Broadly, chips are part of the semiconductor industry, and chips can
be of all kinds, from humble wafers that store basic data for tasks
like switching a light bulb on to high-end powerhouses that enable
the sort of rapid computations required to, say, simulate an
earthquake for test-modelling.

That Indian businesses are doing design work at all is quite a
change, according to Sridhar Mitta, managing director, e4e Labs. As
former chief technology officer of Wipro and head of its global R&D
for two decades, he has seen the shift in the very business models.

"Earlier, people used to talk in terms of number of bodies and
square foot space. Now people talk of making this or that chip.
Texas Instruments and Intel are now developing entire chips or
family of chips here. So is Wipro, Open Silicon and MindTree, though
they are not allowed to talk about it. When they talk to customers,
they talk in terms of new products for new markets, conceiving
products on a custom basis instead of doing bits and pieces."

The chip design ball was set rolling in India by Texas Instruments,
ST Microelectronics and Analog Devices, which were joined later by
Intel in "end-to-end" design work. So recalls S R Dinesh of Frost &
Sullivan, a consultancy firm. The domestic industry now has two sets
of players: product companies that design chips for themselves, and
service companies such as Wipro, Sasken, HCL Technologies and
MindTree that do it for others.

Overall, the number of players has shot up, says Satya Gupta, vice-
president, engineering, Open Silicon, a small chip design firm with
a 50-member design centre in Bangalore. "Now, almost all the global
semiconductor players are doing something here. Plus, a lot of
experienced guys have returned."

Throw in a fresh dose of venture capital, having overcome the post-
tech bubble stupor, and you have enough bustle to accompany the buzz.

The Indian Semiconductor Association, which is less than a year old,
already has 70 members. And bitten by the entrepreneurial bug this
time round, adds Mitta, is a somewhat more ambitious IT professional.

"Earlier they were India-based, getting out of leading companies
like Infosys or Wipro, and their business model was based on cost
arbitrage," he says. "But increasingly, prospective entrepreneurs
are people who have worked in the US with MNCs." Frost & Sullivan's
Dinesh calculates that the industry, which clocked $650-700 million
last year, should grow over the next few years at a compound annual
rate of close to 30 per cent.

So far, so promising. But what are chip designers up to?

Intelligence in design

Among the businesses attracting attention are Open Silicon and
Tessolve. This is because they fill critical gaps that existed in
the chip design eco-system.

These gaps were identified by Naveed Sherwani, Open Silicon's CEO,
and his crew of co-founders, including Gupta, while they were still
working at Intel as a team of ASIC engineers (that's short
for "application specific integrated circuit"). When the chipmaker
decided to shut down that division, they roped in Sequoia Capital
for funds and struck out on their own, setting up shop in 2002.

Unlike the typical end-to-end chip design service firms that develop
chips to client-given specifications for high-volume manufacture,
Open Silicon goes further by offering "silicon engineering services"
that guide the way the chips are actually cranked out, tackling such
issues as testing, assembly, failure analysis, product engineering,
yield enhancement and packaging. "Now we have one design centre,
next year we will have two," projects Gupta, "We will be doing more
complex chips and break even by third year."

Tessolve, a California-based firm that has a Bangalore operation,
also goes beyond the design stage by offering testing
services. "Locating a world class testing centre close to the design
groups is a compelling proposition," according to P Raja Manickam,
Tessolve's founder CEO, former Texas Instruments man and IITian.

Design, no doubt, encompasses a lot more than that. What
about "design" in its original sense -- chip conceptualisation?
According to S N Padmanabhan, vice-president, engineering R&D
services, MindTree, Indian chip designers are getting there.

Concepts are exercising minds. Even two years ago, he says, "People
were doing small parts of overall work, well defined tasks, as an
extension of someone's engineering facilities, not with
responsibility for the whole device. There was also some development
of standards based IP and reusable blocks, but not much scalability."

And now? "We are slowly saying, 'we will own the complete module,
give us the specs and we will use our technology to do the final
product'," says Padmanabhan. "We are now looking at customers who
are not semiconductor companies that need chips for their products
(such as set top boxes). This is causing product level companies to
come to India."

By way of estimate, about a fifth of the work being done now in
semiconductor design services involves taking complete "ownership"
of the design of a device or product level idea.

The Indian units of multinational players have also grown in work
sophistication, according to Harish M, business development manager
for semiconductor marketing and sales at Texas Instruments. For
once, they have begun to lead the design curve, and that's a good
sign.

"Earlier, we were doing bits and pieces of work," he
elaborates, "now we have insight into the strategy of the company as
products which matter to the company are being worked upon in India.
Texas Instruments has played an important role in the designing of
the single chip phone."

The complexity of work undertaken in India has changed beyond
recognition," adds Himangshu Singh, executive director India and
SAARC, Cadence Design Systems, a supplier of electronic design
automation tools, which support and speed up chip designing. He has
seen his customers for tools to make VLSI chips ("very large scale
integration") grow tenfold since 1999 to 150 now.

Some of this is having an effect on chip nomenclature too. Texas
Instruments, for instance, once named an India-designed family of
chips "Ankoor". Intel is currently rumoured to be working on project
codenamed "Whitefield", after the Bangalore suburb where the action
is taking place, to design an addition to its Zeon family of chips.
Texas Instruments, meanwhile, is proud of "Sangam".

Wishbone arch

Amidst the myriad activities, if there's one big breakthrough
waiting for its big moment, it remains unknown. But then, it could
take quite some time before India's semiconductor industry delivers
a chip to reshape the way the world computes.

In the interim, as skill sets get sharpened with experience, there
are other lucrative designs to be made. Design work is always
conducted under strict secrecy, and even technically up-to-date
observers cannot always spot winners. All the more so when the
numbers are vast.

Wipro, to cite just one example, runs what its president of product
engineering services Ramesh Emani describes as the world's largest
chip design services group -- almost one thousand strong.

And this business is growing faster than Wipro's overall engineering
services business, though it accounts only for 10 per cent of
engineering services revenue at the moment. Over the last two years,
Wipro has executed 30 designs of the "system on chip" type.

It has also designed a chip for a gaming company, and done digital
TV work for some Japanese firms, apart from extending its services
to include die-stage chip testing and package design. Its latest
success has been in devising networking chips that help computers
link-up with each other.

And it's all happening in extreme miniature close-up, as chip
designing goes down to double-digit nanometer specifications, with
measurements taken in the accuracy of a billionth of a meter, as
tiny electronic circuits are etched onto a wafer of silicon.