Bangalore: When dark horses decide their time has come, there are few that can match their scorching pace. The software sector of the Indian Information Technology business and more recently the outsourced services industry have tended to hog all the headlines when it comes to upbeat news about this shining segment. But while no one was watching, another niche — largely ignored — has been making quiet inroads on the global IT scene: the integrated circuit (IC) design business.

A leading international market analyst, El Segundo (California) US-based iSuppli, has taken note of this trend. A forthcoming report by their Director and Principal Analyst Jagdish Rebello, `The IC Design Industry in India: Rapid Expansion,' highlights of which have been made available, is creating waves in the global technology community by predicting that India's IC chip design industry will quadruple in revenues from $ 596 million last year to $ 2.1 billion by 2010.

Much of the cutting-edge design work is being carried out in the India-based development labs set up by international semiconductor companies, Dr. Rebello says.

The report will highlight an emerging trend: from working on bits and pieces of the overall chip design, mostly collaborating with other centres abroad, Indian engineers are increasingly being entrusted with what is called end-to-end development ... from concept to design to development and prototype testing. The final stage is what is known as the `tape -out' — sending the detailed description of the circuit to a silicon foundry or "fab" (short for fabrication house), mostly in the Far East.

The report suggests that within the next three to four years, India will end up doing half the world's chip design.

As if to bear out these tidings of a new area of desi ingenuity in the IT industry, the last few weeks have seen compelling chip solutions roll out from India-based labs at the rate of almost one a week. Friday saw the unveiling in Delhi, of the first made-in-India chip for French-Italian semiconductor leader STMicroelectronics — the STi5107 — a single-chip solution to make a digital set-top box. It points to the emergence of Greater Noida as a challenger to India's silicon city, Bangalore. STM's R&D centre is over 1700-strong here. The chip comes up with advanced security features demanded by the global pay-by-use television market.

Just three weeks ago, another Noida-based design centre — run by FreeScale, an Austin (Texas) US-based leader in chips for automotive, consumer and wireless markets — announced two chips whose total design cycle was completed in India: The MPC8313E is a processor that provides a high speed path to link computers, printers and storage devices for digital multimedia applications in the home. The sister device, MCP8323E, will fuel circuit boards that help to bring the new high-speed broadband technology, WiMax to homes and offices.

And soon after this development, nVidia Corporation, a well known name for the graphics boards that fuel high end games PCs and engineering stations, announced that its Bangalore-based design centre was responsible for the total effort that went into the chips at the core of its flagship NForce 600i series multimedia boards.

Within days of the chip set's release, Anandtech, the authoritative US-based chip evaluating web resource run by Anand Shimpi, rated it as possibly the best chipset in the world today that caters to the new generation of dual-core processors launched by Intel. "Our engineers developed this powerful chip in just 12 months.... demonstrating that India's engineers rank among the best in the world," says Sridhar Manthani, Senior Director at nVidia's Bangalore centre.

The company already set up a second design centre in Pune just a year ago.

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