Fabless Chip Design To Be The Fulcrum

The state’s IT minister Dr Debesh Das believes, that if a fabless chip designing centre comes up in the state it will be attract the biggest names in the IT industry to the state including the hardware sector – top-notch electronic systems companies – to create a robust chip fabrication and assembly industry, the backbone of a really strong IT industry. Based on an interview with him I try to outline below his dreams and what he and the state government are trying to achieve in the IT space:

Once a classmate of mine and now an international scholar of humungous repute, Prof Anthony P. D’Costa, Professor of Comparative International Development and the South Asian and International Studies Programs at the University of Washington and a world-renowned specialist on the political economy of Indian and Asian industrial development, never tires of arguing in both private and public forums that any meaningful development of the IT industry in India must necessarily include development of the hardware industry as well, and specifically development of the chip design and fabrication industry. He thinks that the Indian software industry, despite all its much-touted successes, is still very much at the lower end of the IT food chain and can go up only if there is a vibrant chip designing and fabrication industry in India around which the domestic software firms can develop and climb up the value pyramid. He is a globally acknowledged expert in the field and he should know. Interested readers can judge for themselves at http://www.tacoma.washington.edu/ias/about/faculty_detail.cfm?employee_id=104.

Progressing at break-neck speed

The West Bengal state government under the ruling Left Front, (in power for a record 30 years), has always claimed that it is following an alternative economic path. While it has already shown enough results to prove that, one of the pillars of this alternative path is building a sound industrial base in a planned manner. Although the media never tires of mentioning how the Left Front government woke up late to information technology, the state is now progressing at a break-neck galloping speed not only in the planned growth of the IT industry in the state but also in e-governance and IT education.

“If last year (2005-06) revenue growth in our STPIs was 27%, this year (2006-07) it is 44% and our target is to hit 50%,” points out Professor Debesh Das, minister in charge, information technology, Government of West Bengal. In e-governance, the state has already notched up many firsts – it’s the first state to have its budget-making process fully computerized, it is the first state off the block in signing Master Service Agreements with private sector Service Centre Agencies for Common Service Centres under the NeGP, almost all key state government departments are computerized and ready to provide G2C services online and in real time, the Haldia Dock System in the state is the first and so far only major port system in the country that has all its functional departments computerized and integrated into a single enterprise-wide system, and so on.

In IT education too, the state has again notched up a first as “500 full time IT teachers are going to be appointed in the state’s schools,” says Prof Das proudly, adding “I don’t think any other state has done that yet – everywhere IT teachers are part-time outsiders, usually lent out by IT vendors.” Already, nearly 50% of the state’s higher secondary schools have made computer training compulsory and this number is expected to go up rapidly to cover all 12,000 secondary schools in the state within the next couple of years “now that initial hiccups have been sorted out and a PPP model has been put in place dividing the state into several zones and handing over each zone to a private player whose job would be to introduce computer training in as many schools as possible within that zone”, he says. To facilitate quick implementation of the plan, the school education department of the state government has been made the nodal agency for school computerization replacing the IT department – reflecting the need to decentralize in the face of rapid and unmanageable expansion of ICT usage in every sphere of life in the state.

Fabless chip design: Planning the base

But when it comes to planning for an explosive growth in the state’s IT industry, Prof Das’s and the state government’s vision is nothing short of breath taking. The state is surely and steadily moving towards creating just the kind of base that Prof D’Costa so vehemently prescribes – build up a hardware industry around chip designing and fabrication. And, who could be better equipped than Prof Das to lead this major step forward, himself being an international scholar of repute being a doctorate and a reputed academician in the field specializing in the design and testing of very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits, known popularly as chips?

His dream is to build what has already been christened as India Design Centre which will provide facilities for fabless chip designing and testing, Prof Das’s area of specialization. To come up within the next few months in Kolkata’s own silicon valley – Salt Lake Sector V, the design centre, once it takes off, will not only provide hundreds of software engineers an opportunity to engage in high-end chip design work but will also create the base for attracting strong electronic system companies who in turn will create a robust chip fabrication and assembly industry.

Prof D’Costa will surely agree – this is no doubt the right way to leverage India’s huge software talent to pull in the chip fabricators – the real backbone of the IT industry. To the uninitiated, fabless chip designing needs some introduction. Suhas Patil, who two decades ago founded the concept as well as the chip designing firm Cirrus Logic, says “fabless chip design is driven by the software that goes into the chip rather than the hardware. In a fabless environment, the chipmaker creates software rather than the hardware on which algorithms are loaded. It permits software engineers, as against specialised chip designers, to design next generation processors for electronic products. The major advantage of fabless chip design is that bugs can be fixed quickly and cheaply as it only involves reconfiguration of software.” Fabless chips are multipurpose and can help chip fabricators such as IBM or Intel to cut down their chip development costs immensely.

‘Marxists do not dream, they plan’

This is where the Marxist Debesh Das comes through. “Marxists do not dream, they plan,” he says. To Prof Das, as the state’s IT minister, the immediate priority is to “build up the talent pool and step up the growth rate of the IT industry.” But as a professional computer scientist, he knows what the IT industry is really all about – chip fabrication and design. So his dream is a very realistic one – build up a fabless chip design centre leveraging the immense pool of high quality software engineers we have in this country, and, lo and behold! What you create is a magnet that will pull in the biggest names in the IT business – IBM, Intel, AMD, TI, Motorola, Samsung – you name it, you have it! And, of course, in due course, their chip fabrication facilities as well! Market forces will ensure that but not before getting a little help from sound political economy – the right kind of Marxist planning that will ensure that market forces work just the way you want them to.

The key to this planning is the stress on fabless chip design. The chip fabrication industry is non-existent in India and will remain so unless “we can create cost advantages for them to shift base to India,” Prof Das points out. And fabless chip design holds the key to opening the door to the topmost global IT companies, the chipmakers of the world.

Meanwhile, you have guessed right – the state will soon fine tune it’s IT policy or “announce a separate hardware policy,” Prof Das says to reflect the priority that the state government is attaching to the development of the chip design and hardware industry in the state. In the realm of policy-making too, Prof Das and the state government has notched up a first of sorts – it has already begun to give the IT industry in the state a training subsidy.

Taking IT to the masses

As a Marxist, people too are close to his heart. While developing the IT industry is top priority, of equal priority is taking IT to the masses. He has seen too many die and suffer due to lack of timely and relevant information, people harassed out of their wits standing in queues or running after Babus through the corridors of power, poor people losing days of income trying to get one single piece of government paper – a land record, or a permit or a birth certificate or what have you. So, his other big dream is to end it all – through empowerment, by bridging the digital divide and by putting the masses, as he says “on the information highway”. And, again we find Prof Das hitting the nail on the head – open source computing holds the key to rapid expansion of e-governance. So what have you? “We are setting up an Open Source Institute mainly for training in open source computing as well as research and development,” he points out only to highlight in his trademark unassuming way yet another pioneering move by the state government. As for the usual much-touted e-governance initiatives of various states, he is least bothered: “because of rapid expansion and to tackle manageability issues e-governance initiatives have been decentralized on a departmental basis in our state and I don’t even know what initiatives each department is taking because there are far too many initiatives and the spread of e-governance in this state is far too rapid and extensive for any one man to reel off facts about what is happening in e-governance space here,” he says equally humbly. He knows that the only constraint to further expansion of e-governance in this state is availability of people trained in open source computing, so he is addressing that issue knowing full well that the rest will follow automatically and the state will surely succeed in bridging the digital divide and take IT to the masses.

Creating talent pool biggest challenge

His biggest challenge is, of course, developing industry ready professionals because he says “IT industry growth rate is directly determined by the availability of industry-ready talent,” although he agrees that finding cheap and adequate land for the IT industry is “definitely a constraint as most land here is fertile and, therefore, costly,” only to point out that land related problems should get sorted out in a few months once the state develops a “land bank” that is now being prepared through careful study of land use patterns.

The challenge of creating an industry-ready talent pool is, however, being addressed by encouraging greater industry-academia collaboration through the concept of finishing schools for final year engineering students in the state. “More than Rs 5 crore has been allocated only for such schools,” Prof Das explains. A significant part of the Rs 20 crore annual allocation for the state’s IT department will also be spent on training, he adds.

Towards winning the IT race

Humble and unassuming, Prof Das, 47, is a brilliant scholar who despite gaining admission to medical college as well chose to take up computer science. To get an idea of his academic achievements, a quick trip to his website www.debeshdas.net is a must. Though reluctant to admit that he has made any difference to the IT ministry now that he has taken charge after Mr Manabendra Mukherjee’s five-year reign as the state’s IT minister – a period which the state’s IT industry in almost one voice has acclaimed as a “very successful” stint – he does make a big difference. He is just the right man to develop the state’s fabless chip designing industry as he is a specialist in that very field. While the replacement of Manab Babu did come as a surprise to many IT watchers in the state due to his and his team’s excellent track record, it is the state government’s conscious decision to develop the fabless chip designing industry that led to the appointment of Prof Das, say Left Front insiders. Never to admit any personal glory, the man himself merely says “perhaps the party and the government want to implement some conscious plan,” when asked what led to his appointment.

If Prof Das’s dreams come true, Kolkata and West Bengal may well emerge as the real Silicon Valley of India – the country’s chip designing and fabrication hub – the centre of gravity and the real backbone of the country’s IT industry. Under his able leadership, it appears that West Bengal, like the proverbial tortoise, may well win hands down the IT race among states in the country despite appearing to be a late starter and slow mover! Give or take a couple of years and the results will surely show!

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