From Design to Manufacturing: Tessolve Navigates Semiconductor Industry Challenges and Opportunities
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Srini Chinamilli Co-Founder & CEO Tessolve
How do you see Indian semiconductor industry evolving in next 5 years with the big semiconductor manufacturing push?
India has a large presence already in semiconductor design space. All the major semiconductor companies in the world have large design centers in India. The country employs approximately 20 percent of the world’s semiconductor design engineers. Indian government has announced about two years ago $10B incentives for semiconductor and display manufacturing. The new policy offers 50% of the project cost across all categories to pursue global players. In the next 5 years, there is a great opportunity for India to get a few fabs and Assembly and Test manufacturing units in place. This will unlock the much-needed manufacturing eco system in India. There are already announcements from Micron, Tata Group, CG Power and others. With all the design and manufacturing expertise, I foresee many semiconductor product companies emerging that will bring innovative products not only to markets in India but also worldwide.
You have started Tessolve 20 years before when there were not many semiconductor companies. What motivated you to do so and how is the journey so far?
After working in the Silicon Valley for about 15 years, I felt it was time to get started on pursuing my dream of starting a world class engineering focused company. I ran into Raja who had similar ideas and decided to join hands with him. In the early 2000s chip design activity was beginning to pick up In India but there was no actual Test and Productization happening in India. We wanted to fill that need through Tessolve. I moved back to India in 2004 from San Jose, California to set up the teams in India. We quickly realized that we were a bit too early in 2004 for Indian market. We had to retarget our efforts towards US and European customers. In the hindsight, that was the best thing that happened to us as we could develop a competent engineering team that can provide world class solutions. Over the last 20 years, we have grown to become the largest standalone semiconductor engineering solutions company in the world with over 3,000 dedicated professionals across 10 countries. We are fortunate to work with the leading companies in the world on cutting edge technologies. We are also proud of the fact that we contributed immensely to the semiconductor eco system by training over 5000 engineers and setting up state of the art lab infrastructure. Now India is ready to fully utilize our engineering offerings and we excited to be part of the drive to make India a powerhouse in the semiconductor industry.
With the increasing complexity of semiconductor designs, how is Tessolve addressing the challenges of scaling and integration to meet future technological demands?
We are fortunate to work with some of the best semiconductor companies in the world on their cutting-edge products. Over the course of time, we have developed a formal training and quality systems to incorporate the best practices from the hundreds of projects we worked on over the course of last 20 years. We also have dedicated teams under our “Center of Excellence” initiatives, looking into future evolving technologies and developing engineering methodologies to stay ahead of the curve. As we speak, we are working on advanced chips catering to Datacenters, Computing, AI, Automotive, Mobile and Industrial applications.
What are the main challenges in semiconductor development and manufacturing to meet the demands of rapid growth in AI, IoT, and 5G technologies?
Applications such as AI, Datacenter and 5G technologies are pushing the boundaries of semiconductor design, wafer process and packaging technologies. It is not uncommon to have close to 100 billion transistors per chip in CPU ad GPU applications. The chip design costs in the advanced process nodes has become very expensive. For example, the tape out costs for 5nm process node can be upwards of $20 Million. Emergence of Chiplet technologies has made packaging and Test flows very complex. Added complexity is the disruption of efficient supply chains due to Geopolitical tensions between China and the West. The above factors present many challenges but also opportunities for innovation.
What exciting applications does Tessolve’s semiconductor solutions have in industries like automotive, avionics, and data centers, considering semiconductors’ importance in various sectors?
From last 2-3 years, Tessolve is winning big in Data center and automotive chip applications. We have also invested a lot of time and money in these areas.
Two of the largest data center companies now work with us for their semiconductor engineering needs. On automotive, Tessolve is involved in design & development of car infotainment systems, Clusters, Service Oriented Gateways, Telematic Control Units, Functional safety critical systems like zonal & domain controllers for passenger cars as examples. Tessolve has their own system solution for automotive market – TERA (Tessolve Edge Real time Analytics) which is a powerful 5G/4G enabled AI Box oriented towards Service oriented Architecture for modern software defined vehicle market.
Tessolve has expertise in developing AUTOSAR based software for safety critical applications. In Avionics, Tessolve has extensive experience building In-flight infotainment systems, multimedia systems for aircrafts.
How is the semiconductor industry addressing cybersecurity concerns, particularly for chips used in critical infrastructure and IoT devices?
With increasing proliferation of IOT, connected devices are everywhere. From connected cameras, sensors, fitness devices, factory floor machines, medical devices, connected cars etc, these are used in our everyday life. Due to its pervasive nature and relatively weak security, IoT devices present an extremely valuable target for the attackers, and hence there is a strong need to protect these devices. Semiconductor industry is addressing this issue by incorporating a lot of security features at the chip level. Security features include Packet Encryption, Secure bootloader, Debug Port protection, Device identity Root of Trust, message authentication code and message replay protection to name a few.
Semiconductor supply chains are not immune from security threats either. Fabs and Package Assembly plants are especially vulnerable to security issues, and this can cause a huge disruption in manufacturing operations. In response to these vulnerabilities, SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International) developed and published its first two cybersecurity Standards, SEMI E187 (Specification for cybersecurity of Fab equipment) and SEMI E188(Specification for malware free equipment integration).
