'It is always good to be close to where your customers are'

While other Asian countries like China have a clear edge towards the hardware
side of semiconductor business-India continues to shine on the software front
and that is what is pushing EDA focused companies like CoWare to increase their
India bet. Zia Askari of CyberMedia News spoke with President and CEO at CoWare
Alan Naumann about how the company plans to leverage on India's software
advantage.

Why is India important for the company's overall global strategy?

India is one of the most active countries when it comes to software
development and we want to leverage on its capabilities. That is why we want to
have a sizable workforce doing R&D in this part of the world.

More than 50% of our global customers, including ST Microelectronics and
Sony, have got their presence in India, so this country is fairly important to
us.

What are the areas that you are focusing on for your R&D facility
here?

Within India, we are focusing towards designing applications based on system
on chip (SOC) concepts. It is clear that the next generation of the
semiconductor era belongs to SOC. As software is going to dominate the chip
design from concept to finish, India, being a software-focused country, will
play a major role and has a clear advantage

What kind of investment plans do you have for the country and what are the
areas where this investment will be made?

We plan to invest close to $12 mn in the next three years in India and our
present headcount of 43 will touch the 100 mark. Primarily, the money will be
spent on attracting manpower for the company and we would also be considering
having our own facility here-which would most likely be in Noida.

A lot of EDA focused companies tend to partner with premier education
institutions in order to get the best talent. What is your opinion on this?

We have a policy to closely work with big institutions like the IITs in
India. We have just finalized a new course curriculum on systems level design-high
level modeling at IIT Delhi. We are also working with IIT Kharagpur for project
level work and plan to have some tangible designs coming out of this exercise,
which can then be used by the company on a commercial basis.

Presently, we are working on new software tools, specifically designed for a
VLSI developer, to deliver advance algorithm. This kind of product will be used
in areas like high-end imaging, wired and wireless communications and emerging
technologies like WiMax.