Rajendra Khare quits Broadcom India, ready to walk the talk

Sufia Tippu
Wednesday, 23 August 2006 18:56

IT Industry - Market

Rajendra Khare, managing director of Broadcom India, has put in his papers and is set to stoke the entrepreneurial fire and start a new company in the chip design domain – based in India.

An industry veteran, who is also the president of the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA), which has been quite vociferous in saying that Indian engineers should come up with innovative product designs in the semiconductor space, Khare is now planning to do exactly what his association has been preaching.

In an exclusive interview with iTWire, Khare says that with the whole environment in the country is undergoing a change, a distinct shift from services to product development, albeit slowly. “I felt that it was time to start something of my own. Working in a multinational and a high end fabless company like Broadcom has been great but sometimes you realize you need to do something more- and semiconductor is the right industry to bet on – at this point of time.”

At Broadcom within a span 10 years, he ramped up the India center from a mere 20-employee firm to around 250 engineers. Unlike the services industry, the chip design firms do not boast the huge numbers with the Indian R&D center of, for example semiconductor leader, Texas Instruments having 1400 engineers onboard and another equal number working in other design teams in IT companies outside of TI India.

From working on tiny parts of projects in digital video way back in 1999, the Indian arm now works on global projects in enterprise switching, wireless LAN, mobile phones and broadband processors. Today, it has reached a stage where the design team from the India center is now developing complete chipset solutions for set-top boxes for the global market.

Prior to this, Khare co-founded Armedia Labs, one of the first technology start-up companies in Bangalore in 1997. Armedia became one of the first companies in the world to develop technology for HDTV MPEG decoders for the emerging Digital TV and Internet Appliance markets. Its technology caught the attention of several leading industry players and eventually Broadcom Corporation acquired the company in 1999 for around $70 million. At Broadcom, he has filed more than 20 US patents.
Chip design is hot stuff in India

Today, the Indian semiconductor industry is aglow with optimism, especially after the Frost & Sullivan report which said that the consumption of electronic equipment in India is set to increase to $363 billion by 2015 from $28.2 billion in 2005, pushing the total market for semiconductors to a whopping $36.3 billion by 2015.

According to the report the Indian electronics equipment production grew at 25 per cent in 2005, and is slated to touch a growth rate of 50 per cent in 2010 and 34 per cent in 2015. The entire industry (semiconductor and embedded design, electronic equipment manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing) is expected to generate revenues of $73.92 billion by 2010, and generate employment for 1.85 million employees.

The billion dollar opportunity had given rise to a lot of excitement in India and among the non-resident Indians (NRIs) who were looking at returning to India to set up their own operations or work for MNCs who were outlining major plans at their Indian development and design centers.

Companies with cutting edge technologies like Cosmic Circuits which is in analog design domain or Beeceem which is into wi-max technologies or companies like Insilica and Opensilicon which are again offering high end design services as well as newcomers like Verismo Technologies ( into Internet TV), Indrion (which is coming out with a chip for sensor networks – conceptualized, designed and developed here in India) are a few of the start-ups already marking up for success in the global chip design scenario.

“Today, the fact that more than 40 venture capitalists coming here – either setting up Indian operations or scouting for tech start-ups is galvanizing the entire semiconductor industry,” says Dr Sridhar Mitta, who heads e4e, a US-based VC firm which has invested in a number of Indian start-ups.