s embedded tail may yet ignite the pathway to its silicon future.

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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Igniting IT with embedded systems