Sasken leveraging chipsets targeted for automotive: Rajiv C. Mody

Sasken and I, go back a long way. I first met Rajiv C. Mody at Domlur, Bangalore, office back in 2008. It was really wonderful to reconnect with him and Sasken after ages.

Sasken Technologies Ltd is a specialist in product engineering and digital transformation. It has launched the world’s first high-speed satellite broadband device for critical communications, the LTE-based mobile satellite equipment (MSE). 

Excerpts from an interview with Rajiv C. Mody, Founder, Chairman and MD, Sasken Technologies Ltd

DQ: How does Sasken plan to leverage its account-focused growth strategy to further strengthen relationships with marquee customers and achieve targeted revenue growth of $3 to $5 million per account?

Rajiv C. Mody: Sasken's account-focused growth strategy is strategically thought through to harness our historic strengths, which includes our engineering prowess and the ability to deliver complex, best-in-class services and solutions to our customers. Sasken also has the enviable distinction of having a marquee set of customers. 

In each of the verticals that we have been serving, we have had the opportunity to work with the best in class. By leveraging these core competencies, we aim to deepen relationships with our marquee set of customers, ensuring each account grows sustainably to generate revenues of $3 to $5 million over the next 3 years. 

All our customers respect us for solving their problems. I have also seen that when customer employees move to other companies, they do remember us and are willing to provide us the opportunity We believe this ambitious goal is very much achievable and hinges on the below key pillars:

Customized engagement and empowerment: We recognize that each customer of ours is unique and this requires us to service them differently. We are aiming to tailor our offerings to meet the diverse needs of each customer as well as within the same customer account. This approach involves empowering the teams closest to the customer-primarily the delivery team and account manager - to identify and implement the most effective service strategies. We believe that this flexibility and empowerment is the key to fostering stronger customer relationships and driving account growth.

Hire and retain right talent: Talent remains a cornerstone of our growth strategy. To enhance accountability, we have empowered our delivery and practice teams to lead the way in talent management. Working in tandem with our HR team, they are tasked with identifying, nurturing, and retaining the finest engineers. Our approach includes preparing engineers for future projects as soon as they complete their current assignments, ensuring a seamless transition to new challenges. This initiative is part of our broader vision to foster a culture focused on growth, aiming to establish ourselves as the premier engineering firm globally. 

Future-oriented investments: Our third strategic priority involves investment in innovation and thought leadership. We aim to not just keep pace but set the pace, anticipating the needs of our customers and the direction of the industry. The practice team leads this effort, committed to understanding our customers' immediate priorities and long-term objectives. By staying attuned to emerging trends and rapidly adapting our strategies, we want to prepare ourselves to meet future demands head-on. Our commitment to these investments is unwavering, as we boldly move forward to ensure our relevance and leadership in the technology landscape.

Through these strategic focuses, combined with a firm commitment to growth and engineering excellence, we are confident we will achieve the revenue growth targets, while reinforcing our position as a trusted partner with marquee customers.

DQ: Can you elaborate on Sasken's strategic investments in AI, particularly, in bringing LLMs to the edge. How will these initiatives contribute to enhancing the operational efficiencies and meeting client requirements? 

Rajiv C. Mody: Sasken is investing on AI and GenAI use cases on the edge for target vertical such as automotive. As a case in point, we are developing use cases that runs on the edge such as automotive cockpit assistant, that leverages LLM. The smart cockpit assistant is planned to aid vehicle owners and riders and improve vehicle ownership experience. 

The solution integrates automated voice recognition, speech transcription and text to speech along with LLM models and targetted to leverage GPU and AI engine on the edge.

DQ: In what specific areas of semiconductors is Sasken focusing efforts, particularly in the realm of GenAI and custom solutions? How does it envision these advancements impacting its business trajectory?

Rajiv C. Mody: Sasken is investing in developing differentiated solution by leveraging chipsets targeted for automotive vertical at this point in time. We believe that this investment will provide us competitive advantage, and help in accelerating our growth in automotive and digital businesses.

DQ: How does Sasken envision its satellite communication solutions revolutionizing various industries, such as agriculture, remote health, and disaster management, particularly in the context of expanding 5G connectivity to rural and remote areas?

Rajiv C. Mody: Satellite communication has fixed satellite services (FSS) support voice, data, Internet and video services, cellular backhaul and broadcast services at the fixed locations. However, mobile satellite services (MSS) support is in mobility like land mobile, aeronautical and maritime along with fixed locations. 

MSS serves a variety of segments with varied data rates e.g., IoT segment needs data from bytes to a few kilobits to megabits. Low throughput broadband, non IoT segment, needs data from few kilobits to few megabits and High throughput broadband, cellular backhaul, and enterprises like maritime, and aeronautical and governments, need data from few megabits to few gigabits on the move. 

Sasken has partnered with satellite operators, ground system developers and integrators, and technology suppliers across the IoT, low throughput and high throughput products and platforms. We have developed low-power-based modules for IoT, low throughput terminals for land, maritime and vehicular segments. 

We are developing multiple platforms that support high throughput services for multi-orbit systems. These segments cover agriculture, remote health, disaster management and seamless connectivity for 5G/4G services. 

DQ: Can you discuss Sasken's latest MSE design, which incorporates LTE technology into satellite communication for enhanced performance? How this product aligns with market demands across different sectors?

Rajiv C. Mody: Terrestrial LTE has become the migration path for the industries like IoT and critical communications to develop new products to adapt wider applications. This is in comparison with the erstwhile and current products that are using second generation technologies such as GSM and GPRS, which has limited many applications to use. The migrations have excelled in IoT segment. Howeverm in critical communication, it’s been getting evaluated, and migration is underway. 

To have seamless connectivity across the globe, the non-terrestrial, satellite, network is must and it needs to meet the similar services demands of terrestrial services. Hence, satellite products need to be built with at least LTE or 5G technologies. 

Sasken designed MSE, satellite Terminals, uses LTE, which enables legacy POTS services to the latest VoIP services, data streaming services, and enables unmanned services in remote areas. This has enabled critical infrastructure for varied applications, ranging from weather monitoring to emergency services, to remote connectivity, and to individuals, as well to enterprises to government agencies. This meets the commercial and government demands of unique to widely adapted services.

DQ: Can you provide insights into Sasken's innovative product development journey, detailing its approach from conceptualization to commercialization? What have been notable successes or challenges encountered along the way?

Rajiv C. Mody: In the past, Sasken developed IPs targeted at businesses such as OEMs and tier1s  in the areas of computer vision, AI/ML models for ADAS, test automation framework for multiple verticals, IVI solution etc. Most recent is the test automation framework in automotive for component testing that was licensed to a client. There are other solutions/IPs developed as technology demonstrators.

Most of the product’s requirements are not clear in the beginning. We divide programs into multiple phases like requirements capturing, exploration for proof of concept (PoC), detailed designing phase to detailing all requirements to implementation and validations, incremental integration and validation, component validation and system validations. Quality is built from the beginning of the program as its continuous journey. 

Sasken always looks into product development from the view of: How to reduce cost of maintenance, reuse the core design of hardware and software to generate multiple products so derivative products can be quicker to produce, generate software, agnostic to hardware, modularize hardware and software for ease scaling and debugging, develop frameworks for configurations, and debugging, tracing and field assistance from the architecture phase.

Using above methods we have developed the following: 

* Handheld satellite device where protocol stack is easily ported from one silicon platform to another where the developed stack features have not changed for 14 years but ported across to multiple silicon platforms and multiple operating systems.

* Developed conformance specification and tools for satellite 3G system by using similar concept of cellular network simulators.

* Built satellite terminals to work for critical communications usage using LTE SoC from cellular solution suppliers with modified firmware to reuse the SoC which reduces significant cost and schedule.

* Designed high throughput satellite terminal antenna control logic and interface logic to work across multi orbit system requirements using single instance, and

* Migrated LTE eNB ORAN system to LEO NTN IoT for 5MHz bandwidth in LEO satellite simulation environment for Band 8, Band 5 and Band 3. The features supported are NB IoT and VoLTE with different radio heads.