I’m curious about the working of your consultancy wing. Do you train people and then outsource them?
Well, not exactly. We work like an outsourcing consultancy. Companies ask for people with certain domain expertise. We may have those people in-house or we recruit them and then assign them to the respective companies. The beauty of it is that since we are also in the same field, we have the luxury of holding them back in case the client doesn’t want them. We can also recruit extra people and keep them on the bench for future projects.
Is Bengaluru your only centre?
Our HQ is at Bengaluru. We have marketing centres at other places but all our R&D/design activities are centred in Bangalore.
What is your R&D team working on right now?
Currently, we have a couple of projects in the Data Acquisition platform and a few more in the Network Encryption area and some in thin mobile electronics (like the one I mentioned being few microns thick). There are a couple of industrial control system works also running currently. We are also working on a LED based Wall display for a client.
Could you elaborate on the evolutionary changes taking place in Industrial Control systems.
Generally, a trend we have seen is that the life of an industrial control system is much more than the life span of the major components that are being supported by its manufacturers. Obsoleteness has made many of our customers prefer FPGA over processor-based designs. Now a days, most of the FPGA vendors also support processor core within the FPGA. We have done many designs with processor core within the FPGA. Integrating too many logic devices onto a single device has also influenced their decision to prefer FPGA over individual parts.
With the smart phones and tablets being popular, some of our customers have shown marked interest in having the human machine interface on their smart phone / tablet, so that they can have the control and status check from wherever they are with the convenience of the touch screen gadget.
Are all of these client projects?
These are all projects awarded by our clients.
We do have a few products as well. In the field of Data Acquisition, we have a portable data acquisition system with a battery backup of 4-5 hours. It has a built-in capacity of 1 TB. Any application where data is continuously streamed, for e.g. GPS apps, where the system has to capture the data in real time. All you have to do is connect the GPS device to the portable data acquisition system and you will be receiving/storing the data continuously on the device. You can playback the data at your continence and analyse the same in your LAB. We also have an IP Encryption product that can be used for secure LAN data transfers.
