Semiconductor Companies in Chennai

I am trying to put together a list of companies working on semiconductor space in and around Indian cities. I thought I’ll start with Chennai and also attempted to categorize them based on whether they offer products or services.

Product Companies:

 Xambala (www.xambala.com)
  Their website claims to provide the industry’s first message stream processing hardware solution. I know of their founders and I believe its mostly the same team that ran the now-dead RealChip. They seem to be well funded by some of the industry’s best known VC fund houses.

Texas Instruments (www.ti.com)
   TI acquired most of the engineers with DSP expertise from Nulife semiconductors in Chennai when Nulife was folding down. I know a lot of companies were trying to recruit these talented engineers and finally TI hired a whole bunch of them.

I think TI wanted to strategically locate itself close to the upcoming manufacturing facilities of Nokia and Motorola in Chennai. TI, Chennai is small and how commited they are to this facility remains to be seen.

Scolis Technologies (http://www.scolistech.com/index.html)
   Scolis provides Contactless Smartcards and is founded by a couple of veterans from SCM Microsystems, Chennai. I believe one of these founders (Balu) came to SCM through the acquisition of Shuttle Technologies in Pondicherry and the other from WIPRO. I have heard very high opinions about the founders, especially Balu who is also the engineering manager. They just started a few months back, so its a real start-up.

Atheros Communications (www.atheros.com)
    Atheros is into wireless communication products. It is a very good company with a strong leadership.

Cypress Semiconductors (www.cypress.com)
    I have very little information about Cypress in Chennai but I know they are trying to set up an office, if not already.

Services Companies

L&T Infotech
   Most of the VLSI team in L&T Infotech came through the acquisition of GDA Technologies, a semiconductor services and IP provider based out of San Jose, CA. Their IP portfolio comprises of standard interconnects like Hypertransport and other interconnect technologies. They are also reseller parters with Rambus.

HCL Technologies
   Classic services company. You most likely won’t know what you will be working on until you start working.

There may be other companies working on VLSI in Chennai that I am not aware of. If you happen to know, please feel free to post on these pages.

I will gather information on Hyderabad, Noida in the coming days. I will update on Bangalore later as most companies are located there anyway.