eInfochips, US firm Tensilica tie up

The US-based Tensilica Inc has entered into an agreement with Ahmedabad-based eInfochips Inc to use the latter's manufacturing base in India.

The pact puts eInfochips among the three-four Indian firms that offer integrated chip design, embedded applications designs and development systems.

"Under the partnership eInfochips will develop integrated development environments for processors of Tensilica for a varied range of applications. We will also implement the audio video codex for Tensilica processors," said Pratul Shroff, president and chief executive officer, eInfochips.

He said the company is looking at similar partnerships with more US-based firms.

He said Tensilica is a pioneer in configurable applications and firmware (coding on a chip) intellectual property.

"eInfochips aims to exploit the growing trend of top US IT firms relying more qualitatively on Indian companies by outsourcing key areas of work," Shroff said.

Tapan Joshi, vice-president, marketing, eInfochips, said while IT infrastructure has always been more of a support function, the deal with Tensilica assumes significance because the US firm has outsourced a highly sophisticated and core competence aspect of its processors to eInfochips.

"We have been doing seven projects with Qlogic and two other with Tensilica. That takes eInfochips among the only four Indian companies that offer integrated services in designing," Joshi said.

eInfochips is a provider of ASIC design services, embedded systems solutions and IP cores.

Tensilica, with a configurable and extensible microprocessor core called Xtensa, is the only company that has automated and patented the process of generating a customised microprocessor core along with a complete software development tool environment.