“India is one of ST’s most important centres for design and will play a major role as ST expands its offerings in healthcare,” says Michael Markowitz, director of technical media at ST. The In-check platform is now being used to develop other molecular tests, he adds.
Such diagnostics are made possible by what are called system-on-chips, or SoCs, where all the components of the traditional printed circuit boards are integrated on a single chip.
Freescale Semiconductors India is active in this space and has some “work in progress” which it is not ready to disclose yet. But its president and country manager Ganesh Guruswamy agrees that there’s plenty of innovation that Indian engineers can bring in the design while driving the cost down. “We can integrate more stuff, for instance if two-three chips are used for sensing, we could use one; or even add video processing,” he explains. It’s an emerging market and everybody is studying it, he says.
The Western world has started to look at medical applications as the next big opportunity as the phone and automotive markets are getting saturated and fast turning into commodity-like businesses. In India, these sectors are still driving the industry, but experts say it would be prudent to get started early on.
To the extent Indian engineers and semiconductor companies are already proving themselves to be the chip design houses of the world, medical applications, even if challenging, might just need priming the existing pump, some experts say.
According to a report jointly prepared by technology researcher International Data Corp. and ISA and released in April, the Indian design market was worth $6 billion in 2007 and is estimated to grow at 21.7% annually in the years to 2010, more than three times the global growth rate.
The intensity of design and testing work involved in chips associated with medical applications, for instance, makes such development a good fit for India. Custom design companies such as Cadence say biomedical devices also use a significant number of radio frequency, or RF, and analog-mixed signal components—both areas that are design-intensive.
In short, “chips should be designed to have high levels of sensing functionality and configurability,” says Poornima Mohanachandran, director of medical business development at TI India. “We see medical electronics as the next growth engine, particularly in a country like India,” she says.
Telemedicine, tele-diagnostics and other remote ways of taking medical help to rural areas are some of the uses that she thinks have vast scope here in India.
Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd’s Sanat Rao, marketing director for the company’s embedded market division, thinks medical imaging is another area that places India in a strong position.
From traditional applications such as ultrasound machines, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans to emerging ones such as home health monitoring, ECG machines with easy and common interfaces with computers and other devices, automated pathology equipment, India offers tremendous growth opportunities.
“We see several original equipment manufacturers developing products for the Indian market,” says Rao.