Friday, March 29, 2024

“We Were Ranked Number 1 Worldwide In Chip Design”

product engineering, chip design, 3d video conference,eInfoChips is a product engineering services company headquartered in Ahmedabad, with subsidiaries in eight other countries including the US. Here is an exclusive interview of the founder CEO, Pratul Shroff.

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Q. Where are your R&D design centers located?
A. We have a small design center in USA, but the rest is in India. In India we have a major design center in Ahmadabad, Pune, and Chennai. And we are just about to start one in Bengaluru.

Q. What are the total number of employees that you have?
A. Currently we are about 800 professionals and are looking to hire about 200 more professionals by the next quarter.

Q. What would be the average experience of your design engineers?
A. 50 per cent of our team has more than 5 years of experience with us.

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Q. Do you recruit freshers?
A. We do recruit freshers, and we also manage to retain a substantial number of them. So we have one of the best attrition rates in the industries. The reason is that the work we have is very challenging which is what typically engineers really enjoy. For instance, I mentioned 3D video conferencing. Obviously being able to work on cutting edge things like that is very very attractive.

Q. What are the skill sets that you look for while recruiting?
A. When we hire freshers we typically hire Bachelors of Engineering from Electronics and Communications Stream, Computer Science Engineering, and Information Technology engineering.

With regards to experienced people, we look for people who have experience with video codecs and people with experience with ARM and DSP processors.

On the VLSI side we are always looking for good engineers who have good experience in verification and chip layout side. For every design engineer, we need 2 verification engineers to do verification as they really need to break the design in every possible way.

Q. What are your future plans?
A. Hiring 200 people is going to be a very aggressive challenge. We have a consistent growth rate of 40 per cent year on year except for when the recession hit. We persistently aim to grow by 40-50 per cent year on year, so our team size also has to increase by a similar amount.

Q. How do you compete with other design companies?
A. Firstly, even though we are small, when you look at the absolute size, the reason we are small is that we are focused on product engineering in embedded and hardware areas unlike most other companies.

Secondly, my background is in semiconductor industry and the focus we bring on quality and the engineering expertise is unlike any other company.

Thirdly, nobody focuses on partnerships like we do, like working with the next-gen processors I told earlier, so the benefit to the customer is much higher in terms of value addition. Most of our customers are very big companies and they are very satisfied with us.

Q. Could you name a few of your companies?
A. Toshiba, TI, Cisco, Freescale and Huwaei.

Q. What is the significance of the Indian market for you?
A. I believe there are major drivers which will bring major product development to India.

Firstly, India is a huge market by itself, and every market requires localisation for its local needs and therefore a lot of companies have put up operations here for eastern half of the world. So in the coming decade product engineering will happen in India in a big way.

Secondly, people have cut across from the Indian side and they still have to be competitive. So a lot of companies have setup up captive design centers in India because they see the talent in India and they see the scalability in India. So I think we have a very promising future for the coming decade.

Q. What are the percentage of exports of your company?
A. We started as a 100 per cent export oriented company, and now almost 99 per cent of our sales are exports.

Q. Isn’t the Indian market expanding?
A. Bengaluru by itself is a huge market. All the captive centers for TI, CISCO, Intel, everybody is here. That’s why we are moving in to Bengaluru and setting up a center here.

Q. Is eInfoChips planning to release a branded product?
A. I think we are going to be focused on the services business, we will develop a lot of IP, and help our customers to produce products. We will not brand our own products though.


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