Speaking in December 2007 at a conference on low-power design, organized by the India Semiconductor Association (ISA), S N Padmanabhan, senior vice president, Mindtree Consulting, said that IC power budgets have fallen drastically. Four out of every five chips designed are <2W. There has also been a manipulation of multiple parameters (P=CV2f). And there are several leakage issues with 65nm and smaller geometries, which cannot be ignored.

India's automotive industry has received a major boost with new investment plans recently announced by two of the world's largest car makers - Ford and Daimler.

Sales of semiconductors in 2007 hit a new record of $255.6 billion, up 3.2 percent on the previous year and the sixth consecutive annual rise in chip sales, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

The global design and engineering services market is growing robustly, and India is emerging as one among the top engineering, design, and development centers. Industries, such as automotive, aerospace, consumer durables, and hi-tech are contributing to this trend. While some OEMs are establishing captive engineering, design, and development centers in India, others are working with independent service providers in new product releases and product upgrades.
The major drivers, which have been contributing to the growth of the market for captive development centers and offshore design and engineering services, often referred to as engineering services outsourcing (ESO) are: the rapidly expanding global demand for a broad range of new consumer products at different price points, achieving conforming to various national standards; and the need to continually upgrade products that are already in the market. At the same time, the manufacturing industry is facing challenges on various fronts, such as the escalating development costs, inability to meet the new product release schedules,and lack of talent pool. Therefore, manufacturing companies are transferring the design and engineering work to places where engineering talent is readily available at affordable costs. Additionally, manufacturing companies are also under time-to-market pressures forcing them to extend the concept of concurrent design and engineering beyond one location and time zone to multiple teams working at different locations on 24x7 basis. With the current design and engineering tools admirably supporting collaborative working, some OEMs are transforming their product design, development, and engineering activities as multi-location team activities. Even OEMs, which typically felt comfortable in carrying out design and engineering in-house, are under business pressures to collaborate with others.
Industries, such as aerospace, automotive, consumer durables and other hi-tech including telecommunications and semiconductor have embraced this trend and are benefiting from it. The launch of the Nano establishes India's capabilities to design and build automobiles indigenously. International car designers are making an entry as they find it cost-effective to design cars in India. Automotive companies, such as Toyota, Ford Motor, and Honda Motor and component makers, such as Robert Bosch, TRW Automotive, Visteon, and Collins & Aikman have design and development centers in India.
The Indian chip design segment is witnessing huge growth. This growth would provide the impetus for the further strengthening of the electronic industry ecosystems including semiconductor and embedded system designs.
Driven by these factors the country is emerging as one among the top engineering, design, and development centers globally. Just as the poor in India look at the country's economic growth as a jobless growth phenomenon, India's OEMs may find that they get bypassed unless they invest more in research, development, and engineering and take the path of product innovation. They must also ensure that they embrace collaborative and concurrent engineering practices.

Price wars have cost the semiconductor industry $23bn in lost revenues over the last two years, $18bn in 2007 alone, it was said at IFS2008, the annual forecast seminar run in London last week by Future Horizons.

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. said it has agreed to purchase SigmaTel Inc. for about $110 million to secure complementary analog ICs as it diversifies sales into the digital and consumer electronics markets.

While Motorola Inc.'s decision to consider spinning off or selling its mobile unit might have only meant to silence critics of its operations, it sets the company on a path that could eventually break-up the entire company.

Intel Corp. will pour in more than Rs.3,947.84 crore ($1 billion) in India over the next three years, according to John McClure, Intel technology India director.

India is expected to grow by 8.75 per cent in the fiscal year ending March 2008, the International Monetary Fund said, but cautioned that inflation risks remain due to rising global food and fuel prices. Indian policy makers expect growth close to 9.0 per cent in the current fiscal year and the statistics office will release the first official estimate for gross domestic product growth for 2007/08 on Feb. 7.

What a difference a year makes for private equity. Heading into 2008, private equity deals in the semiconductor industry have cooled--if not come to a screeching halt, according to panelists at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here.

Dwindling interest for venture capital funding in semiconductors could cause engineers and other talent to migrate and seek careers outside the industry, warned an expert in the field. Shahin Farshchi, an associate partner with VC firm Lux Capital Management (New York), described the overall trends in venture capital for semiconductors as "troubling."

Fairchild Semiconductor has set up an R&D center in Pune, India dedicated to the development of next-generation power MOSFETs and IGBT technology for applications such as solar inverters, UPS, automotive, lighting and ballast applications.

India's booming mobile services market will see investments of over Rs 100,000 crore (around $24 billion) by 2010, the fastest investment ramp-up seen in any telecom market globally even as analysts predict a bruising battle that will see tariffs fall sharply.

As consumers await handheld Internet devices that will download and play videos, strap-on health monitors that connect to doctors in real-time, and other such gizmos, techies in Bangalore are busy making smaller, smarter and multi-tasking microchips to run them. As chips shrink and morph, Bangalore has become home to 70 firms, including leading multinationals, engaged in their design, development and making, comparable to hubs such as Cambridge (UK), Taiwan and Silicon Valley.
Bangalore is second only to Silicon Valley in the number of engineers involved in very large scale integration (VLSI) as high-end chips are called.New generation chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have Bangalore on edge. Engineers are design testing their new 45 nanometre (billionth of a metre) microprocessor codenamed 'Shanghai.' Earlier, they contributed to the chip Opteron. Recently, while inaugurating the R&D unit of the company, CEO Hector Ruiz called it a "critical" unit.
As AMD’s arch-rival, Intel, squeezes in the operating capability of a trillion mathematical operations in a second, like a super computer on a chip the size of a fingernail, a team led by Vasantha Erraguntla plays a key role. Ten years ago, such operating capability would have required a computer the size of a small house with hundreds of times more power.
While 30 chip firms conduct captive offshore design for giants such as Texas Instruments (TI) and NXP Semiconductors (formerly Phillips), there are Indian firms and a new tribe of Indiaborn scientists and entrepreneurs based elsewhere with Bangalore links.

Texas Instruments’ CEO and President Richard Templeton has been named as the recipient of the 2007 SEMI Akira Inoue award for excellence in environmental, health and safety standards. The Akira Inoue award is named after the late past President of TEL, who implemented collaboration on EHS development in the semiconductor industry.

Spending on automotive semiconductors advanced to $20.1 billion in 2007, up 8.1 percent on $18.6 billion spent in 2006, according to a preliminary estimate from Gartner analyst Adriana Blanco.

The imminent market entry of low-cost cars made in emerging countries such as India or China has triggered thought processes in the automotive electronics supply industry. The expectation of significant market shifts forces them to rethink their approach of sophisticated automotive electronics and ever-increasing electronics content for the vehicles.

Driven by computing and consumer electronics demand, IDC predicts that the Chinese semiconductor market will surpass $28 billion in 2011. Yet Chinese semiconductor manufacturing technologies continue to lag behind those in the United States, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. To capture a share of China’s growing domestic market, semiconductor suppliers must include China as part of their global strategy to improve their competitiveness worldwide. "China is an attractive market with opportunities and challenges," said Patrick Liao, research manager, Asia/Pacific Semiconductors at IDC.

National Semiconductor plans to form an low-power IC ecosystem made up of Indian suppliers. National Semiconductor said it would announce the first Indian ecosystem partners in the next few weeks. The coalition will be centered around the chip maker's PowerWise portfolio of products and IP relating to adaptive energy management.

AMD and the American India Foundation (AIF), has announced the launch of the first Learning Lab in Hyderabad at the Government Girls High School, West Marredpally. The Learning Lab reiterates AMD's commitment to connect 50 percent of the world's population to the Internet by 2015 under the aegis of its 50x15 Initiative.