Wipro charts high growth trajectory in semiconductor design services
By Chitra Giridhar, Contributing Writer -- EDN, November 27, 2006
A common thread that connects technology majors such as Nortel, Cisco Systems, Lucent and Sun Microsystems is that they all use outsourced product development services. And their vendor of choice is Wipro Technologies (aka the Bangalore Tiger), which is reckoned to be the largest independent R&D services provider in the world.
Employing more than 14,800 engineers, the company’s Product Engineering Solutions (PES) business unit generates about a third of its $2.4 billion annual revenue, and offers a vast array of services—from product strategy and hardware design to quality consulting. In the past 12 months the company has spent more than $100 million to acquire three overseas companies to bolster its portfolio of skills in the PES space.
Companies are turning to partners such as Wipro for several reasons: in spite of the fact that many companies have captive design centers in India, they use Wipro for specialized projects and for skill sets they do not have internally. Additionally, product designs increasingly are calling for embedded software—which is Wipro’s big strength.
“Wipro probably has the largest ensemble of third-party semiconductor designers with skills to design any kind of SoC—and the associated software and middleware,” says Dr. Sridhar Mitta, managing director and chief technology officer of e4e Inc., a business services company.
Mitta was previously the head of Wipro's global R&D and for many years led the company’s efforts to market its services to overseas clients. Today, Wipro works for many of the top names in the electronics industry—often under strict confidentiality agreements.
“Wipro has been a long-time partner for TI India in areas like chip design, software development and system level products,” says Dr. Biswadip (Bobby) Mitra, managing director of Texas Instruments (India).
Wipro is a world leader in IEEE 1394 IP, and has licensed technology to more than 60 companies including Emuzed, Epson, Indigita, MediaTek and Zoran. The Gartner Dataquest Semiconductor Intellectual Property, Worldwide (2005) report rates Wipro as the top IP provider for WLAN and Bluetooth—with close to a third of the world market share. Last year, Wipro filed 58 invention disclosures on behalf of its clients, and has in the last quarter filed three patents in digital video and FPGA emulation.
The company’s VLSI and systems design team handles projects in mixed-signal and digital ASIC/SoC, complex FPGA and board designs, enclosure/chassis designs and core technology IP blocks. The 1,700-member team is often at the cutting-edge of technology—manipulating more than 40 million gate designs, 65 nm geometries, high-end FPGAs and 28-layer boards. Over the past three years, Wipro has delivered 250 projects in silicon design and about 200 board design projects to customers. These range from highly complex chip designs to system designs spanning domains such as DSL technology, passive-optical-networking (PON) technology, CPRI for wireless infrastructure, and H.264 QVGA encoder systems.
“Wipro’s robust processes and flexible operational model have been instrumental in making them our natural engineering partner," comments T J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor.
More recently, Wipro has increased its focus on the automotive electronics space. The company currently has 550 software and IC design engineers in its automotive practice, and develops about 15 ASIC designs for the automotive applications each year. The company recently received the Automotive SPICE Organization Maturity Level 5 certification, and is the first in the world to achieve this distinction. This is in addition to other quality and process certifications such as ISO 9000 and Six Sigma. Wipro also was the first in the world to achieve SEI (Software Engineering Institute), PCMM Level 5 and among the earliest to get CMM/CMMI. There are less than 150 organizations around the world that have these software engineering certifications, and few companies have all of them.
Libi Baskaran, an analyst with the ARC Advisory Group, says that these achievements make Wipro an ideal end-to-end product development service provider. This process orientation has enabled the company to create a first-time-right 2.4/5 GHz radio for WLAN based on 0.18µm or 180nm CMOS TSMC process for a European client.
In 2005, Wipro paid $56 million to acquire Austria-based NewLogic, for its portfolio of semiconductor IP and components in the wireless applications space. With the acquisition the company added 120 specialists, got access to 25 patent filings and more than 20 customers in the product engineering domain. This year, it acquired Quantech, a provider of CAD and engineering services in automotive, aerospace and consumer goods space. The most recent acquisition was Finland-based Saraware, a provider of design and engineering services to telecom companies.
The company continues to prowl for more acquisitions in niche areas to supplement its engineering competencies. Commenting on strategy, an upbeat Ramesh Emani, president of Wipro PES says, “Nasscom [the National Association of Software and Service Companies] forecasts that the Indian design industry will grow 25 percent to30 percent. We want to beat those numbers.”
