India’s WhizChip Technologies debuts in Silicon Valley

SAN JOSE, USA: WhizChip Technologies, a leading semiconductor and systems design company, has established its US market presence in Silicon Valley ahead of schedule.

WhizChip provides a broad range of innovative ASIC and system-on-a-chip (SoC) and related design services to large integrated device manufactures (IDMs), fabless semiconductor houses and electronic design vendors focused on specific vertical markets.

Innovative design methodologies coupled with an automated global delivery platform that makes multi-site project planning, execution and tracking seamless for WhizChip customers, have helped WhizChip grow at a phenomenal rate since its inception in 2005. Today, it has more than 100 employees; mostly design engineers and technical staff, and strategic partners in the US, Asia and Europe.

Extreme integration in SoC development has created new market opportunities for companies like WhizChip. In the SoC market, greater design complexity has lengthened design cycles. Conversely, product life cycles have shrunk and development costs continue to soar making it imperative for SoC developers to get it right the first time.

Companies are turning with increased frequency to third party semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) providers and incorporating third party blocks into their designs or SIP libraries. Today, many SoC developers are outsourcing a substantial portion of the SoC, focusing their efforts on the portion that creates value and differentiation. As these trends continue, the use of third party SIP increases, and the level of systems integration also increases. Increased integration calls for more design and verification, validation and prototyping.

WhizChip Technologies has successfully tapped this market opportunity, investing heavily in technology and IP. This has helped the company grow rapidly to be become a leader and trusted partner to semiconductor companies around the world.

“Silicon Valley is the center of excellence in semiconductor design and development and we are excited to be launching in the US market well ahead of plan,” commented Ravi Shankar, founder and CEO, WhizChip Technologies. "Our growth rate has been phenomenal, in no small part due to the design expertise of our company, and its talented engineers, as well as the continuing trust and support of our customers around the world.”

Behind the rapid growth of WhizChip, sits a deep reservoir of technology know-how and proprietary intellectual property (IP) and methodologies that have enabled the company to deliver products to market consistently on schedule. Backing up this technology leadership is the industry’s only fixed cost and milestone based cost model that mitigates risk for customers, saving time and money throughout the design cycle up to silicon validation.

WhizChip's innovative methodologies include XPlan, a design & verification planning tool for providing differentiated services to customers. WhizBoard, a prototyping solution created for providing quick prototyping services. The company’s proprietary ASIC/SoC design methodologies are fully compatible with leading electronic design automation (EDA) tools; support SystemsVerilog, VHDL, Verilog, SystemC and other languages.

Its verification technologies are compliant with VMM, OVM, and RVM. It has a wealth of experience in low power digital design, high-speed chip design and both ARM and MIPS architectures. Its broad domain expertise includes Chipsets, Audio, Security & Networking Processors, Media Processors, RF, Medical Imaging, DTV Chip, WiMax, VoIP, Networking & Communication, Wireless Modems, ARM and MIPS based SoCs.

“We invest heavily in leading-edge technology development, deliver an automated global delivery platform that makes multi-site tracking seamless and we back these innovations with an industry leading fixed cost model that works for our customers in America and overseas,” said Shankar. “At the core of our company is a desire to solve our customer’s design engineering problems and mitigate risk in the process. That creates a high level of predictability, which has created trust and fueled the rapid growth of our company in such a short time.”

WhizChip featured services
WhizChip offers a broad range of design services to customers in Asia, Europe and the USA, including:

* ASIC/SoC design architecture
* Verification optimization using its proprietary Plan technologies
* Silicon bring up and validation
* FPGA prototyping and reference system design
* Methodology development and technology licensing.