BANGALORE, INDIA: In the last couple of decades, the semiconductor industry has witnessed some rapid changes along with an impressive growth. Gone are the days of vertically integrated semiconductor houses that did almost 100 percent of their entire chip program completely in-house. That has virtually become the bygone era for the industry.

The semiconductor industry is going through some significant changes, mostly in the direction of consolidation. In this change sweeping the industry, the Indian semiconductor industry is creating its niche in the design services and product development areas and today, India has established itself as a leading provider for design services outsourcing. However, it took India a long time to get to this level and there were no short cuts to success.

It is interesting to note that design services offshoring started with Texas Instruments (TI) setting up a center in India about 20 years ago. TI leveraged the India advantage for all the right reasons like the availability of engineering talent and time to scale up. However, this space remained a high-entry barrier area for third party design outsourcing service providers-primarily due to:

* The obvious complexity of work.
* Very high IP sensitivity.
* Relatively high cost of setting up operations.

The fact that India has the world’s second largest English enabled population and an ecosystem that supports English learning significantly enhances the employment opportunities in the knowledge sector of electronics and embedded software. Coupled with this is the fact that India’s multicultural background largely lends itself to deal with the working cultures of both the eastern and western global economies.

India’s offshore pool of available IT and engineering talent is more than 25 percent of the global IT and engineering talent. This makes India one of the most favored destinations for enterprises to nurture their development + R&D programs.

India continues to rank second in the world, after the United States, for producing engineering graduates. Of course, not all of these engineering graduates gravitate towards the field of semiconductor design and embedded software, but increasingly, a substantial part of this pool is now seeking a career in this industry.