Cyient to design chips with improved power, M2M capabilities: official

Time of India

7 days ago

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Hyderabad-based engineering and technology solutions firm Cyient plans to design chips for automotive, data centre, medical equipment and aerospace and defence applications by leveraging 800-900 intellectual property rights (IPRs) that it owns, managing director Krishna Bodanapu said.The focus will be on scaling up capabilities in power and machine-to-machine communications targeting these industries, Bodanapu, who is also the company's vice-chairman, told ET. Most of Cyient 's IPRs are in technology such as protocols for communication, input-output and memory.Bodanapu said a company that can design and manufacture chips will have a huge opportunity at a time when the geopolitics of semiconductor supply chains are rebalancing with countries looking to de-risk the source of supply.Cyient demerged its existing semiconductor business in April into a wholly owned subsidiary, Cyient Semiconductors , to increase its focus on the sector.Cyient Semiconductors will work on scaling application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) turnkey solutions for global clients through a fabless model. Cyient Semiconductors has done a strategic tie up with global foundries company MIPS, to create specialised ASIC and application-specific standard product (ASSP) solutions using the MIPS Atlas processor portfolio.Demand for these products is skyrocketing. Arguing that the number of chips in various applications is growing exponentially, Bodanapu said a small room may host 200-300 chips, including the chip cards in the door, the lights and the phones. "An estimate is that a conference room will now have 2,000-3,000 chips in various formats," he said.A $100 million investment has been earmarked for Cyient Semiconductors over the next one to two years, Bodanapu said. "The opportunity is huge. We need to capitalise on that sooner rather than later. We are looking at various avenues for that investment," he said. Cyient's comfortable cash position is expected to support much of the investments, he said.Cyient, which subcontracts the manufacturing of 5 million chips to global foundries, has seen no disruption in chip production from international foundries despite the ongoing trade tiff between the US and China, Bodanapu said.The ongoing global disruption in critical mineral supplies, owing to China extending restrictions on those used in high-tech components, permanent magnets and batteries, has also not affected the semiconductor manufacturing sector so far, Bodanapu said. "We haven't seen a big supply chain constraint at least at the moment. Be it silicon, or the packaging materials, there's still enough supply in the world,' he said, adding: 'It hasn't impacted us."