Chinese fabless market set to double! And India’s?

I received a report from IHS iSuppli, which stated that China's fabless market is likely to double by 2015! Well done, China, and all kudos.

According to the report, there are 3Cs - China, Consumer and Convergence -- that China has been focusing on. However, there are three more Cs -- Culture, Content and Contribution -- that the report urges China to focus on.

The report states: "The companies must accommodate and adjust to the differing cultures of overseas customers. They must learn more about end-content sectors that drive the growth of technology markets. And China’s fabless firms must take advantage of government contributions to the industry, given that Beijing has instituted a range of policies designed to improve the fabless industry in areas including investments, tax rates and capital investments."

Having taken its own sweet time, the Chinese fabless industry is coming up well, and fast! However, what is the state of the fabless market in India?

If one goes back to Dec. 2009, Pravin Desale, VP and MD India operations, LSI Corp., while speaking at Mentor Graphics' U2U conference, had said that India has only two (2) fabless firms. If this number, or even a number below double digit is considered to be correct, then India surely has a lot of catching up to do!

Now, who are the leaders in the fabless semiconductor business globally? That's Qualcomm, Broadcom, even AMD (as per 2010 reports), MediaTek and Marvell. Four of these companies are based in the USA, leaving MediaTek as the only Asian (Taiwan) representative.

Do Indian companies have the necessary experience of designing complete chips from scratch? Perhaps, some may have. Can the Indian companies get the silicon manufactured easily (local manufacturing) and later, debugging it? Here comes the first major gray area! Do the Indian companies have easy access to tools? Perhaps, some, most of them, have that access today!

Now, guess what? The last para -- I had written about 7 years ago! ;)