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Ex-TI geeks join hands to make DSP products

Fakir Chand in Bangalore

The slowdown in the US or Indian Silicon Valley has not dampened the spirits of hard core Indian geeks if one goes by the upbeat mood with which seven former Texas Instruments techies have rallied to float a start-up for rolling out digital signal processing products from India for global market.

Christening their unique venture on the lines of 'I Think Therefore I Am', Ittiam is the brainchild of Srini Rajam, the former managing director of the Bangalore-based TI India Ltd, who managed to wean away six top brains from TI to lead a new wave of global product companies in India.

With a cumulative experience of around 134 years in VLSI/DSP industry, marketing, and building a world-class organisation, Ittiam Systems' team had no dearth of funds from venture capitalists and potential investors to provide the seed capital for the asking even as many line

up before it to pump in more for the second round.

As a result, within a fortnight of setting up the company in the new year of the millennium, Global Technology Ventures, an investment arm of the Bangalore-based Sivan Securities, came rushing to provide $5 million to the seven Ittians to get cracking.

Valuation of the VC and equity share options of the seven promoters being proprietary, Rajam declined to give details of the controlling stake, nor the paid-up capital or even the authorised capital.

The two areas of focus will be to develop software on DSP and co-processor in a DSP System, and reference design of the system based on DSP and other components.

"The seed capital should take care of our investments in building the company for the next 12-18 months. As we go on to add more techies and set up our offices in the global arena, we will be going for the second round of funding next year," Rajam told rediff.com on Wednesday.

Singularly focussed on DSP-based systems in wireline, wireless, audio-speech, and video-imaging markets, Ittiam not only secured its first project for developing a wireless custom product from an US-based company within a month, but also received payment for it in dollars before releasing it.

Though Ittiam's first product is scheduled to be released next week, details such as value of the order and the customer's profile have not been disclosed on account of the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between the two firms.

"We are already getting strong response from global players in the field, who represent the semiconductor as well as the electronics OEMs, respectively."

DSP systems are one of the fastest growing segments as they are fuelled by the ever-increasing need for higher bandwidth, mobility, and convergence. They are the core of the new age devices from mobile phones, MP3 players, digital still cameras; palm tops to high-end disk drives, and motor control.

"We firmly believe that there is tremendous potential in this spectrum space. A global market of $9 billion is waiting to be tapped in DSP software and systems. Our road-map plan in the next 5 years is to leverage this market potential to its maximum and establish Ittiam as a world class DSP software and system company from India," Rajam claimed.

Setting up conservative projected revenue of $40 million by 2005 when the global DSP market is expected to be around $5 billion, the company will be expanding its modest presence in the US, the UK, and Japan for being close to its global customers.

"We are also ramping up our creative team of software professionals from the present 20 to 100 by this year-end and 200 by 2002."

Having opted to go beyond the traditional service model, Ittiam has committed itself to products, both

customized and off-the-shelf. "We have chosen to go beyond even software to venture into the whole

thing, i.e., from algorithm to the software development that brings the design to the actual reference

board which forms the base of the end equipment," Rajam asserted.

With expertise in developing new software products that require proven multi-domain competencies in the areas of wireless, wireline, audio and speech, and image and video applications, Ittiam will also go in for strategic partnership with other Indian DSP developers or companies to leverage its strengths.

As a registered software technology park in India, the company is also forming a business advisory board to guide its long-term business strategy besides its R&D efforts. Alcatel COO Krish Prabhu will head the Ittiam board. "We intend to grow by about 40 per cent annually while the DSP market worldwide is set to grow at 50 per cent on year-year basis," Rajam affirmed.

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