New Chip on the Block

After
a 20-year stint in Silicon Valley and an expertise in chip designing, Vivek
Mansingh started a small company in Bangalore called Ishoni Networks, as
managing director (India operations). The company deals with building software
programs for system-on-chip (SoC) while its US counterpart designs the chip and
markets the solution. According to him, there is lot of potential for Indian
start-ups in embedded software and chip design. Today Philips Semiconductor has
a 51% stake in Ishoni Networks.

To which specific chain of the embedded technology do you cater?

We design chips and build system-on-chip for broadband technologies
specifically for cable and DSL. The SoCs developed by us go into the broadband
(cable and DSL) routers, giving them multi-functionality features like data
routing, VPN, wireless LAN and VoIP among others. We have several IPs to our
credit but our revenue stream is only by incorporating them into the SoC.
Worldwide this market is very demanding with 40 million cables and DSL
connections now. In 2005, it is to reach 100 million users and a $5 billion
market for customer premise equipment.

How is the Indian market reacting to your solutions?

There is almost no market in India. For us it is constitutes less than one
percent of our revenue earnings. This market is highly dependent on the usage
level of cable and DSL, which is still very low as compared to other parts of
the world. So our target market is the US and the European region in particular,
totaling 15 customers as of now. Most of our customers are box-makers on which
the solutions sits and others are fabricators from Taiwan. In India we are in
talks with Reliance, Bharti, HFCL, and C-Dot among others.

Any tips for aspirants in this arena?

Like a handful of us in this segment, more and more start-ups can
concentrate on chip designing and embedded software.

There is a huge potential and most can adopt a two-pronged model wherein they
develop SoC solutions in India and market them overseas. The fact that large
companies, like Philips Semiconductor in our case, acquire such start-ups for
the existing know-how and talent pool should be encouraging.

The requirement for those intending on starting up a firm is not much as SoC
only requires integrating multiple functions onto one chip. SoC is a crucial
market today because as the area size of the chip decreases so does the cost of
the chip, which in turn will bring down the cost of consumer electronics on
which these chips are embedded.

Radhika Bhuyan In New Delhi