Rajeev Mehtani: Technology First
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We spoke to Rajeev Mehtani, vice president and MD, NXP Semiconductors, India Pvt. Ltd to understand what all NXP does in India. He has almost 22 years of experience, all of it with NXP. He has worked in The Netherlands, USA, Singapore and now he has been working here in India in the last four years. Here is a tête à tête with Mehtani...
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Saturday, May 17, 2008:
Q. The first would be, what does NXP do in India?
A. We do in India couple of things. At NXP India, as part of the global R&D organization, we focus on semiconductor and software design for all of our BUs. Apart from R&D we have a sales organization which is also based out of India. On the R&D side we are close to 900 people doing leading edge work in 45nm design, advanced system related SW for Digital TVs, car entertainment and Cellular platforms. Our 900 people constitute about 12 per cent of the NXP R&D workforce.
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Q. Being in India for quit a while, how do you see the India Semiconductor market progressing?
A. There are two pieces to the India Semiconductor market. Firstly the design part which relates to the services sector as well as all of the global R&D units of Multinationals in India. There are close to 12,000 VLSI engineers in India and this part will grow at 15 to 20 per cent on a yearly basis. This is steady and we will not see many changes here as most of the growth already took place in the years of 2002 to 2007. For the future the big story for India will in my personal opinion come from the manufacturing and end-product design side. What I mean here is producing and designing TVs, STBs Cell phones, Applications on Smart Cards (RFID), power electronics, Electronic sub systems for Automotive applications, Multimedia convergent devices. We do not have much of this today but due to large demand a lot of the local ecosystem is coming up very strongly and we are supporting it.
Q. Q.What kind of growth you see in Indian design market?
A. If you look at the Indian IC design base its about 9,900 people so this figure gives you flavour of it. The expected growth rate at this point is about 20 per cent. And NXP will probably follow in the same track. On the design side we work with industry bodies, standardization organizations, operators, multiple service providers, banks and government organizations to create the awareness, define technology standards, technology choices and business models. We are also working with leading universities, in both technical and business areas to develop the talent pipeline for leading edge technologies/applications. R&D competency in end products has still a long way to go in India we want to partner with all of the major players in India in this area as we have years of exerpeince of doing this outside India.
Q. And what about manufacturing?
A.On the manufacturing side one of the key factors is local demand which is now there. Apart from that we need to get the government to focus on creating a manufacturing eco system which means reduction of component duties, setting up of manufacturing eco-systems and of course the much talked about Infrastructure problem. Our Chinese colleagues are very active in creating these as they realize that jobs will only be created if they get this right and they have done it. Sadly, we are far behind and I do not see a lot of movement from the side of the government or bureaucracy. We are talking about jobs and wealth creation and we can achieve a lot with a little.
Q. Returning to NXP, what kind of work culture do you have at NXP?
A. In NXP India we have a simple philosophy of providing the best work in the world to our engineers to keep them engaged technically. We also spend a great deal of time on growing our people technically as well as individually (as managers or individual contributors). This coupled with our focus on having good managers makes us tick. BTW we believe individuals who aspire to be managers must prove themselves technically sound before they move into this ladder. We have a clear philosophy of 'technology first' in our organization. We spend a great deal of our time on developing the internal talent pipeline.
-- Swapnil Bhartiya
Swapnil Bhartiya, EFYTIMES News Network
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