Hyderabad : Chip Engines (I) Pvt Ltd (CEIPL), the wholly-owned subsidiary of the US-based Chip Engines Inc, has set up a design and development centre in Hyderabad. Chip Engines is the first and only Indian company developing a chip for IP over fibre technology. The company employs 45 engineers and plans to grow multifold in the next few months.For setting up the development centre, CEIPL has already received the first round of funding amounting to $10 million. Managing director Srinivas Kilambi said that a leading US-based VCF has pumped in the funds. He, however, did not disclose the name of VCF.
He said that CEIPL is planning to invest $25 million for both Indian and US operations and the design centre would be developed in three phases in a span of 18-24 months. The Indian centre would be responsible for the entire design of the chip using leading edge ASIC design tools. CEIPL plans to make this centre a world class design centre. For this, CEIPL has the latest Sun workstations and data storage capabilities from Network Technology Applicance with an investment around $2 million.
Mr Srinivas opines that there is a huge market for WAN equipment. With over $1 trillion invested in WAN equipment, retrofitting this equipment into new WAN infrastructure poses many challenges, he said.
Quoting from Merrill lynch, he said that the market for silicon use in communications equipment is likely to increase from $11.7 billion in 1999 to $24.6 billion by 2004.
The list of clientele includes potential customers like Cisco, Nortel, Lucent and Alcatel. The company is also planning to have joint ventures in the hardware field.
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