Compute, networking, storage to open up, EVs will be new smartphones: InSemi

InSemi Technology Services, based in Bangalore, India, creates technology solutions that enable businesses and consumers to integrate their physical and digital worlds, accelerate technology adoption and simplify everyday life.

Shreekanth Sampigethaya, co-founder and president, InSemitech, said the company started in 2013. We started off in areas such as training and IoT product development. In those days, our focus was largely in what is known as embedded services. Slowly, we started working with a large MNC, and in 2016, we ventured into the VLSI space, along with related software and embedded services for our semiconductor customers.

The company also started doing IP design, foundation IPs, etc. We recently tied up with Mentor, as there is a huge demand from our semiconductor customers to left shift the entire verification process. Emulation, by far, is the one of the most efficient ways of achieving that objective. We are the first player in the Indian market to offer emulation as a service to our customers. We have partnered with the top player and their best-selling solution is on our offering.

Embedded services growing
According to Sampigethaya, the embedded services market has been growing along with the overall growth in the engineering services market and it expected to double by 2025 as per market reports. We were working with a major global company on developing of an IoT board in telematics space. We are proud to announce that we delivered a full spec to solution and became a complete end-to-end player in the embedded services market.

Insemitech also merged Powersquare recently, which was founded by Pavan Pudipeddi. They bring more than two decades of product and solution building capabilities in power electronics, embedded devices, wireless charging, automotive electronics. We are focused on improving our proposition to provide truly end-to-end capabilities to our customers and the merger of PowerSquare with InsemiTech is a testimony to our commitment towards that goal. There are automotive companies who also want to get to the next level. PowerSquare has been an innovation partner to some Tier-1 global auto OEMs for several years.

IoT use cases limitless
On the IoT front, Sampigethaya said they are working with a lot of customers to help build solutions to track equipment, manage workforce more efficiently. The use-cases are just limitless! He said that as long as we are able to show them a positive RoI, the customers are more than happy to commission such projects. There is lot of re-use of technology and expertise in the IoT segment. The more customers that we work with, the more cost efficient it becomes over time. We are at a stage where were can turn around projects in 6 months, as against what a new entrant might take years to build and fine-tune.

Automotives down, but up, soon!
In automotives, the company understands that things are currently down. But, the innovation never really stops for these automotive companies! The R&D work that is happening today will hit the market in a few years. We don’t think that R&D will come to a halt, irrespective of the sales decline. We are seeing exactly that same thing playing out after a short break, when things were extremely uncertain a few weeks back. We are also looking at the oil prices that have drastically come down, and will help the auto industry in the short term.

However, the new environmental policies will drive this industry in the mid- to long-term. We believe that a significant portion of the market will move to EVs by 2030. We are well positioned to take advantage because of the capabilities that we have acquired recently due to the PowerSquare merger. The Prime Minister also wants that all of the gasoline cars should be gone by 2030. We will be contributing towards that objective in our own capacity.

Sampigethaya added that in automotives, the situation is uncertain right now, There are big, long lists of the supply chains, which will re-shape in the years to come, because of the coronavirus and the move from gasoline to EVs. There will also be a drastic change in the people’s thought process and the after-market categories, which will bring new accessories players.

EVs will become the new smartphones, with a huge after-market ecosystem of not just hardware, but potentially, software as well. They will look for partners who are nimble and can deal with complexities and solution building with a tight time frame. We specialize in taking the consumer experience to the next level and have already proven capabilities. In China, all the public transportation is electric. They already have large EV players. However, the shift in India might be faster, as compared to China.

Manufacturing expertise
Regarding manufacturing, Sampigethaya added that with their product development expertise spanning industries such as consumer, industrial, health/fitness and automotive, we see a clear opportunity to offer concept to mass production services for our clients. Given the global political uncertainties and India’s willingness to emerge as a manufacturing hub, we are getting a lot of opportunities to support both established clients and new age startups with their hardware mass production strategies.

We have etched strong strategic partnerships with the India-based EMS companies to complement our existing relationships with the semiconductor and distribution ecosystems to enable us to be cost competitive with China. This is an area of significant growth for us over the next few years.

Semiconductor shift likely
Sampigethaya added that in the semiconductor world, the bulk of our business today comes from the SoCs segment. We do pretty much everything, from RTL to GDS. We work on the implementation of SoCs. We also do packaging and then getting it manufactured in some specific cases. We have also seen some early indications that the South Korean and Japanese companies semiconductor companies are planning a gradual shift to India because of the latest international developments.

The company has recently partnered with a Malaysian company, which also has presence in Singapore and Japan. The two were able to leverage the combined scale, customer access and cultural diversity to services multiple customers, which would have not be possible without collaboration.

He is convinced that something big will happen in the Indian semiconductor industry. It is a great opportunity for us to grow. Unlike in the past, where there were some false starts of semiconductor players and other ecosystems players regarding the move to India, we genuinely believe that given the current global environment and the government commitment in reforming land and labor reforms, will ensure that the semiconductor industry will find India to be a lucrative place, not just in terms of cost advantage, but also because of the other aspects like access to market, favorable taxation, large semiconductor design ecosystem, etc.

The likes of TSMC will continue to grow as more and more de-risking will happen in terms of design and manufacturing expertise. We are all working from home, and if you go by what the industry experts are saying in term of the permanent changes, it will only increase the demand for compute and storage.

Segments opening up
According to Sampigethaya, the first segment that will open up in terms of market will be the compute and networking equipment. We see a definite build-up of demand for computers and various other devices, which have become essential commodities. The households, which didn’t have a personal computer earlier, and used to rely on their office laptops, will start buying computers. The demand for storage, connected storage, high-performance computing, accelerators customised and fined tuned for ML models, FPGAs, etc., are all set to see exponential growth in coming years.

One of the segments that might get impacted in the short term is the automotive semiconductor space. However, we genuinely believe that it’s just a blip and the long-term story is very exciting.

There will be lot more newer players in the new segments of the semiconductor market, and lot more new companies, and work coming our way, making FPGAs and ASIC solutions for data-centre and edge computing, and AI use cases. 5G will also see a rise. Some companies like Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, might see good growth because of the international situation, and also because of the adoption of 5G by the operators.

In the short term, Sampigethaya believes that players like Qualcomm might see some challenges as the phone upgrades will be slower, but eventually, when 5G gathers full steam, they will recoup all the lost business in those years. Google, Amazon, and Facebook will make a lot more chips. Some other large-scale companies will also start making workload-specific chips for their own special needs. That’s the big way that will lift the semiconductor industry for times to come.