The new venture started by Srini Rajam, who till yesterday was the managing director of Texas Instruments India, is taking concrete shape.

Although the start up’s name is still under wraps, the focus of the company will be on building applications software that will run on Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips. Four senior people are leaving TI India to partner Rajam.

“A market study we did earlier proves DSP is the fastest growing market segment within the semiconductor industry totalling around $5 billion in 2000, growing at a rate of 30 per cent. The market for software and application services over DSP is around $10 billion, growing at 50 per cent.” says Rajam.

The company intends to focus on wireless, broadband, audio and imaging. In audio – the applications can fit into an MP3 player or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) with speech capability. To enable Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – the applications can be over the DSP chip for the cable modem, DSL or the Internet gateway.

“The nature of the applications are diverse. And, here in India there is hardly any company that is focussed on this area. Apart from Sasken, that is working in this space, there are other small R&D teams in companies like Wipro, HCL Technologies and Tata Elxsi,” Rajam pointed out.

Moreover, the company is also looking at creating Intellectual Property and marketing it to create a more vibrant revenue model. “This is a long-term process and we expect it to pay off in 2002,” Rajam added.

The company is planning a “huge outfit” with around 100 engineers to be based in Bangalore with maybe a small R&D team in the US.

But the challenge would be to get the engineers with the right skill sets. “We are working out an innovative training programme through which we will take engineers with an aptitude for DSPs and give them the right kind of training so that they can be converted into DSP engineers within three months,” Rajam added.