Electronic Product Design outsourcing to India - What works?

What are the emerging opportunities in the area of electronic product design outsourcing in India? Who is best poised to execute? What are the key differentiators and what are the areas of improvement? Gopa Periyadan, co-founder , GDA Technologies Inc tells us more.

Electronic Product Design Outsourcing to India - What works?

As the initial days of Hurricane Rita brought rains to Boston, my evening United flight to San Jose was held up on the run way for a while on September 15th 2005, heading back after a very successful Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in Boston and meeting some of my customers in that area. Reflecting on the week that went by, what particularly struck me this time on ESC was the number of India based consulting companies exhibiting in the conference which is catering to the embedded sector. Never before in its long history of ESC, I have seen such full participation from India based companies. Eight companies had crossed 10,000 miles to be here. While some of them had strayed into this space from their Information Technology focus, others have been here looking for a niche in the fast growing Electronics Design Service (EDS) Market. Opportunity is now very clear. Only the execution is remaining. Who is best poised to execute?

Areas to Outsource to India in Electronic Product Design

From my initial ten years of experience on the side of the OEM and Semiconductor vendor (both in USA and as well as in India) and subsequent ten more years in the EDS space, I can safely recommend the following areas of technology outsourcing to be successfully done with high degree of success:

• Board Design: Low and medium complexity boards in embedded, X86, Ethernet Switches, digital video boards, FPGA Validation Boards, Standard Form-factor boards around PCI, PCIX, PCI Express, CPCI and ATCA
• PCB Design: Library services, Board component placement, manual routing, auto-routing, Gerber processing and CAM services
• FPGA Design: IP validation, IP integration, standard interfaces, full chip integration, verification, synthesis and bit-file generation
• ASIC Design: Most of the OEMs and Semiconductor vendors have taken a step by step method while outsourcing ASIC related services to offshore. While a lot of success is already there in verification and backend related tasks, full large chip design outsourcing to from RTL to GDS2 India is the next logical step.
• Embedded Software: India has been demonstrating its capability in "close-to-hardware" software development and lot of drivers and protocol development work is being outsourced to India in a big way. Bring-up and Manufacturing diagnostics and microcode programming for NPUs are successfully done from India.
• Design Quality and associated tasks for all of the above

New Areas to Outsource to India in the coming years

• Signal Integrity Analysis: This tool intensive and analytical area has huge opportunities to grow since the speed of the board level and chip level signal speeds are breaking the escape velocity.
• System level testing: Sub-assembly level and full system Design Validation Tests and regression testing is an area that can outsource very well
• RF and Wireless: Untapped area where companies and educational institutes in India can collaborate and make a success.

Differentiators

While there are a dozen companies out there to participate in the EDS industry in making, OEMs and Semiconductors have to consider the following factors while making a selection:

• US presence: Companies with sufficient engineering strength in USA can react quicker to changing customer requirements, be able to have white-board discussions on design ideas and work out a blended model where best of both worlds can be given to the best interest of the customers. Customer interface and Program Management may be done from US.
• Tools and Lab Infrastructure: This is a key factor for meeting time line and cost control
• Ability to provide turn-key solution: End to end outsourcing on a fixed price arrangement is in the best interest of the customer and even to the growing EDS sector
• Process Driven Development Mythology: This is the most vital factor contributing to the success of an outsourced design.

Areas to Improve

In terms of being able to be a real player in scalable hardware technology services, India as a country has to focus on the encouraging careers in hardware and embedded design. Currently all top campus push is to send all the bright electrical and computer engineering graduates in "bulk" to the IT related jobs. Companies in the hardware sector with opportunities to scale need to be given the right environment to be able to hire and train engineers for these specialized jobs. There is a big need for training and coaching centers that can create technology designers. This may create opportunities for new companies to emerge in high-end training.

Author: Gopa Periyadan, Co-founder & Vice President of System & Software BU GDA Technologies Inc. (www.gdatech.com)