Got talent? Get into DSP!

Any emerging technology brings with it a wealth of opportunities and all of a

sudden, hitherto unthought-of careers are up for grabs. One of the best examples

that comes to mind is the Internet. Entire industries were woven around the Web,

which spawned not only exciting career opportunities but also gave people the

freedom to take the road less traveled. With all this came the rumblings of the

new economy, the age of the dotcoms, e-commerce,

e-crm

and now e-governance.

Acronyms mushroomed by the day with the all-important ‘e’ attached to them.

Suddenly, people from the ranks of CEOs to the neighborhood grocer were

discussing strong business models, VC funding and value added services. Such was

the effect of the Internet.

But this story is not about the Internet, it’s about another multi-billion

dollar industry that, just like the Internet, is quite revolutionary and one

that’s on the threshold of exploding further. What I’m talking about is Digital

Signal Processing or DSP. Until now, DSP

was a market dominated by Texas Instruments. But, now there is some strong

competition from the likes of Motorola, Lucent, Analog Devices Inc and the

latest entrant, Intel, which until now focused only on microprocessors. If

industry sources are to be believed, this is an industry that has an insatiable

appetite for talent.

Industry speaks



Whether at the IC design level or developing sophisticated applications for
these chips, building a career in DSP opens up an entirely new world. At the

level of IC design, one could be writing software tools for these chips or

developing applications on these chips using these tools and finally systems

design. Who better to tell us the about the market for DSP than Texas

Instruments, the pioneers in this field. To quote Sham Banerji, Director DSP

product development, Texas Instruments, "If you look at the Nasscom

figures, a lot of their future projections is for embedded software as opposed

to solutions for the enterprise. So DSP is a high value-added differentiated

software market."

And, what about career prospects in DSP? "DSP presents a tremendous

opportunity for growth. What makes it more attractive from the Indian point of

view for young graduates coming out of universities is that DSP technology and

programming tend to be a little maths intensive. This actually fits very well

with the Indian academics as our graduates are very well versed in maths,"

says Banerji.

The demand



One of the challenges faced by the DSP industry today is to grow the install
base of software programmers by several degrees of magnitude. As the

applications are quite sophisticated, right now they tend to be written by

people who are expert DSP programmers. Texas Instruments’ biggest initiative

is to increase this programmer base on its platform from a mere 30,000 to 50,000

programmers to as much as 500,000 to 700,000 programmers. When this happens, DSP

will really end up in your ears and pockets.

Skill sets



So, what are the skills that a person looking to make a mark in the field of
DSP need to possess? Surprise, surprise, assembly level programming and C.

Assembly level programming is preferred so as to extract that last bit of

performance out of the DSP architecture. But owing to the increasing

complexities of applications, programming at the C level is also required.

When we talk of careers the other term that’s equally important is the

paycheck. Illustrating the potentials of DSP, Banerji said if TI sent one of its

engineers and a company like Wipro sent one of its to a customer site in the US,

a Wipro engineer would charge something like $5,000 to $8,000 while a TI

engineer would command $30,000 to $50,000. "Such is the value-add in a

highly specialized and differentiated market."