India Design Centre in Bengal for chip

Kolkata, Feb 9 (UNI) The West Bengal governmet is planning to set up India's first Rs 120-crore "India Design Centre" to facilitate the high-end chip designing companies in the state.

Speaking to UNI over phone from Hyderabad, State IT Minister Debesh Das said, ''The 18-floor building will house facilities for chip designing firms. The chip designing companies require very expensive software packages and the cost of these run into crores.

This Design Centre will have facilities which could be used by the big and small chip companies.'' The India Design Centre is West Bengal IT department's pet project. The 100 crore facility would have chip designing centres, incubation centres for small start ups and a Bengal government-owned chip designing facility.

Mr Das said, ''We have invited about 30 CEOs from companies such as Intel, Texas Instruments India, Qualcomm, Cadence, Synopsis and Sequence for a meeting and presented our plan for the India Design Centre. They are very enthusiastic and a couple of them may set up base in the state through this project.'' Companies like Synopsis and Texas Instruments have also shown interest in this Centre. Intel India had also placed a proposal to the IT department to create wireless hotspots in certain areas of the city.

The state's nodal IT agency Webel and the IT department were in talks with various companies that specialise in creating high-end, high-value infrastructure to set up the building. Webel would provide land, a 1.7-acre plot in sector V, the city's IT hub. The private partners would invest in the infrastructure.

Webel Managing Director Debanjan Dutta said, ''IIT Kharagpur is the R&D hub for chip designing in India. Bengal could not provide infrastructure, which led the industries to invest in other cities like Bangalore. If we can offer proper facilities, the companies would make a beeline to the city.'' The national semiconductor policy is expected by the end of the month. Bengal has already framed its own guideline regarding this sector to give it a proper direction.

The state has set up an advisory committee, comprising the heads of companies like Bobby Mitra of Texas Instruments India; Dhrubesh Biswas, chief technical officer of IIT-KGP; Pradip Dutta, Managing Director of Synopsis, along with NRI investors and a US-based VC fund Sandalwood Partners for the semiconductor park project near IIT Kharagpur.

The Bengal IT Minister, WEBEL MD and IT secretary were on two-day 'Vision Summit 2007' organised by the Indian Semiconductor Association.

IT Minister Debesh Das had made a presentation on the project to chiefs of some top 50 companies in the semiconductor industry.

UNI