What is good for Texas Instruments is turning out to be pretty good for India.
Over 70 per cent of all the work being done globally by Texas Instruments to develop new cutting edge end equipment, devices like wireless handsets which the customer at the end of communication networks uses, is being done in India.
This work involves both chip design and development of embedded software which forms the brain, so to speak, of devices. A third of all the engineers in Texas Instruments India are working on embedded software, says Praveen K Ganapathy, general manager of the DSP emerging end equipment group in TI India.
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DSP or digital signal processing is the key technology by which telecom signals are generated, transmitted and received by today's new generation devices.
This is not surprising as Texas Instruments, which pioneered offshore software development in India, has also taken the lead in developing hardcore products out of India. "In our case the global IT slowdown has resulted in pickup of work here. We have never grown as rapidly as we have done in the last two years. More and more of the critical pieces of TI's worldwide strategy is ending up here."
The slowdown has also led to some people of Indian origin wanting to come back from the US. "We have been able to offer positions to people of Indian origin working in the US wanting to work here."
The value of embedded software work being done in India so far is small -- it will be around $ 500 million this year -- but is growing at a healthy pace of 30 per cent plus. The growth is because of two reasons: one, the value in the business is slowly becoming clear and two, Texas Instruments is sharing the development work with key Indian players like Wipro, Sasken and Infosys.
There is a division of labour of sorts in Texas Instruments. While product development and all the investment involved in it is concentrated in India, the marketing and systems people are all in the US and other consuming centers for electronic devices around the globe.
If you are in the business of these products then you have to be near the consumer, to feel the fine vibes of what he or she is looking for and therein lies the disadvantage of Indian companies eager to get big in this field as the domestic Indian market for state of the art consumer devices is small or almost non-existent.
But within that the foremost Indian companies are carving out a niche for themselves bearing testimony to their own growing sophistication. Overall 250 engineers are working on embedded software and the tools needed for developing it in Texas Instruments. And for every three of them there is one engineer working in a partner Indian development company.
Ganapathy explains how outsourcing has grown and changed. Earlier it was the more run of the mill, non-critical type of work that got outsourced to meet short term needs. "Now in one area Wipro has become out competency center. There is an entire design team out there, we have no staff inside TI India, other than one person to manage it. All the ARM (advanced risk machines which are embedded microprocessors used in consumer electronics) spinoff development we do for the automotive market is completely done from outside."
"It is good for us to have a pool of engineers who are literate on TI architecture. That enables us to use them whenever we have a need. If we have engineers there who see the value of our platforms then they may push it with some of their customers.
"In the wireless space we recently announced OMAP (TI platform for multimedia applications on 3G handsets) technology centers, at Sasken and Wipro. We are doing this worldwide. We have a couple of centres in the US, two in India, two in Europe. These are centers where we are going to build competency on our 3G handheld platforms. TI will not be able to offer systems integration to all our customers. We can support a Nokia or an Ericsson but the worldwide strategy, so as not to miss out on the smaller players, has been to build competent design houses like these so as to offer integration services via them to our customers.
"In embedded applications we are looking at the high-end audio market. We designed a chip called Malhar which was announced some time back, targeting the home entertainment system. We will have samples of the chip sometime next month. The embedded software is ready. We will be taking the silicon and software to customers in July."
Ganapathy has three groups working for him. One is for emerging end equipment with new embedded DSP applications. The second group is for imaging and audio like digital still cameras, digital camcorders and compressed audio like MP3. The third group is for wireless software, primarily targeting 3G applications for multimedia.