Nikkei Electronics Asia -- May 2007
Reports
FPGA Developers Look to India

With high-end design services and contract manufacturing becoming more widespread in India, developers of programmable logic solutions - such as Altera, Xilinx, Lattice Semiconductor, Actel, and QuickLogic - are looking at India to increase their share of the overall market.

Added to the mix are companies like Powai Labs, India's first indigenous EDA company, which incubated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB), and which has just released its new field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based simulator accelerator, IMAGE, claimed to be five times cheaper than the equivalent "international" tool.

The worldwide FPGA/programmable logic devices (PLD) market is expected to hit US$3.7 billion this year, up just 2.9% from 2006, compared with 12.9% growth last year, according to Gartner Inc. The research firm has also lowered its FPGA/PLD forecast for 2008, from 23.3% growth to 15.7%. The sector has been hit by excess inventories, a slowdown in the wireless market and a decline in average selling prices, said Gartner.

However, the same difficulties do not afflict India, where chip design activity has been on the rise. According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the FPGA/PLD market is expected to grow at 36% from 2005 to 2015 in India. And it is verticals such as telecommunications and customer premise equipment (CPE) - for example, modems and consumer electronics - that are the key drivers for FPGA chip design. Bangalore-based Ittiam Systems, for instance, has been a die-hard user of PLD to create and test its products - such as digital multimedia players, Internet videophones, in-flight entertainment systems and high definition TV appliances.

Apart from Ittiam, companies like Tejas Networks, which is in the optical networking product space and supplies to national carriers such as BSNL, and large IT outsourcers like Wipro, HCL and Satyam, have been bitten by the FPGA bug.

FPGA Majors: Altera, Xilinx
Razak Mohammed Ali, product manager, Asia-Pacific, Altera, said, "We were the first FPGA company to enter India in 2002 and we work with almost all the leading design companies in India." Although Altera does not have a full-fledged development center in India, it is very closely integrated with its other development centers in the US, the UK and Malaysia.

Altera's Cyclone series, its latest FPGAs, are making their presence felt in the global design space as well as in India. Altera is rolling out low-cost FPGAs which it says are the industry's first to be fabricated in a low-power process. Cyclone III FPGAs consume 75% less power than some competing products, according to Altera.
Meanwhile Xilinx, which is shipping its Virtex-5 SXT series of FPGAs, optimized for high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) applications, opened a development center in Hyderabad last October.

Neeraj Varma, country manager, Sales & Marketing, Xilinx India, said: "We see a huge opportunity and design growth in India, and our Hyderabad R&D center has 90 engineers working on all aspects of programmable logic design. We have the largest technical support team here, which offers support not only to the local market but also globally."

The center is responsible for the full product development lifecycle of intellectual property (IP) cores in the high-growth areas of automotive electronics, embedded processing and high-speed serial I/O connectivity. IP cores are pre-engineered, functional modules that Xilinx customers use to reduce development time for their programmable system designs. In addition, the facility will provide design verification for IP cores and technical support for Xilinx customers.

by Sufia Tippu, Bangalore

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