- Execs say multinationals still need to mesh with global tech industry
http://www.eet.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=179101871
K.C. Krishnadas
EE Times
(02/08/2006 12:37 PM EST)
BANGALORE, India — Multinational technology companies have yet to mesh their operations with the $1.1 trillion global electronics industry, according to executives at a chip summit here.
Speaking at the first day of the two-day Vision Summit organized by the India Semiconductor Association (ISA), speakers also said Europe has emerged as the partner of choice for India's fledgling chip industry.
"In the next 10 years, the global electronics industry will grow at twice the pace of global gross domestic product," said Francois Guibert, corporate vice president of emerging markets for ST Microelectronics. India is poised to take advantage, given its robust economic growth, growing electronics infrastructure and ability to churn out high-tech products, Guibert said.
"Anyone putting up a fabrication facility in India will be at an advantage," added Rajendra Khare, ISA chairman and head of Broadcom India.
Predicting more consolidation in the global electronics industry, Ulf Schneider, managing director of Infineon Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd., said the "wall" between designing and manufacturing semiconductors must end. EDA companies, he said, must provide comprehensive solutions to enable design for manufacturing.
"This, in fact, will be the key focus to meet the technological and economic challenges of the semiconductor industry," Schneider said.
Referring to sub-90-nm process technology and accompanying materials challenges, speakers said yield loss, power leakage and industry divisions over how to solve both issues must be overcome in order to progress.
"Foundries are starting to provide an ASIC-like business model to their customers and the 65-nanometer era is probably the end of the customer-owned, tooling model as we know it," Khare said.
Partnerships among fabless design companies and pure-play foundry players have forged a virtual integrated device manufacturer model. Partnerships among pure-play foundries and EDA firms are coming, Khare added.
Other executives noted that India is a potentially huge electronics market and possesses the right mix of local entrepreneurs, global partners and domestic technology skills to maintain control of its own markets. India, one speaker added, still needs its own foundry model, rather than relying on overseas foundries to manufacture products designed here.
- TCS and Stanford University Sign R&D Pact for Data Privacy
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20060213/LAM02513022006-1.html
MUMBAI, India, Feb. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Tata Consultancy Services, a leading global technology services organization, announced that it has entered into a 5-year Research and Development collaboration with Stanford University, one of the leading academic institutions in the U.S., for research in the critical area of data privacy.
TCS and the Computer Science department at Stanford University will work on joint projects focused in the area of data privacy. The projects will be selected so that genuine collaboration can take place with TCS scientists working in the area of security and data privacy at the Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC), the company's software engineering research centre in Pune, India.
Stanford University plays a key role in National Science Foundation-led initiatives to accelerate research into security and data privacy. It is part of TRUST -- Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology -- a multi-university initiative that includes UC Berkeley, Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University as well as industrial partners like Cisco Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Sun and Symantec.
In addition to TRUST, the Stanford Security Lab leads the NSF-sponsored Privacy, Obligations, and Rights in Technologies of Information Assessment (PORTIA) project on privacy and computer security.
Stanford computer science Professor John Mitchell (a co-principal investigator of TRUST) as well as computer science Professor Rajeev Motwani and computer science and electrical engineering Professor Hector Garcia-Molina will work closely with TCS researchers on this critical area of data security. Research staff from TRDDC will be spending extended periods of time at Stanford University and experts from Stanford will also visit the Pune research centre. The 5-year collaborative research project on data security and privacy started from 1st January 2006 and TCS is making a substantial financial contribution to the research project.
As part of the collaboration, TCS will become an industrial partner on data privacy in the new TRUST initiative as well as a member of the Stanford Computer Forum: Industry Affiliates Program.
- Rambus to expand design activity in India
http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180201496
K.C. Krishnadas
EE Times
(02/14/2006 11:39 AM EST)
BANGALORE, India — Rambus Inc. plans to double its head count in India this year, to more than 100, and said it will continue to use Indian companies for outsourced logic design and verification, layout and other engineering tasks.
"We are well ahead of the market in, and will remain focused on, high-speed I/O in memory," said Rambus CEO Harold Hughes. He added that the company is looking to hire staff for mixed-signal and digital design and development in Bangalore.
A planned program of joint research with engineering institutes in India is also expected to begin this year.
Rambus (Los Altos, Calif.) has grown its team in India through the acquisition of the development center here from GDA Technologies Inc., said Samir Patel, vice president of engineering.
- Indian chip to take science to the edge of time
http://dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1014021
Dhananjay Khadilkar
Monday, February 20, 2006 22:40 IST
If scientists ever understand and interpret the conditions prevalent in the Universe just microseconds after the Big Bang, part of the credit will go to Indian microelectronics engineers.
The Geneva-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has designed the world’s largest particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, to conduct some of the most complex experiments ever attempted by man, and to create conditions that were present just millionths of a second after the Big Bang when the universe consisted of a primordial soup called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
The Muon Spectrometer of ALICE experiment will be a detector system which will study the properties of QGP. The tracking detectors of this Spectrometer will be powered by microprocessors or chips designed by Kolkata-based Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) and fabricated by Semiconductor Complex, Chandigarh.
The detectors will have 80,000 of these 16-channel readout chips called MANAS (short for Multiplexed Analog Signal Processor. This will be a part of an experiment called ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) that will artificially recreate QGP by accelerating heavy (lead) ions up to a speed close to that of light and making them collide head on.
The ALICE detectors will observe the properties of the particles created under these extreme conditions and how they aggregate to form ordinary matter. Says Jos Engelen, CERN’s deputy director general, “The spectrometer will track muons resulting from this collision, and the MANAS chips will process these signals.”
Engelen feels it was a combination of quality, reliability and affordability that gave India the edge for its chips to be selected for such a groundbreaking project. “We are thinking of extending the scope of these chips to other experiments as well,” he adds.
The first MANAS prototype was built in March 2000. But it was only four years later that CERN decided to accept the chips after extensive and exhaustive testing.
So far, 18,000 out of 80,000 chips delivered to CERN while the production of the remaining chips would be done by May 2006.
Professor Sukalyan Chattopadhyay, leader of the Muon Arm Project at SINP who has been closely associated with the development of MANAS considers it to be an important milestone since it has proved India’s credibility and capability in high technology sector in front of the international community.
“It shows that India can design, fabricate and deliver application specific integrated chips (ASIC) which are at the frontier of technology,” he added.
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