Relevance
High-integration Electronic Embedded Systems find application in every conceivable walk of life. Consumer applications include subsystems used in cars, washing machines, PDAs, refrigerators, cell phones, lifts, ATMs, toys, music systems, TV, PoS Terminals, etc. Professional applications include communications, power, control, automation, medical and strategic areas. The key factors driving the growth in this domain are bandwidth, convergence and mobility.
There are many enterprises in our country working on Embedded Systems products in their own specific domains. Convergence, however, is driving most professional applications to standardized designs (e.g. SDR), with the basic know-how provided by a handful of overseas semiconductor manufacturers (e.g. Texas Instruments) along with their expensive proprietary application suites. R & D efforts in India are confined mainly to developing algorithms and software using the design kits and subsystems supplied by them. As a result, the know-why aspects as well as the nitty-gritty of the basic silicon functioning, is not available to our country, ploughing us even deeper into imported "black-box" hardware.
To address this issue, it is necessary to adopt a systematic two-pronged approach - the implementation of new-technology products using available hardware, concurrent with R & D efforts to develop and deploy our own technology for the particular hardware building blocks themselves (which form the strategic advantage and major value addition to the final product). Suggested examples of such building-block products are Contactless Smart Cards, high-power semiconductors, ASIC-IP such as microprocessors, DSPs, and analog/RF functions, MEMS transducers, etc. Having considerable product development experience using these blocks, C-DAC is well positioned to take up these assignments, which will demand consistent funding, manpower and further competence development.
Another necessity from our country's perspective is that for reliable deployment of the latest electronics technologies, especially for industrial, strategic and professional applications with high availability. This calls for a high level of system integration involving multiple disciplines in electronics state-of-art, with project and man management skills to offer turnkey solutions. Thus the efforts of R&D can be brought into the field only if field trials and deployment projects are undertaken, synergizing with other areas of electronics high-technology.
C-DAC's Capabilities and Expertise in Professional Electronics
C-DAC is currently working in the following areas of electronics:
C-DAC has acquired considerable expertise and experience in the design of VLSI Systems-on-Chip and ASIC IP development, for fast turnaround reusable designs. Pilot manufacturing capabilities exist for fabrication and assembly of complex PCBs using fine-geometry components and packages for prototyping and Transfer-of-Technology for complex-compact-cheap products. C-DAC also has the experience of handling field deployment projects in various aspects of human daily life touching health care, traffic control, manufacturing, communications, energy and many more. The R&D engineers have acquired system-level thinking and project management capabilities, giving them the confidence to take on new technology challenges with a commercial acumen. Specific expertise in the domains of FPGA, analog and RF system design, industrial and ergonomic packaging also exists in abundant measure. Proficiency for embedded software, RTOS, etc., communication protocols and stacks, energy saving, power switching, etc. is also available, as required for real-time systems. Besides, substantial knowledge is on hand at C-DAC in microprocessor, microcontroller and DSP hardware and software technologies, which form the key building blocks in many industrial and strategic technology areas. C-DAC has good application development and deployment experience in the various key enablers above, essential for developing Professional Electronic Embedded System products for any application vertical, and the ability to adapt to new requirements in totally new areas.
During the last many years, C-DAC has designed, deployed and transferred manufacturing technology for numerous large scale electronics systems besides small footprint VLSI & Embedded System Products for applications ranging from supercomputing, energy measurement, Personal Computing, medical appliances, power and process control, wireless broadband, sonar and acoustic detection, etc. for a range of verticals such as railways, consumer, steel, power generation, defense, health-care, police, broadcast media and many more. Transfers of Technology for large scale manufacturing have proved the commercial success of these products time and again.
Click here to know about Professional Electronics including Embedded & VLSI Products » |
