Instead of designing products around fixed components and static requirements, TVS Electronics is moving towards adaptable platforms, field-driven engineering and AI-assisted decision-making to handle India’s evolving semiconductor and electronics ecosystem.
TVS Electronics is changing the way its research and development (R&D) organisation approaches product development. The shift is being driven not by a single technology, but by a combination of semiconductor supply uncertainty, rising component costs, demanding field conditions, shorter product cycles, and the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in engineering.
In an exclusive interaction with EFY, Vijaykumar Ramalingam, vice president of engineering at TVS Electronics, revealed how the company is responding by making adaptability a central part of its engineering strategy. TVSE’s R&D covers point-of-sale computing systems, printers, scanners and biometric products used across retail, banking, government, manufacturing and logistics. These products bring electronics, firmware, software, mechanical engineering, compliance and manufacturing into one system, while requiring high reliability and continuous operation.
The challenge is that the underlying ecosystem keeps changing. A processor selected for a product can suddenly become unavailable, while RAM, SSDs, and other components face price and supply fluctuations. Instead of treating such events as procurement problems alone, R&D has to redesign products around them, validate alternatives, and still meet customer commitments. This is pushing the company towards scalable product architectures that can accommodate changing processors, operating systems, and technologies. The company typically has only six to nine months to bring a new product to market, making such flexibility critical.
India has strong chip-design capabilities, but gaps remain in semiconductor manufacturing and its supporting ecosystem. The company is working with Indian partners and startups to evaluate locally developed chips and MCUs. AI is also being used for data retrieval, simulation, design, testing and repetitive tasks, with it seeing 20 per cent improvement in software work and 30–40per cent faster engineering decision-making; some simulations could shrink from about a week to an hour.
But the company is not using AI to replace engineers. Manufacturing constraints, tolerances, material behaviour and real-world conditions still require human judgement. Instead, it wants engineers to develop system-level expertise across electronics, mechanical, firmware and software.The company is also bringing field experience back into R&D. Data from IoT-enabled products and its service network helps identify issues such as dust and humidity, with it working towards a continuous loop between field performance and product development.
Ramalingam supports this through cross-functional teams spanning engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing and service. He encourages engineers to challenge decisions and propose ideas without initially worrying about feasibility, cost or failure. Promising concepts move to proofs of concept, while failures are captured as organisational learning. He also identifies technically motivated engineers to champion emerging technologies while balancing immediate product needs with longer-term R&D. The resulting model focuses on continuous product adaptability to new chips, environments, customer needs and technologiesmwith AI accelerating the process while engineering judgement remains central.
Stay tuned for the full conversation for a deeper look at TVS Electronics’ R&D strategy, innovation process, and AI-led engineering transformation.
