Expert View

October 15, 2004
Scicom: Product engineering yet to evolve in India

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

NOIDA -- Scicom Infotech Pvt. Ltd. (Scicom) recently tied up with Credence Systems Corp., USA for providing product development services for the latter's automatic test systems division. Scicom and Credence will jointly establish a Noida Product Development Center (NPDC) that will provide specialized services for developing new technologies and products in testing, validation and characterization at the wafer and board level. The initial tenure of services will be for three years. Convergence*plus met up with Dr. Indranil Chakravarty, chairman and managing director, Scicom, to learn more about the company and its plans for the coming year. Excerpts from an interview:

Convergence*plus: Please update us on Scicom's activities in India.

Dr. Indranil Chakravarty: Our activities in India are relatively small. They deal with oil exploration companies and relate on how we could supply services to them in upstream exploration with a focus of E&P data management and application interoperability.

CP: The EDA industry is on the verge of a major change in the types of tools it will need to address new markets. What are you doing to address those needs?

IC: Our focus is on building new tools in the test area that deals with timing and complexity.

CP: Scicom provides services in "Design through Manufacturing" in all key areas. What are those?

IC: The "Design through Manufacturing" refers to CAD/CAM - not generally to all the verticals that we currently work in.

CP: How will the advent of clusters-on-die (COD), which is likely to replace SoC products, will increase the size of the EDA market? What role do you see yourself playing?

IC: Both SoCs and CoD address the issue of designing with shrinking the feature size and packing density. Software plays an increasingly important role in such designs and hardware/software co-design becomes more important. This places additions burden on how you test such systems - which may comprise of multiple application processing units that are linked together in a hybrid configurations of networks and shared memories. Our role, with our customers, is develop tools and technologies to test such systems for debugging, functionality and timing. Some of these issues are extremely complex as shrinking the feature size approaches or challenges the basic laws of physics.

CP: Although growth of ASIC tools is slowing and will eventually reverse direction, new application areas are becoming feasible. What are these areas?

IC: Consumer applications are driving a lot of the design of new chips and functionalities. Those are cell phones, PDAs, cameras and wireless devices and applications.

CP: What is the scope for the semiconductor-testing segment in India?

IC: This is a new segment. Most of the activity in India revolves around design where significant capabilities have evolved. As manufacturing, foundries and packaging are done outside India in Taiwan, China and other South Asian countries, product engineering, which forms the bulk of the testing process, has not really evolved in India. This situation is starting to change as design teams take on increasing challenges of engineering the product and are starting to look into issues of testing, manufacturing, yield characterization, packaging. We, therefore, see this as a growing area and vital to the growth of the overall industry in India.

CP: What are your activities in the mobile computing domain?

IC: We are interested in various enabling frameworks that allow to develop and integrate wireless applications.

CP: What sort of applications are you developing for mobile devices, handhelds, PDAs and desktop products?

IC: A lot of our interest revolves around open frameworks and operating systems for consumer devices. We have developed and continue to develop customized applications that allow enterprise data to be linked into wireless applications.

CP: How do you see India as a market, especially the wireless segment?

IC: China and India are emerging as important and fast growing markets in this area.

CP: What are your plans and strategies for the coming year?

IC: We continue to be focused in our areas of expertise. The volatility in the price of oil has opened up a number of opportunities in providing new services that relate to E&P data management and project services. In addition, we see new areas of development in image-guided systems for the healthcare industry, especially in the diagnostic area. Likewise, the test area is starting to change with the development of semiconductor testing services in India, which are positive signs that the industry in maturing in scope.

Contact:
Scicom Infotech
www.scicmp.com