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  Date: 17/05/2015

Semiconductor cos in India and China develop world-class SOC chips, but there is a diff

Chinese semiconductor company Actions Semiconductor is offering a 64-bit SoC S900 to design Android and Linux based gaming consoles, signage computers, notebook/personal computers. SoC S900 is also suggested for smart projectors, educational devices, robots, virtual reality devices and other electronics devices which need 64-bit computing performance.

S900 is made using 28 nm semiconductor process technology. The CPU powering S900 is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with TrustZone Security system and the Imagination PowerVR G6230 GPU. The S900 SoC supports display resolutions of 2560x1600@60fps LCD display with Ultra HD(4K) @30fps external HDMI TV display dual-screen output and all standard video decoding playback capabilities which includes HEVC 4K x 2K@30fps / H.264 FHD 1080P@60fps video decoder.

The ActDuino S900 open source reference design platform supports the Android 5.x, Linux and Ubuntu operating systems. The hardware reference design schematic and board layout diagram and other design resources required for designing board are provided by Action Semi.

Well this is the case with China, if you're wondering what about an Indian company offering SoC chip for today's market needs, well we have a company called Ineda Systems based in Hyderabad, Telangana, India, which has developed a SOC chip for Internet of things/wearable and also for general embedded systems market. An SOC chip called Dhanush, an industry-first Wearable SoC is made available in the year 2014 by Ineda. The advanced version of Dhanush targets wearable devices, whereas the Micro version of Dhanush targets microcontroller class of smart watches. To know more on the MIPS processor core powered Dhanush visit:
http://inedasystems.com/dhanush-wpu.html

Though the product by an Indian company is different from a Chinese company, the availability of complex SOC chips designed locally tells, the VLSI design engineers in India and China have all the capability to design chips for today's market.

But the difference between India and China is, China has World-class eco for electronics manufacturing including semiconductor chip fabrication facilities which can make chips at 28 nm nodes.

Whereas in India, it still hasn't got a semiconductor fab. India should only increase the effort to build nano technology material science talent in India along with so called "Electronics Engineers" who are more trained in soft-designing and using IC chips rather than making physical semiconductor devices.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
Header ad Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
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