Cadence & The Coming Indian Chip(s)

Elizabeth Corcoran writes an excellent article in Forbes on the increasing levels of usage for cadence in India. Cadence, a well known name in the electronic design automation(EDA)technologies arena & in engineering services. The company is a driving force behind the emergence of several consumer electronic devices like cell phones ,video player etc. The article motes,

Cadence, now wants to fuel the next wave of offshoring, one that takes not just the help desk but the engineering department abroad. Cadence sells its tools throughout the world. But while China is becoming the world's manufacturing center, India is using its software expertise to leap into the next innovative zone: designing chips. Offshoring chip design promises to turbocharge business, letting companies produce more products quicker than ever, and at low prices. Imagine it and India's tech wizards will design it, then Chinese factories will churn out the chips for it: It's just-in-time invention.

Read my related note on offshore product development. Every new chip is the basis for a score of devices; every device sparks ideas for a host of software applications. Last year Cadence trained more than 2,000 students and engineers in India to use its tools. The company offers payment schemes that let small outfits pay for its technology as their work brings in revenues. CK.Prahalad recently said innovation shall get cheaper.

Today, the software design effort has surpassed the hardware design efforts in most ASSP products designed. Simon Calder of SpiraTech shouts,hardware design needs software shift. He points out that the additional people who need EDA software are the 50,000 engineers who join the silicon and the embedded applications together. Middleware has to be written, operating systems must be optimised and custom device drivers developed. Any new system has to be validated to ensure that the hardware/software combination is meeting the functional and performance requirements of the specification. It is only then that we can be sure we have a ‘hardware’ design that is ready to ship or even implement. With abundant talent that the country has ,more so the number of technical experts that are coming out are quite substantial (Ray Lane was referring to the fact that India & China would be rolling out six times more technical talent compared to the US - every year ), the opportunity for chip design related activities can expand exponentially. Clealry the chip design activity in the country may be actually be on the threshold of a takeoff, with promises of a long run. Also not to ignore the major market related opportunities – the chip design value output is forecast to quadruple in the country in the next four years while the electronics equipment value is expected to grow by more than five times in value terms in the next five years.