System-on-chip poised for growth

Both domestic firms that aim to exploit the potential of design and R&D offshoring and multinational firms with captive units will drive the development of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) segment of the semiconductor industry in India, industry sources say.

While the current Indian share, with clusters such as Bangalore and Noida, of worldwide SoC business is considered very small, it is rapidly growing.

As pressure mounts on large companies at every segment of the consumer electronics chain, for greater functionality and shorter times-to-market, exploiting Indian talent could play a greater role in the coming years.

An important driver is the need to put more circuits on a single smaller chip at lower costs. In this context, the Indian advantage is said to be in "process innovation", which is becoming more important.

The Manufacturing Association for IT (MAIT), a computer hardware industry lobby, says SoC technology is the packaging of all the necessary electronic circuits and parts for a "system" (such as a cell phone or digital camera) on a single integrated circuit, generally known as a microchip.

An SoC for a sound-detecting device might include an audio receiver, an analog-to-digital converter, a microprocessor, necessary memory and the input/output logic control for a user, all on a single microchip, MAIT says.

The technology is used in small, increasingly complex consumer electronic devices, which typically have more computing power than a desktop of the early '90s.

Future SoCs could drive nanorobots to act as programmable antibodies, enable the blind to see and the deaf to hear. More conventionally, handheld computers with small whip antennas might someday be capable of browsing the Internet at megabit-per-second speeds from any point on the surface of the earth, Mait's newsletter says.

The worldwide SoC market is estimated at some $14 billion, growing at almost 25 per cent.

The market will reach $43.2 billion by 2009. Unit growth will average 18.4 per cent on average per year to reach 2.2 billion in 2009, and average unit prices will increase from a current level of $15.2 to $19.6 by the end of the forecast period, MAIT quotes a market study, System-on-a-Chip: Technology Markets.

The Indian end of the business is being driven by the availability of large numbers of software developers, to build software around chips, and a slowly growing workforce in chip design. The so called eco-system for the industry is growing flesh too:

Examples include Agilent Technologies' SoC design centre in Gurgaon. Singapore headquartered Flextronics' SoC development unit, Insilica Inc, in Bangalore, Texas Instruments' Bangalore engineers working on a single-chip solution for a cell phone, integrating analog, digital, radio frequency and modem functions and Wipro's licensing of MIPS Technologies' 32 and 64-bit processor synthesizable cores to support joint customers with end-to-end SoC design services.

"STMicroelectronics India is providing a wide spectrum of IP products for SoC designs to STM's global market and is also deeply involved in the crucial area of super-integration, wherein it embeds complex functions in ultra-high density logic with a focus on robustness of IPs," says MAIT in.

These global firms and others are driving SoC's growth into new markets and penetrating existing ones of standalone chips. A new set of end-use devices, running on SoC technologies is also beginning to hit the market.