Optimizing innovation, design and engineering processes in product development: BlackPepper Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Over the last three decades, the semiconductor industry has contributed in powerful and unique ways to nearly all fields of science and engineering resulting in the emergence of many new industries as well as the transformation of existing ones such as aerospace and automotive. But now, the industry is facing intense pressures due to escalating design costs, growing product complexity, shrinking average sales prices, and the relentless pace of innovation. The daunting design challenges, accelerated lifecycles, and complex supply chains are adversely affecting the product launch, development budgets, and quality targets.

As the semiconductor industry keeps on evolving, semiconductor companies will need strong execution to meet aggressive time cycles for new product introduction. To become truly competitive and prosper in this fast-paced environment, they have to embrace strategic thinking and business processes in a comprehensive solution, and BlackPepper Technologies can help achieve that. BlackPepper Technologies is a new generation Silicon to System Design Company, focused on providing differentiated product engineering capabilities across the spectrum of global semiconductor companies. With distinct functional units ranging from Embedded S/W, Logic Design, Design for Test, Physical Design, Board Design, Analog & Mixed Signal Design, Post Silicon Validation, Yield Optimization and Supply Chain Management, BlackPepper can bring to bear diverse design capabilities to provide comprehensive turnkey solutions.

Creating and nurturing a culture of professional and personal excellence

BlackPepper was incorporated in Nov 2009, and it took about 3yrs to put the initial layers in place before firing up the engine to accelerate. And post 2012, the company has been thriving and growing at more than 2X times year on year. The company has added top 10 global semiconductor companies as its clients and penetrated deeper into each company to become their key design partner.

One of the core purposes of the company is to create an enduring impact on society by building an innovative hardware-specific organization in emerging technology sectors like the Internet of Things. BlackPepper aims to democratize innovation by transforming ideas into tangible products and inculcate the spirit of innovation among all. The company is setting new benchmarks in quality, reliability and turnaround time (TAT) using proven engineering and management techniques, which has become the way of life for Pepperites.

BlackPepper is built on human values rather than conventional corporate priorities. Each one of its employees (alias Pepperites) - has strong engineering capabilities, passion for excellence, and above all, is a fine human being. For BlackPepper, every Pepperite comes first, and for every Pepperite, the customer comes first. Besides being appreciated by the customers for the value BlackPepper has been offering until now, the industry repute agency ELCINA recognized it in their recent event “ELCINA-EFY AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN ELECTRONICS HARDWARE MANUFACTURING & SERVICES” held on 14th September, 2017 with award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. BlackPepper continues to thrive across customers, segments, markets and technology.

Delivering high-end semiconductor solutions

In the current market scenario, where the innovation is democratized and moving away from the concentrated large semiconductor companies, customers demanding significant disruption in the usability of the product or services is pushing the innovation to a completely different level and BlackPepper is ideally placed in enabling the transformation of end user experience. The company has built end to end silicon to system design capabilities, where customer ideas can be transformed into a full blown product including industrial designing. It is creating an ecosystem of partners to support SCM capabilities as well.

BlackPepper is today a trusted design partner for top 10 global semiconductor companies. The company continues to aggressively expand its global footprint, leveraging two core assets – Lean Tall Engineering (LTE) and EYWA. LTE or Lean Tall Engineering is a focused return to first principle engineering tenets of yesteryears, where a single engineer was massively multi-skilled rather than skills and capabilities being sliced and diced across a slew of less experienced engineers. EYWA is its home grown, unique technology framework that allows optimization of human and compute resources enabling complex designs to predictably converge to closure.

The leader in product engineering services

BlackPepper is building capabilities to support 5 key vertical segments, i.e. Defense, Wireless, Automotive, Medical and Industrial Automation. It is supporting global companies across these segments, and its design centers in Singapore and USA will enable its global clients to access the services at their locations. BlackPepper will be a global unicorn with a billion dollar valuation when listed in 2021, and this valuation will be possible by enabling end to end turnkey services across all 5 verticals.

BlackPepper currently enables tier 1 to tier 3 semiconductor companies and is the preferred design partner to some of the largest semiconductor companies.

Knowing the CEO, Hari Krishna Puravankara

Hari comes with an 18+ years of career spanning Silicon design, Supply Chain Management, Foundry relations and technical support. Hari started his career at Wipro Technologies as a cell library and physical design specialist and then moved on to Magma Design Automation, where he led the Applications Support team across Asia Pacific. Post Magma, he started building the vision for BlackPepper and raised angel funding to commence operations in Dec, 2011. Hari did his Bachelor of Engineering from Cochin University of Science and Technology in Electronics Engineering in 2000.

“We believe in the philosophy of collective entrepreneurship and encourage every single Pepperite to think freely, innovate tirelessly, question fearlessly and be deeply involved in every facet of the BlackPepper success story.”