SEMI India benchmarks India's NSM on global FIT best practices

SEMI India organized a panel discussion in Bangalore, India, today to discuss public policy principles on feed-In tariffs (FITs) and their relevance to the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JN NSM).

L-R: Dr. J Gururaja, Honorary Executive President, REAF (Renewable Energy Advocacy Forum), K. Subramanya, CEO, Tata BP Solar and Chair, SEMI India PV Advisory Committee, and Sathya Prasad, President, SEMI India.

SEMI India also released a white paper on the policy principles and recommended global best practices for solar FITs, with comments on its relevance to the Indian context.

The paper was released jointly by Sathya Prasad, along with K. Subramanya, CEO, Tata BP Solar and Chair, SEMI India PV Advisory Committee, and Dr. J Gururaja, Honorary Executive President, REAF (Renewable Energy Advocacy Forum).

I believe the paper can be downloaded from the SEMI/PV Group’s website.

A feed-in tariff (FIT) is said to be a “Government policy to encourage adoption of renewable energy by requiring regional or national electric utilities to buy electricity from renewable sources at above-market rates.” If you look at the global FIT statistics, 37 countries adopted FITs in 2008, which now stands at 45 countries.

According to Sathya Prasad, president SEMI India, policy drives the solar PV market. For instance, over 80 percent of 2008 PV demand came from the FIT supported market.

Key findings from the white paper include:

* India’s JN-NSM framework compares favorably with long-established successful FIT regime (Germany, etc).

* The FIT must be continued until grid parity is achieved,

* Following FIT best practices ensures lower policy cost, faster ramp of manufacturing and growth of PV market.

* Efficient execution/implementation of JN-NSM is crucial.

More details later! 😉 Keep watching!

BSA to help Karnataka PSUs manage software efficiently via SAM

L-R: Keshav S. Dhakad, Chair, India Committee 2010, BSA, Dr. D.S. Ravindran, CEO, Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, and Lizum Mishra, director, India, BSA.

Ever wondered why you are unable to update your anti-virus software? Chances are that you are running a pirated version of the Windows OS! That itself opens your system and network up to cyber threats and other attacks! Yes, I know! Prices of software, at least the relevant ones, aren’t that low! However, you don’t have much choice, do you?

Now, if you were using original software in your computer, you won’t really face this problem! It means, you are mananging your asset — in this case, the software. To run your heavy, feature rich programs, you need robust software that is sometimes (or, nearly, all the times) expensive!

Okay! Imagine an enterprise using counterfeit or pirated software. Will it face problems? Surely, very serious ones, in the short and long terms. Now what if a public sector undertaking was using pirated software? Perhaps, that would directly impact the services, and in most cases, e-governamce services that it offers.

Keeping all of these in mind, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has launched a SAM (software asset management) program for public sector undertakings (PSUs) based in the Indian state of Karnataka. This is the first SAM initiative for PSUs in partnership with Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka.

Dr. D.S. Ravindran, CEO, Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, said: “In the last year, the IT spend by the government was close to Rs. 300 crore. All PSUs are now also coming up with their own IT needs and it is important to adopt this standard of SAM with good IT governance practices in order to enable the state of Karnataka to be more productive and cost-efficient.”

The Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka has two key mandates — putting in place an entire core network infrastructure across the state for e-governance services, and, to expand the capacity and program of running the e-governance initiatives.

Dr. Ravindran added: “We have connected 30,000 offices across the state thru the wide area WAN. We have done over Rs. 22,000 crores worth of procurement over our e-governance platform.”

Semiconductor-IP directory for FPGAs indexes over 17,000 IP blocks and FPGA devices!

Today, I came across a very interesting story, which stated that Parallel Engines has launched the world’s largest semiconductor-IP directory for FPGAs. According to the company, the site — http://www.FPGAIPDirectory.com, indexes over 17,000 IP blocks and FPGA devices!

How does this help the global semiconductor industry? Most critically, customers can now search for semiconductor-IP and retrieve IP vendor datasheets, IP meta-information, and FPGA device configurations. Also, the meta-information includes IP interfaces, LUT, BRAM, I/O and embedded IP resources, costs and packages.

According to the release, Parallel Engines is the brainchild of its CEO, George Janac, Electronic Design Automation pioneer, founder of Chip Estimate; High Level Design Systems, and startup investor. “FPGA design has long been served by a disaggregated IP supply chain,” says Janac.

The next best thing to do was to get in touch with George Janac and have his thoughts.

First, I quizzed Janac about the need for such a site. He said that today, most IP portals are really the outgrowth of IPs for ASICs and SoCs.

Janac added: “The FPGA IP market really has no central IP place of its own. Also there is a unique need in FPGA to combine both IP and devices. Much of what is ASIC and SoC hard-IP (I/O, PHY, memory, PLL, etc.) is really embedded in an FPGA device. Hence, the need for a specialized portal. Also, many ASIC and SoC suppliers do not sell in FPGA and vice versa.” Very interesting indeed!

If this is the case, why develop such a site now, and why not earlier?

Janac explained: “Timing is driven by the sizes of the new generation of FPGAs, especially the recent announcements of the upcoming 28nm FPGA devices from Altera and Xilinx, respectively. These device will put the FPGA devices two to  three generations ahead in IC technology compared to ASIC. It means that more and more systems that were ASIC, could be placed in FPGA.

“Additionally, we are seeing more heterogeneous FPGA devices from companies like Actel. These have high embedded content for analog, and ARM cores. Finding this kind of IP and mapping to these devices needs a new approach.”

LTE should benefit from WiMAX beachhead!

This is the concluding part of the Maravedis seminar on 4Ggear: Equipment market update and chipset trends, which I had the opportunity to participate late last month. Here is the perspective from Maravedis’ LTE and WiMAX Equipment Analysis Service – Q1 2010, presented by Adlane Fellah, Research Director – Maravedis and Robert Syputa, Senior Market Analyst, 4Ggear – Maravedis.

4G equipment executive summary 2009
One, mobile WiMAX chipset shipments surged. Further, there has been a shift in devices. The year 2009 has also down as the year of transition between WiMAX and LTE. In fact, WIMAX has established a beachhead, while LTE has been gaining in momentum. It is apparent that the LTE chipsets landscape is already crowded.

Maravedis also presented some BWA/WIMAX statistics for 2009 — 5.6 million chipsets, 4.8 million devices, and 3.5 million new subscribers (Source: 4Ggear Quarterly Report –March 2010).

When one looks at the WiMAX chipset breakdown by device during 2009, indoor fixed CPEs segment accounted for 49 percent, followed by USB dongle and PC cards at 42 percent. Embedded PC (netbook, notebook) contributed 4 percent, while outdor CPEs added up to 3 percent and indoor fixed CPEs accounted for 2 percent, respectively.

LTE/WiMAX trends
Now, let us look at some selected LTE and WiMAX key trends, as per the 4Ggear report.

Among WiMAX chipsets, the vendors have offered differentiated chipsets to address the emerged markets. The aggressive chipset prices have led to higher volume and optimized platforms. In case of LTE chipsets, as of now, the early solutions support LTE only. It may be pointed out here that the early suppliers may not be the long term winners.

Turning to devices, in the case of WiMAX devices, there have been diversified deployments of low cost CPEs, dual-mode USB dongles, and smartphones. In the case of LTE devices, the demonstrators have single-mode followed by dual-mode USB dongles.

As for the 4G equipment equipment itself, it is clear that WiMAX has already established a beachhead for technological progress. Definitely, LTE stands to and will benefit from all that.

Freescale in strategic partnerships with Mentor, Enea and Green Hills

This has been quite an eventful day. Today, Freescale Semiconductor signed strategic partnership agreements with Mentor Graphics, Enea and Green Hills Software to establish comprehensive enablement solutions for Freescale’s QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

Freescale and its strategic software partners intend to share IP, invest jointly in product and technology roadmaps, and collaborate on go-to-market activities.

According to Raja Tabet, vice president, Software & Systems Organization, Networking & Multimedia Group, Freescale, the company’s strategic alliance with Mentor focuses on enabling highly optimized Linux solutions for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors. Mentor and Freescale will use a common Linux distribution for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors.

He said: “Mentor is our strategic partner on Linux, We will be aligning with Mentor around a common Linux development distribution methodology. We will no longer have our own distribution methodolgy. The objective for us is to allow seamless migration for our customers from free Linux to commercially supported Linux.

“With Green Hills — a premier provider of OS and tools –we are making sure that we have a broad support  for our product portfolio. When our products are launched, people will have premium support from our partners such as Green Hills. These are for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors.

“With Enea, the alliance is on enabling the highly optimized versions of OSE, OSEck, Optima Tools and related software for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors as well as StarCore DSPs.”

On the timing of these agreements, Tabet said: “We have been working on a model for quite some time. Ths announcrment, we’ve been planning it for a while. We wanted to put our silicon out there and add software system partners. The name of the game was pushing the clock speed. We see move from single to multi-core.

“We need to invest much more heavily among ourselves and our partners. We need different partnership strategies. We need to decide what investment to put into software and what investment into our partners.”

He added: “We have been working on these strategic alliances for quite some time now and as the leader in providing processors into the networking market wanted to lead the way in setting a high bar for silicon-software vendor collaboration for multi-core devices.

“We believe that effective multicore support necessitates deep, collaborative and early investment between silicon vendors and software partners to truly provide an optimized silicon-software experience. Additionally, given the recent consolidation in the industry, we wanted to reaffirm our commitment to enabling a healthy independent ecosystem of partners and help customers maintain a choice of software vendors for our devices.”

Analog Devices opens new development center in Bangalore

Jerald G. Fishman, president & CEO, Analog Devices, and Dr. S. Karhik, engineering director, IPDC.

Jerald G. Fishman, president and CEO was recently on a trip to India, apparently, his first ever, to celebrate 15 years of Analog Devices’ presence in India, and to inaugurate its new development center in Bangalore.

He said: “We have opened a new development center in Bangalore, India. We are focusing on signal processing. We are a leader in high performance signal processing solutions. We sell our products into virtually every application.”

Commenting on some trends prevailing today, he added: “Everything has to be greener and consume lower power. We also have products for security, video surveillance, etc. Another trend is healthcare. Our technology enables images that doctors need. For example, we have a solution that enables you to see medical imaging of the heart in four dimensions.”

Speaking on the company’s Bangalore center, he said: “For many years, the Bangalore center has been at the forefront of several designs. We have got the capabilities here as good as anywhere. The people here will become more important for us over the years.”

Dr. S. Karthik, engineering director, precision signal processing (ASC), India Product Development Center (IPDC), Analog Devices India Pvt Ltd, said that the India center opened in 1995 to focus on SHARC processors. The SHARC processor family dominates the floating-point DSP market with exceptional core and memory performance and outstanding I/O throughput. He added that the India PDC is home of the SHARC processor.

In 2002, Analog Devices India added analog and mixed-signal design group to the IPDC. In the same year, Analog Devices and IIT-Madras announced India’s first DSP learning center — the ADI-IITM DSP Learning Centre.  The IIT-M faculty, in consultation with ADI engineers, designed the course material and the lab experiments. The centre is designed to train approximately 500 students every year, of which about 400 are from various engineering colleges in the region and about 100 are from industries in India, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.

In 2006, Analog Devices opened the IC test development facility.  Karthik said that the company has also added the DSP application engineering capability. In the past 15 years, the IPDC has done products from concept to development in India.

LTE will see larger deployments, higher volumes than WiMAX!

Craig Miller, VP, Marketing & Business Development, Sequans Communications.

Late last month, I had the pleasure of attending a Maravedis seminar on 4Ggear: Equipment market update and chipset trends. It also included a market perspective from Sequans Communications, presented by Craig Miller, VP, Marketing & Business Development. This post will highlight Craig’s presentation. Maravedis’ post will follow thereafter.

4G trends: Device volumes and devices
During 2010, WiMAX device shipments are on pace to triple vs. 2009. The volume is well balanced in 2010. Key growth drivers include handset adoption, deployments in India as well as continued growth in US, Japan, SE Asia, and the MEA.

As for 4G devices, in the beginning (ca. 2006-2008), the device shipments were dominated by fixed broadband CPE. Today, the device ‘mix’ is shifting toward mobile broadband devices, netbooks and mass-market multimode handsets. Tomorrow, we shall witness more mass-market handsets, plus mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and other CE devices, as well as the emergence of M2M applications.

According to Miller, mass market prices are here now, enabled by low cost, high-integration chipsets.

Symantec's Internet threat security report on India has few surprises!

Actually, no surprise, really! India is definitely shooting up — in the wrong direction — as far as Internet threats are concerned! The India edition of Symantec’s Internet threat security report, presented by Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India, has several key findings that will make you sit up and think! Let’s start!!

Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India, presenting the Internet threat security report, India edition.

Here are just two among the many data points. One, India, Brazil and Poland — all witnessed growth in malicious activity. In 2009, India accounted for 15 percent of all malicious activity in the APJ region, an increase from 10 percent in 2008. Also, 19 percent of the attacks targeting India, originated in India itself in 2009. So, India is rising — both as the country of origin and a target for attacks! Wonderful!

Another one: after the US, Brazil and India are prominent among the countries where Web-based attacks originate. Okay, India was also one of the highest ranked countries for Zeus infections in 2009!

So, the key findiings of the threat landscape are as follows: The underground economy remains unaffected by the global economy. Hence, users are still plagued by Web-based attacks. Targeted attacks focus on enterprises — no surprise! Next, attack kits make it easier for novices to indulge in information theft. Finally, malicious activity takes place in emerging countries (read India, among them). I will deal with all of these a bit later.

Dhupar elaborated on some best practices as well that we all — enterprises and end users need to follow. These include:
* Defense-in-depth strategies
* Proactive policy based approach to security
* Test security, and update definitions and patches.
* Educate management on security.
* Emergency response procedures with backup and restore.

As for the way ahead, cybercriminals will continue to innovate to fuel the underground economy. New age Internet technologies and usage will encourage novel propagation vectors. The global scale and origin of attacks requires international co-operation.

Altera intros 28nm Stratix V FPGA family

Altera Corp. has introduced its next-generation 28nm Stratix V FPGA family, said to be the industry’s highest bandwidth FPGA. Offering up to 1.6 Tbps of serial switching capability, Stratix V FPGAs leverage a myriad of new technologies and a leading-edge 28nm process to reduce the cost and power of high-bandwidth applications.

Gangatharan Gopal, country sales manager and office manager for Altera India, announces the Stratix V FPGAs.

Manufactured on TSMC’s 28nm high-performance (HP) process, the Stratix V FPGA family provides up to 1.1 million logic elements (LEs), 53-Mbits embedded memory, 3,680 18×18 multipliers and integrated transceivers operating up to an industry-leading 28 Gbps.

Gangatharan Gopal, country sales manager and office manager for Altera India,  said that the FPGAs are suitable for devices used in next-generation high bandwidth systems. According to Altera, these offer 35 percent higher performance than alternative process options, as well as 30 percent lower total power versus other generations. These also enable the fastest and most power efficient transceivers.

He pointed out that Altera has been delivering innovations from the core to the I/O that provide higher system performance at lower cost and power.

Altera’s 28nm Stratix V FPGAs are said to have broken through the bandwidth barrier. The company is  also said to be dramatically improving the density and I/O performance of the FPGAs, and further strengthening their competitive position versus ASICs and ASSPs.

Altera’s devices incorporate the industry’s highest level of application-targeted hard intellectual property (IP) for increased system integration and performance without the cost and power penalty.

The FPGA family itself includes four variants that address a broad range of applications in the wireless/wireline communications, military, broadcast, computer and storage, test and medical markets. These variants include:

* Stratix V GT FPGA – Industry’s only FPGA with integrated 28-Gbps transceivers targeting 100G systems and beyond.
* Stratix V GX FPGA – Supports a wide range of applications with 600-Mbps to 12.5-Gbps transceivers.
* Stratix V GS FPGA – Optimized for high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) applications with 600-Mbps to 12.5-Gbps transceivers.
* Stratix V E FPGA – Highest density FPGA ideal for ASIC prototyping, emulation or high-performance computing applications.

India should focus on developing local electronics industry: ST

(L): Vivek Sharma, regional VP, Greater China & South Asia region -- India Operations and Director, India Desgin Center, STMicroelectronics and (R) Francois Guibert, executive VP and president Greater China & South Asia Region, STMicroelectronics.

I had the pleasure of meeting Francois Guibert, executive VP and president Greater China & South Asia Region, STMicroelectronics, along with Vivek Sharma, regional VP, Greater China & South Asia region — India Operations and Director, India Desgin Center, STMicroelectronics, during the recently held ISA Vision Summit in Bangalore. Naturally, it was great to meet up with them again, at ST’s sprawling facility in Greater Noida last week, where the company outlined its future vision.

On India, Guibert said: “India should focus on developing the local electronics industry. We also help start-ups in India. Further, we speak and discuss with governments on how to go about doing things.” He noted that a very strong percentage of ST’s libraries are developed in India.

Focusing on ST’s performance and vision for the future, Guibert pointed out that ST has been the world’s no. 5 semicon supplier for some time now. Its revenue was $8.51 billion in 2009. The semicon giant currently has key collaborations with Nokia, HP, IBM and Ericsson, respectively. In February 2009, the company had formed a JV with Ericsson Mobile Platforms to establish ST-Ericsson.

In terms of the company’s global set up, ST has 13 main production sites and advanced R&D centers in 10 countries.

Giving a breakup of ST’s FY09 revenue by region, Guibert said Apac accounted for 30 percent, followed by EMEA at 28 percent, Greater China at 25 percent, America at 12 percent and Japan at 5 percent, respectively.

As per its various groups, the ACCI (automotive, consumer, computer and telecom infrastructure) accounted for 38 percent, industrial and multisegment sector (IMS) 31 percent, wireless 30 percent and others 1 percent, respectively. “We have a solid product position via industry verticals,” Guibert added.

ST’s product strategy for the future includes:

* Maintain world leadership — especially in industrial, power conversion and MEMS.

* Consolidate leading position — especially in wireless ICs, digital consumer ICs, automotive ICs and computer peripheral ICs.

* Increase presence in MCUs and advanced analog, with leadership in selected segments.

* Gain market share on selected standard product families.

ST’s new products aim provide a better future for all. The focus is on:

a) Energy savings — New products addressing the issue of volatile and soaring oil prices, and contributing to reduction of global warming.

* Microelectronic devices in home appliances.

* Electric/hybrid cars

* PV technologies, including control and conversion.

b) Healthcare — New solutions improving the quality of life and addressing the problem of skyrocketing healthcare costs.

* Lab-on-chip for diagnosing influenza and other diseases.

* Insulin pumps, other microfluidics, etc.

* Remote monitoring of patients with chronic diseases.