When the Koreans first made and exported colour TV sets they themselves did not get to own them.
Analog Devices, a global leader in design and manufacture of signal processing chips, is designing, developing and `productising' chips out of India which go into the latest gizmos that are far away from the Indian market.
What is more, Analogue Devices, the $ 1.7 billion United States east coast based information technology pioneer, has played and is continuing to play a unique developmental role for Indian technology, nurturing and helping it flower.
It takes the technology to the market in the quickest possible way and helps it earn the best value, while its ownership continues to remain in India.
India is now well recognised as a source of software services, including high-end chip design services.
The IT multi national companies have also located some of their most important development centres here where a lot of their proprietary work takes place.
Analog Devices has evolved a model where it takes the IP (its ownership stays with the Indian developer) puts it in a chip, does a reference design, takes it to the customer and then sells it to the whole world.
"Our uniqueness is that we have the product managers stationed here. They generate business plans for which they are responsible," says Ashok Kamath, managing director of Analog Devices India.
There are old timers in Analog who have nurtured these relationships through more than one generation of technology development.
"Many of these companies are now owned by techno-promoters who were at one time our customers, working for large companies with which Analog did business."
Analog lays claim to another important first in India. Earlier MNC teams in India designed parts of their new chips, which were then integrated into a whole elsewhere.
When Analog set up its design shop in Bangalore in 1995, it straightaway undertook the entire work, including integration.
Analog's India development centre here is recognised as the centre of excellence for its Sharc floating point digital signal processors.
Some of the latest products of the greatest global names in audio like Sony and Bose are based on the Sharc DSP.
Another DSP, BlackFin, an embedded processor which works on communication and multimedia concurrently, has also been entirely developed in India.
It sits at the heart of the new car telematics in which you get GSP (navigational system), text to speech (DTS), MP3, GSM (interface) and speech recognition (you can say, dial me this number while driving), all rolled into one box the size of car stereo.
These products that use these technologies barely have a market in India yet but Analog's chips are mainstream and most widely used in the static (electronic) tamper proof power meters for households.
Over 600,000 of these have been sold last year at Rs 300-400 a piece, which work out cheaper than the conventional rotting meters.
These meters hold the key to improving SEB recoveries and thus bring analog well within the Indian mainstream.
In fact, the challenge for India is to become a major global supplier of electronic devices like these meters.
In its role of handholder for the Indian technology developers, Analog takes pride in having worked with TeNet and Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala since the mid nineties.
Today, the centerpiece of the TeNet initiative, the CorDECT switch, which has set a new global benchmark in low cost connectivity, is being installed by the mainstream service providers like Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Reliance, and exported across the globe from Singapore to Brazil. And CorDECT is built on Analog chips!
