MosChip proves India and semiconductors mix

By Sufia Tippu
Tuesday, 08 August 2006 17:35

IT Industry - Market

When Ram Reddy and Dayakar Reddy chose to return to India in1999 to set up a chip design company, everyone thought the company would have to be aborted because semiconductor and India just didn’t go together.

Ram Reddy spent over 23 years the Silicon Valley, designing and manufacturing various ICs, had turned an entrepreneur to set up semiconductor design companies and sold them to larger companies in the last 18 years. Dayakar Reddy, graduated in electronics engineering from California State University, San Jose, has filed for 12 patents in his 10- year stint Cirrus Logic and later turned into an entrepreneur in his own right.

But, grappling against odds, these two engineers made this Hyderabad-based firm MosChip Semiconductor a stand-alone success.

Now, Moschip has achieved the distinction of being the first India’s fabless design firm to have shipped two million units from its suite of peripheral component interconnect (PCI) controller chips since this product was launched three years back. These chips, which connect  peripherals to a PC are high performance connectivity solutions for consumer, industrial and computing applications and are used right from printers to handheld devices when they have to be connected to PCs

Today, with customers including IBM-GES, Panasonic among others, its 80-strong team of engineers is product centric–thinking and designing products that working across different operating systems and multiple platforms of various hardware configurations. Seventeen products are currently in volume production and customer sampling in the PCI, USB and IPSec area.

Says Dayakar Reddy, co-founder and managing director of Moschip, “The remarkable record of the our product (MCS9800) which has crossed the two million mark shows the confidence our customers have in us. We are seeing a continued growth in demand for these products as well our other products which have become major design-wins.”

This suite of products are also being used in point of sale ( POS) machines, industrial automation, set top boxes, vending/banking kiosks,    GSM/GPRS modems, gaming motherboards and CTV systems.

Basically the company develops system software to enable the complete functionality of ICs. It focuses on product design and development utilizing standard cell approach portable to multi foundries for processing. After the design is done here the products are fabricated in fabs in Taiwan and sold worldwide through its Santa Clara office in the US.

“Today, we are able to design end to end solutions – right from conceptualizing the design to production stage by talking to customers, getting an idea of the market need and refining features of the products. These become customized products and we are also able to create intellectual property (IP) for customers,” Reddy pointed out.

Although India is seeing a number of design houses working on chip designs - right from well established companies (like Wipro, Sasken and MindTree) and start-ups (like Insilica, Qualcore), most of them are in the services side of the chip design. Moschip is unarguably the largest and one of the very few firms that designs and completes the product here and sends it for manufacture in Taiwan and markets it on its own.