Tensilica opens R&D centre in Pune

Tensilica, a world leader in microprocessor technology, has set up its second global research and development (R&D) centre in Pune.

The company, which delivers hardware and software designs to fit system-on-chip (SOC) applications, has also announced investment plans of $40 million over the next five years.

Subodh Shukla, the Santa Clara-based company's Indian operations managing director, said, "The Pune R&D centre is the companionly other than the one at Santa Clara. Work on design automation, developing multimedia applications on chips, verification automation and applications engineering will be carried out at the Pune centre."

The decision to set up a 100 per cent subsidiary in Pune, he said, was based on "one year of successful running an offshore dedicated centre at eInfochips on a trial basis. This provided dedicated premises and software personnel for Tensilica."

Detailing the company's India plans, he said, "We will invest $55 million over the next five years. In a year's time we will grow this operation to include 55 people and account for a third of our total R&D work."

Asserting the company's target of becoming the number two player in terms of volumes and licensing, Shukla said, "We have over 80 organisations licensing our technology and 200 plus products based on Tensilica technology. We expect to have a new product launched on our technology every week."

Cisco, Samsung, LG, ATI, Sony, Epson, Agilent technologies are some of Tensilica's clients. The company boasts of having five of the top six cellphone companies, three of the leading four printer makers and leading internet and router player as its clienetele. Many cellphones, MP3 players, iPods and digital cameras use the company's technology.

Shukla said that Tensilica's technology automates chip designing to allow for programming of microprocessor core.

This includes programming of multiple functionalities such as audio/video processing, picture clarity and more as against the previous method of manually programming and developing register transfer language (RTL) to allow these functions to work with a pre-designed micro processor.

"Our technology has reduced development time by 50 per cent from 18 months to 8-9 months. Besides it is now easier to design multiple core processors. Also there is no need to re-spin the entire design to add a new functionality, which costs companies $8,00,00-$1 million," Shukla added.