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Chip design labs emerge beside India's software factories

Posted on: Friday, 4 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

BANGALORE, India (AP) -- It may be too early to call India the Silicon Valley of South Asia, but more and more U.S. semiconductor companies are drawing upon Indian talent to design their chips.

International companies, especially from the United States, have been using India's skilled and cheap workers for almost two decades to handle software jobs but have done most of their research in-house.

Now, that is changing.

On Friday, Indian software firm HCL Technologies announced that it has developed a chip for a U.S. telecommunications equipment company.

This announcement came weeks after Intel, IBM and Silicon Laboratories announced they will design chips in India.

And in late May, Texas Instruments, the first U.S. firm to set up a technology center in India in 1985, said its research center in the southern city of Bangalore had designed the world's first single combined chip for high-speed modems -- an improvement over current modems which require several chips.

``Integrated circuit design activities in India are growing significantly,'' said Lung Chu, vice president of Asia-Pacific operations at Magma Design Automation, a chip design software firm based in Cupertino, California.

HCL Technologies used Magma's software to design the telecom chip, which has a width of 0.13 microns or one-fourth of the thickness of human hair. It contains 2.5 million gates, the building blocks of an integrated circuit that determine the chip's ability to do complex calculations.

``This is among the most advanced chips in the market to carry out many complex tasks in a telecom switch,'' said Anup Datta, who heads the embedded software and telecom solutions division at HCL Technologies. He declined to name the U.S. telecom equipment maker for which the chip was designed.

The world's largest chip maker Intel revealed its plan to design a chip in India last week. Intel also plans to design the next version of its Xeon processor for mainframes and write some embedded software for its Centrino mobile computer chip in India.

During a visit last month to Bangalore, Intel's President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Otellini said his company could access ``incredible talent'' in India. ``To get these skills, we may not be able to hire and train people quickly in the United States.''

IBM, which opened a chip design center in Bangalore in late May to cater to Asian communication gadget makers, expressed a similar view.

``The India center will enable IBM to leverage a vast Indian IT talent pool,'' said Uday Shukla, director of IBM's Technology Group Lab.

Texas-based chip maker Silicon Laboratories has formed a joint venture with a Bangalore startup called Ittiam Systems for designing all-in-one chips for modems and television set-top boxes.

Companies here say the increasing interest in designing chips in India underscores their ability to handle more complex jobs.

``Our companies are getting into sophisticated design and consultancy work. This will help us to continue having an edge over emerging competitors like China,'' said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association for Software and Service Companies.

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On the Net:

HCL Technologies: http://www.hcltech.com

Intel in India: http://www.intel.com/in/eng/index.htm

IBM India: http://www.ibm.com/in/

Texas Instruments India: http://www.ti.com/asia/docs/india/index.html

Ittiam Systems: www.ittiam.com

Silicon Laboratories: www.silabs.com

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