e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Orygun]

Let's look at Ittiam. Our technoloy is already in this company's product, according to Walter at the CES.
"Ittiam sets sights on becoming India's DSP leader
http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20030527S0045

BANGALORE, India — When Ittiam Systems was started in 2001 by
half-a-dozen top executives from Texas Instruments (India), it was
one of the first, companies here to focus exclusively on DSPs. A few
companies like Encore Systems, Dacs Software and Wipro Ltd. have
worked on DSP technology while spending most ot their time writing
application software.

Hence, Ittiam stands out in India's technology landscape, and the
startup found itself getting boost when its first product, an MPEG4
video decoder, was licensed to Sony Semiconductor in Europe. The
decoder has since been widely licensed and forms the basis of larger
system-level offerings from Ittiam such as video-over-wireless, media
players, digital recorders and digital video cameras.

Unlike other companies here, Ittiam does not offer pure-play
services, focusing instead on custom products. Here, the
specification-level intellectual property is owned by the customer
instead of being licensed to them, and Ittiam's IP comes in at
implementation stage. A wireless communication application for Kromos
Communications Inc. (Fremont, Calif.) was Ittiam's first custom
product design.

Ittiam's focus is on DSP systems for media processing and
communication, including digital video, wireless LANs and voice-over-
IP. It will add two more products soon. Based on customer feedback,
Srini Rajam, Ittiam's chairman and chief executive and former head of
TI's Indian operations. claimed the it is among the top five
companies in each of the three product areas.

Unlike global DSP companies with development centers in India and
whose focus is on developing core products and tools, Ittiam focuses
on systems and applications. Its product line covers software on DSP
and co-processor in DSP systems, reference designs for DSP-based
systems and other components and soft cores for signal processing IP
and products. Applications focused on communication (wireline and
wireless) and multimedia (video imaging and audio speech). "We find
that there is more interest in system designs and core designs,"
Rajam said.

Ittiam has garnered crucial design wins in wireless, video, speech
and audio both at component and system level in Europe, Asia and the
U.S. Its current customer list includes more than 20 OEM and
semiconductor companies including Fortune 500 companies. Ittiam
declined to identify its customers.

Ittiam has about 28 products, including a WLAN product line (802.11
b/a/g) and the VOIP signal processing suite that offer the highest
revenue potential. Long term, its digital video line would yield the
most cumulative revenues through royalties.

Rajam said WLANs and the V.92 voice band modem were the toughest to
execute. "In case of WLAN, it was the sheer magnitude, complexity
and range of comptetency that were needed to put the entire IP
together. To make it even more challenging, the time available to
make the product happen was just around a year. In the case of V.92
modems, the difficulty was in the complexity of making 48 kbps data
upstream mode work robustly and in making the modem interoperate with
all commercially available V.92 modems," he said.

Products Ittiam has licensed to global companies include a VoIP
signal processing suite including telephony functions and echo
canceller to ARC International plc (Elstree, England), VoIP voice
processing codecs to Texas Instruments, software system for a
tapeless digital camcorder to Premier Image Technology Corp., a
leading elecronics OEM in Taiwan, and video and image codecs to Veo
(San Jose, Calif.).

The business climate has changed since Ittiam's launch. "The
environment today is more difficult when it comes to attracting
customers [and] business deals take longer to sign," Rajam said.
Still, the company expects to break even in the next year.

Ittiam has launched a subsidiary company. Ittiam Semiconductor, to
focus on system-on-chip designs in association with Silicon
Laboratories Inc. (Austin, Texas). Their focus will beon SOC designs,
including mixed-signal SOC designs for wireline communications."
May 2003