Arise Labs -- an imec, Wipro initiative! Does it fit the bill?

Belgium's imec Corp. has collaborated with India's Wipro Technologies to form the Arise Labs. Besides, imec has also opened its India office in Bangalore, according to Luc Van den hove, president and CEO, imec, at an India Semiconductor Association (ISA) CXO Conclave this evening.

On this same day, Cadence Design Systems (India), announced with imec Europractice IC Service, to develop a shuttle program for Cadence University Software Program members. Without a doubt, this news is of more importance, but Cadence, as well as imec, surprisingly, chose to underplay it, for now. Nevertheless!

On the Arise Labs event, Dr. Pradip Dutta, chairman, ISA raised an interesting query in his opening remarks: How do we bring the research quotient into the Indian semiconductor industry? He added that imec had most recently become an ISA member. imec has a huge focus on R&D as well.According to him, innovation to incubation to wealth creation was key!

Dr. Anurag Srivastava, CTO and senior VP, Wipro Global IT Business, said that emerging markets comprised 80 percent of the global population. Around 50 percent of the population in emerging markets was below 25 years of age. The rural population comprised 75 percent, and 64.7 percent users were those involved in high-tech adoption.

Overcoming challenges were essential to sustaining growth. In this regard, new service models and solutions were required to overcome challenges. As an example, remote health monitoring could be used to address this challenge.

There is now an opportunity for new service models. These could be in some of the following ways:
* Quality and reach of education through technology.
* Affordable healthcare through remote patient care and telemedicine.
* Address growing energy needs at affordable rates.

Dr. Srivastava laid out certain technologies that could be solutions for emerging markets. These are: intelligent machine to machine cyber convergence, natural user experience (NUE) technology, big data, web science and nano technologies. The ecosystem for emerging market solutions include the following: medical, securities, automotive and aerospace, energy, and HPC/cloud.

He announced the Arise -- Applied Research & Intelligent System Engineering, an R&D collaboration between imec and Wipro, that should try and take on all of the above mentioned challenges.

Coming back to the original headline of this post -- does it fit the bill? Perhaps, no! Here's why!

The Cadence-imec collaboration is likely to allow Indian universities with unprecedented access to advanced technologies, enabling students to work with state-of-the-art process and design techniques through to silicon tape-out. Also, as part of the agreement, Cadence will offer support to its University Software Program members by providing flows and methodologies, while imec will provide access to IC technologies down to 65nm, SPICE models, design rules, PDKs, and standard cell libraries.

Wonder, what kept them from even mentioning it!