ISA Vision Summit 2010: Saankhya Labs, Cosmic Circuits are Indian start-ups to watch at Technovation 2010!

It was an evening to celebrate for home grown Indian technology and product companies, as well as Indian start-ups in semiconductor product development at the India Semiconductor Association's (ISA) Vision Summit 2010. This year's ISA Technovation Awards 2010 celebrated some of the best Indian start-ups to watch, as well as some of the best products developed by home-grown Indian companies.

'Technovation 2010 - Celebrating Excellence in Electronics' were constituted with an aim to recognize role models and excellence in not just the semiconductor, but also the greater electronics ecosystem – covering the entire electronics value chain.

Technovation 2010 acknowledged, recognised and honoured India’s best individual contributors and companies and provide them with a platform to showcase their achievements and product successes.

While Saankhya Labs, Cosmic Circuits emerged as the Indian start-ups to watch at Technovation 2010, Dr. Kumar N Sivarajan, Co-founder and CTO, Tejas Networks, was declared the ISA UKTI TechnoVisionary for 2010 for his vast contribution vastly to the design, architecture and development of a slew of next-gen SDH SONET and carrier Ethernet products.

Here are the winners. In case you wish to contact any one from this list, do get in touch with the ISA or with me.

ISA TechnoMentor Award 2010: Dr. Shanti Pavan - Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
He’s a professor in the field of analog/mixed signal design. Dr. Shanti Pavan has done his MS & Ph.D from Columbia University, New York, USA. He is a well known authority and has mentored several students in the field of analog/mixed signal design.

ISA TechnoMentor Award 2010: Dr. Sreeram Vasanthi - Websol Energy System Ltd
She is the Director – Technical & Marketing. Mrs. Vasanthi is a alumnus of IIT Bombay & IIT Delhi and has 15 years of experience in photovoltaic industry. She has been a role-model & an inspiration for many within her organization. Through her mentoring & leadership, she led her organization to significantly improve the efficiency of the solar cells produced by her company.

ISA UKTI TechnoVisionary Award 2010: Dr. Kumar N Sivarajan, Co-founder and CTO, Tejas Networks
In the area of optical networking, over the last nine years Kumar has contributed vastly to the design, architecture and development of a slew of Next-Gen SDH SONET and Carrier Ethernet products that allow telecom carriers to integrate voice, data and intelligent network management on a single network. Kumar was instrumental in Tejas being one of the first companies in the world to have developed and deployed standards compliant Carrier Ethernet-over-SDH SONET.

ISA Start-up to Watch -- Winner: Saankhya Labs
Saankhya Labs is a fabless semiconductor startup based in Bangalore. Saankhya has developed world’s first Multi-standard TV demodulation technology targeted for Digital TV and PC TV Tuner applications. Saankhya’s unique product enables for the first time a truly universal TV demodulator, capable of demodulating all digital and analog TV signals on a single chip.

ISA Start-up to Watch -- Honourable Mention: Cosmic Circuits
Cosmic Circuits is a leading provider of differentiated Analog and Mixed-Signal silicon IP for integration on to System-on-Chips. With a single-minded focus on Analog, and a large team of expert analog designers, Cosmic Circuits offers quality analog Hard-IP solutions for integration into nanometer silicon process nodes. The company has seen a growth rate of 40 percent to 45 percent for the past few years and despite the economic slowdown of last year it had positive growth.

Innovative products that won!
Now, we come to India’s best individual contributors and companies who used the ISA Technovation 2010 as a platform to showcase their achievements and product successes. Here are the winners in the various product categories.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Consumer -- Winner: VuNow - Internet TV Platform : Verismo Networks Pvt. Ltd
Verismo Internet TV device is a high definition set-top box bringing internet video over any IP network to your television. The set-top connects to the Internet using a broadband connection and is able to stream content from various content sources such as linear TV channels, free websites like youtube, premium on-demand Hollywood movies. A multi-format, multi-protocol player along with a video search engine enables access to a very broad range of content found on the Internet.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Consumer -- Honourable Mention: Quillpad - Tachyon Technologies
Quillpad is an artificial intelligence based solution for intuitive (completely phonetic) Indian language input. It can be used on PCs as well as mobile phones. On mobile phone Quillpad can be used for SMS communication in Indian Languages. Quillpad is accurate and ease to use. Quillpad technology is bundled onto LG phones. It will also soon be available for download by MTNL and Idea Cellular customers. It is also available for end users to directly download from quillpadmobile.com.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Energy -- Winner: Solid Multilight (Solar LED Lantern) - Gautam Polymers
Solid Multilantern is a well designed Solar LED Lantern that maps itself to the way a rural user requires a light. It can be used in many forms - as a diffused general surround light, focused study / task light, handheld torch, handheld downward lantern, roof mounting light and can be used to charge mobile phones.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Energy -- Honourable Mention: Solar powered "Egg lamp" - Kotak URJA Pvt. Ltd
“Egg Lamp” is a uniquely conceived and designed multi utility solar lamp that will soon be introduced in the market. It provides uninterrupted light through either CFL or LED lamp, for a period of six hours daily, with standby back up of additional 10 hours. This product is a multi utility lamp, helping to meet the rural energy requirements for light (surrounding, reading, ceiling) & portable torch. Egg lamp can be used for charging mobile phones and has a unique feature of FM radio with built-in antenna and speakers.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Health care -- Winner: "Mozzquit" Mosquito Trap - Leowin Solutions (P) Ltd
“Mozzquit” is an apparatus for attracting, trapping, and killing the harmful mosquitoes. It mimics the human body in attracting mosquitoes and eradicating them. It does not use any harmful chemicals like the existing products in the market to achieve its purpose.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Health care -- Honourable Mention: USB Power 3 lead ECG Monitor - Infotech Enterprises Ltd
Infotech USB-ECG is the “world’s first USB powered 3 lead compact ECG monitor” which resembles a pen-drive, offering cheap and effective cardiac diagnostics. This particular system works with the power supplied by the USB port. Main features of this system are 3-lead ECG Monitoring and Heart Rate Measurement. The ECG data can also be transmitted to an expert in the cardiology room using ZigBee in case of emergency. This product is affordable, compact, easy to use and portable.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Security -- Honourable Mention: Automatic License Plate Recognition System - Kritikal Solutions Pvt Ltd
KritiKal’s vision based automatic license plate recognition system is a non intrusive & automated image processing based solution. It identifies and authenticates vehicles by capturing and recognizing vehicle’s number plate, transmits real-time stamp of entry / exit of the vehicle to the database. The solution is highly applicable for Access Control (Parking lot management, restricting vehicle accessing sensitive/high security establishments/zones etc), security and surveillance (policing), and traffic management. The solution has been fine tuned to meet Indian conditions hence provides accurate results with high reliability.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Telecom -- Winner: ELAN - Tejas Networks Ltd
Tejas ELAN innovations aid Triple Play services by supporting protected service rings that optimize bandwidth and by natively supporting multicast applications like IPTV. To support time-critical services such as VoIP and Circuit Emulation, the operators can use Tejas platform to create Point-to-Point CBR (Constant Bit Rate) Services over Traffic Engineered Ethernet trunks, using Tejas’ PBB-TE implementations. Moreover, the same Tejas equipment can simultaneously provide various services, giving the operator considerable flexibility to offer differentiated services in a “pay-as-you-grow” fashion.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Other category -- Winner: Pre Shower - 32 Channel Silicon Strip detector for CERN, Geneva - Bharat Electronics Ltd
BEL supplies 32-channel Silicon Strip Detectors to CERN Geneva, which are used to detect subatomic particles generated when high energy particle beams collide. These detectors have unique features such as very low leakage currents and very high breakdown voltages in spite of large area. The uniformity over large area, fast response time, high detection efficiency, compactness, and superior performance than traditional detectors. The technology has a huge potential in the field of radiation detection, nuclear instrumentation, medical and other commercial applications.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Other category -- Winner: Remote controlled system for power tillers - Mangalore Robotronics Technologies
Remote Controlled System for Power Tillers was basically developed for making the works of farming easier and more comfortable. This system is an electronics combined mechanical gadget which goes as an attachment for power tillers.Presently, the operator of a power tiller has to walk continuously along with the machine to control its direction (unlike tractors where operator sits on the machine). Remote controlled system for power tillers is an attachment kit, which is installed on a power tiller or a waking tractor, which will make the machine to operate using a hand-held wireless electronics device.

ISA Best Electronics Product – Other category -- Honourable Mention: iMFAST - Integra’s Mobile Financial Application Secure Terminal: Integra Micro Systems (P) Ltd
iMFAST is a device designed for rural banking. It is a banking platform capable of providing mobile banking as against branch banking. A commercial bank can link this device to its CORE Banking System and extend all banking facilities to poor and illiterate population in rural India without spending opening remote branches and installation of ATMs. With the usage of RFID identification, biometric authentication and online secure confirmation of the transactions, the device facilitates absolutely safe transactions virtually at the cost of one phone call.

What's interesting to note here is that all of these products and the companies that won today have it in them to go on and become commercial successes. Not only that, some of these could well find use in other emerging markets, and perhaps, even in the developed markets. Congratulations and best of luck to all the winners.

A suggestion for the ISA: It would do certainly even more service to the Indian industry by introducing awards in some other product categories as well, for e.g., in automotive, education, transportation, etc., and any others that it can think of.

For everyone present at this function, it was truly a celebration of the great success of Indian electronics and technology companies! More good times ahead, folks, as far as the Indian electronics and semiconductor industries are concerned. Stay tuned!