Intel Inside" will soon spell "designed in India". Having just beaten Israel to emerge as Intel's largest design centre outside the US, India centre is now learnt to be working on designing a microprocessor completely in India. The high-end microprocessor, its first to be designed in India, is expected to hit the global markets in three to four years. A cutting-edge microprocessor with roots in India is being seen as a vote of confidence for India's tech capabilities, till now known more as software and BPO outsourcing destination. Though Intel is keeping these plans under wraps, India is already perceived as a threat in countries like Israel where reports of Intel dumping Jerusalem in favour of Bangalore are doing the rounds. While Intel confirmed that India has indeed emerged as its largest non-manufacturing design centre outside the US, it refused to comment on the processor being completely designed in India. With a headcount of over 2,000, Intel's India development centre has now overtaken Israel which has about 1,700 people. Significantly, the Indian R&D centre, started in 1999, is actually among the youngest on Intel's map. In comparison, the Israel centre has been around for 25 years and Malaysia for over a decade. "Intel's India development centre has already designed chipsets for digital home technology and has a mobile computing team and is also developing standards for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio,'' says Intel India president Ketan Sampat.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, July 30, 2004

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Reliance Infocomm on Thursday announced the launch of country's first Multi-Protocol Label Switching Global Virtual Private Network (MPLS Global VPN) service in association with MCI Inc, an international converged Internet Protocol, data and voice communications provider. Under the agreement with MCI, Reliance would offer its seamless global MPLS-based VPN connections to its business customers, over the US-based company's global network, the company said in a release. MCI is installing MPLS network nodes in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore to provide access to its global private IP network through India using Reliance Infocomm's MPLS VPN network. "This partnership will enable Indian transnational corporations to get the benefit of end-to-end VPN connectivity for their businesses between India and the world. It would benefit MCI by opening up the market for global customers," B D Khurana, Group President Reliance Infocomm said. MPLS VPN is a solution for companies that require best quality of service to carry integrated voice, video and data, while providing Internet access.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, July 30, 2004

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The one announcement which went virtually unnoticed last week was Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement in Parliament declaring the Brahmos cruise missile ready for induction into the Indian Navy. This supersonic cruise missile will give the Navy the capability to destroy targets up to 300 km away with deadly accuracy. The addition to its firepower will increase the Navy's power projection capability in the Indian Ocean region. The announcement indicated that the development process for the Brahmos, as a surface ship weapon, is complete. Work is now expected on other versions of the Brahmos meant to be fired from the air and under the sea.

Courtesy: Hindustan Times, July 26, 2004

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The growth of nuclear energy in the future will be the fastest in India and China because the maximum energy demand will be from them, R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, said here today. Twenty-seven nuclear reactors were under construction in different countries now. Of them, India had the highest number - nine. When completed these would together generate 4,460 MWe. While India would generate 20,000 MWe of nuclear power by 2020, China would generate between 32,000 MWe and 40,000 MWe. Dr. Chidambaram, who gave a talk on ``Nuclear Energy - the Indian Perspective'' here today, said the country's nuclear energy programme was totally self-reliant. Its ``nuclear technology foresight'' had four components - a three-stage programme for generation of nuclear electricity; acquisition of a credible, minimum nuclear deterrent; using atomic energy spin-offs in agriculture, healthcare and industry; and development of major research facilities.

Courtesy: The Hindu, July 15, 2004

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Wipro Technologies, the IT services division of Wipro, has launched a radio frequency identification enabled store at its Electronic City campus, a company release says The concept store demonstrates how item level RFID tagging enables automatic check-out, intelligent shrinkage avoidance, smart stock maintenance and tracing and tracking of apparel by the store manager, the release said. IT firms here are looking at potentially huge contracts to build software applications for large retailers, to manage data generated by RFID enabled supply chain networks. However, RFID is not without controversy: Some of the biggest retailers in the world, including Wal-Mart and Germany's Metro AG have faced consumer anger over privacy invasion issues. Both firms actually pulled plans to put tags on items sold in retail such as shirts and trousers, after customers said RFID could be used to study their shopping behaviour without their knowledge. The RFID tag is a little radio frequency chip that can be tracked literally anywhere. The company has set up an `RFID Centre of Excellence,' the company release says.

Courtesy: The Hindu, July 15, 2004

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Through public private partnerships, $27.6 million worth of indigenous biotech products have been developed in the country. Many of the partnerships have been driven by commercialisation of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)'s findings, said Dr D Balasubramanian, director of research, L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, chairing a session on partnering biotech in research and development at the BangaloreBio2004. Large growth is expected to come on the back of increased partnering activity, transition to product-driven model, growth in biogenerics market and government initiatives to encourage investment and expansion, he added. The sector, which is in a nascent stage, has tested and tried some models like bench-ready technology model, where small companies have undertaken work for big pharma companies. Contract research model is fairly new in the country and is being tested by some pharma companies for global majors, said Dr Balasubramanian. Through academia-industry partnership, a few small and medium companies have mushroomed and these companies have come out with low cost products, especially vaccines, said Dr Balasubramanian. Some of the successful partnerships are Shanta Biotech with CCMB and IISc, Bharat Biotech with CDFD and IISc, Indian Immunological-IISc, University of Hyderabad-Dr Reddy's Labs, Nagarjuna University-IISc and L V Prasad Eye Institute-Bausch & Lomb.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, July 14, 2004

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India test-fired the 700-km, nuclear capable Agni-I medium range ballistic missile for the third time on Sunday. After the successful flight test from Wheeler Island off the coast of Orissa, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) declared the single stage, solid-fuelled Agni-I ready for induction into the Army. The test firing was described as a "user (Army) associated launch" involving an Army missile group. It was witnessed by Director-General of Military Operations Lt. General A.S. Bahia along with DRDO chief V.K. Aatre. The Agni-I addresses the missile gap between the 250-km range Prithvi-II and the 2,500-km Agni-II missiles. In the Pakistan-specific Agni-I, India will have a tactical missile which can be safely deployed far away from pre-emptive strike zones and activated without lowering the nuclear threshold. Pakistan already has the Chinese-made M-9 (Shaheen-I) missiles in the 800 km range inducted in its armoury. Following the Kargil conflict, it was felt that forward deployment of the Prithvi short-range ballistic missiles, even with conventional warheads, would provoke Islamabad to launch a pre-emptive strike as it would perceive the Prithvis as nuclear armed. This meant that Prithvi's deployment would lower the nuclear threshold, especially since movement of short-range missile batteries to launch points could be easily detected by the adversary. The DRDO is now reportedly bracing itself for a bigger test-firing - the 3500-km Agni-III. The launch of the Agni-III has been on the cards since 2003. Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee recently hinted that this missile would be tested this year.

Courtesy: Hindustan Times, July 05, 2004

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A computer built by an Indian-American company has been rated the second fastest supercomputer in the world, second only to the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, built by NEC. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "Thunder," built by the California-based California Digital Corporation, has been named the second-fastest supercomputer in the world by the Top 500 Project, which provides twice-yearly lists of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world. "This is something that will change the face of high-performance computing as we know it. I think this is going to be extremely groundbreaking," an ecstatic B.J. Arun, founder and CEO of California Digital, said. "Our machine costs only $20 million," Arun said. "For a small-size company like ours - we are just about 100 people worldwide - for a company of our size to have done this, I can't explain to you how thrilled all of us were." "Supercomputers are very special-purpose, high tech kind of projects that are run by the largest of companies," Chhabria said. "Historically, companies like Intel and IBM spend literally billions of dollars in this kind of environment. Chhabria added that it was this ability to use off-the-shelf components that made their effort remarkable. "What made us unique is that we have demonstrated that you can build around commercial components and still make top two on that list." The Thunder cluster delivers 19.94 teraflops of sustained performance. The Earth Simulator in Japan, on the other hand, is capable of 35.86 teraflops. Thunder uses 1,024 California Digital 6440 servers, each with four Intel(R) Itanium2 1.4GHz processors.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, July 02, 2004

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