It sees a strong demand for intellectual property (IP) in areas such as semiconductors, System on Chip (SoC) and Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) design coming from Japan and the APAC region, which is emerging as the new growth engine of the world.
"Wipro owns a large portfolio of IPs in the semiconductor sector. Many large players in this sector are showing interest in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel. They are looking for ready IP in hardware and middleware. We see opportunity for growth in this region," says A Vasudevan, vice-president (VLSI), Wipro Technologies.
The semiconductor practice of the company is a part of Wipro Technologies' Telecom and Product Engineering (TPE) Group. The TPE Group accounts for a third of Wipro Technologies' revenue, which was Rs 3,249 crore (Rs 32.49 billion) during the second quarter of 2007-08.
Japan and APAC currently account for only 10 per cent of the TPE revenue, whereas the US accounts for 65 per cent and Europe 25 per cent.
"In the last two years, we have been witnessing growth in Japan and APAC. Clearly, this region will drive the growth for the company in the coming years as more companies start chip design services," he said.
Wipro recently formed a partnership with Oki, the wireless design arm of Oki Electric Industry (Japan), to tap opportunities in Japan. Wipro Technologies employs the largest number (2,100) of high-end chip designers, who work in the VLSI (very large-scale integration) segment in India.
The company engages nearly 80 customers and works with semiconductor companies across industry domains, including automotive electronics, mobile devices, consumer electronics, industrial automation, telecommunications, computing, storage, medical devices and avionics.
The semiconductor team is primarily based out of India (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi and Pune), Europe (Austria, France and Germany), Singapore, Japan (Yokohoma), China (Shanghai) and the US (Mountain View).
"Apart from these dedicated teams, based on clients' needs, we frequently have teams working from any of Wipro's 48 development centres across the world," he added.
"We have seen a steady growth in demand from clients for our services. Our team has grown at a rate of 30-35 per cent year-on-year in the past five years to reach the current team size of 2,100. We are offering high-end turnkey services in mixed signal and digital transmission for application specific integrated circuit (ASIC)and SoC development. We continue to see increasing demand from our customers for these services," said Vasudevan.
He said the company had been working on extending areas of expertise in the last few years.
"Analog mixed signal is becoming more integrated into larger SoC solutions and we have built and expanded this capability in the last few years. We are providing radio frequency IP to customers in wireless technology areas such as wireless local area network (WLAN) and Bluetooth," he stated.