Democratizing innnovation: BlackPepper Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a comprehensive solutions provider, seeks to make a positive impact on the society with its product engineering capabilities

We live in a connected world, where device manufacturers are bound to bring continuous disruption in the market to meet the ever-increasing consumer demands. This involves compressing and packing in more computing abilities into consistently diminishing sizes and form factors. Therefore, companies, in order to stay competitive, need to focus on developing and offering comprehensive and differentiated solutions encompassing security, analytics, user experience and cloud which require new competencies that go beyond silicon design, manufacturing and hardware engineering.

In the light of the above mentioned, we are thrilled to present you BlackPepper Technologies, a company that leaves no stone unturned to meet the needs of the new interconnected world with its innovation and products.

BlackPepper Technologies is a full-fledged silicon and system player providing differentiated product engineering capabilities for global semiconductor and system companies. BlackPepper offers comprehensive turnkey solutions across consumer electronics, automotive, medical, industrial automation, defense, wireless and the Internet of Things. The company’s distinct functional units include Logic Design & Verification, Design for Test, Physical Design, Board Design, Analog & Mixed Signal Design, Post Silicon Validation, Yield Optimization, Supply Chain Management, Industrial Design and Embedded Software. BlackPepper’s AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning) and DL (Deep Learning) driven solutions cater to applications like ADAS, Predictive Machine Monitoring, Autonomous Platforms, etc. BlackPepper is actively transforming itself into a company that is squarely at the heart of the product end user experience.

Competing like a champion

BlackPepper is today a trusted design partner for global top 10 semiconductor companies and “arm Approved Design Partner”, only company from India to be recognized so. 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.

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 our employee (alias Pepperite) - 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”, the company said. It believes in the philosophy of collective entrepreneurship and encourages every single Pepperite to think freely, innovate tirelessly, question fearlessly and be deeply involved in every facet of the BlackPepper success story.

The present market scenario: An insight into the key business dynamics

The overall industry is growing rapidly and expanding much further on various segments. As per Gartner Inc, the worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to total $451 billion in 2018, an increase of 7.5 percent from $419 billion in 2017. And as per McKinsey report in 2018, The Internet of Things alone has the potential to generate about $4 trillion to $11 trillion in economic value by 2025. The IoT market will be driven by new age companies who can address specific problems for specific markets, and they might not be fully aware of solving the complete problem, especially the technology piece. The technology problem will be focus area for BlackPepper to solve. It is building different technology verticals that enable the company to be an end to end spec-to-product company and has developed solutions for various tier 2 and tier 3 companies globally in the automotive, medical and industrial automation segments.

BlackPepper believes that the ecosystem will be aligned on four important pillars, “SENSE, COMPUTE, SECURE AND NETWORK” and its solutions will accordingly incorporate all these or relevant areas as part of the solutions. The solution will be wrapped around with the creative Industrial Design (ID) such that the end user experience will be out of the world. In the future, the hardware could become a commodity and the services will be where the companies can generate revenues.

With over a decade of semiconductor SoC design experience, strict axioms of quality, constant improvement in R & D, technology, and processes, and the hard work of a dedicated team of professionals, BlackPepper Technologies today is an Indian brand that is recognized globally. Ripening with a clear vision of building an end to end full-fledged hardware company out of India, BlackPepper Technologies is a new generation System to Silicon Design Company that has been growing exponentially year on year through organic means. Holding diverse design capabilities to provide comprehensive turnkey solutions to tier 1 to tier 3 companies, BlackPepper today holds the crown as the trusted design partner to top 10 global semiconductor companies. With a cumulative expertise of more than 500 years of combined experience in the field, the management team has witnessed, participated in and shaped the complete evolutionary phase of the industry. As India is poised for rapid take off to become a manufacturing centre for the world, the organization is looking forward to setting new standards of excellence in electronics and introducing a new range of products and services to the furthest corners of the globe.

Diversified solutions with optimized test time and least defects

BlackPepper creates solutions for automotive, medical & healthcare, defence, industrial automation and IoT segments. For each of these segments, the company has provided solutions and is also developing further solutions from its Pepperlabs. One such solution that it has developed for automotives is the Digital Cockpit with Driver Assistance and Autonomous Driving (ADAS).

The platform is designed based on BlackPepper’s proven SeNSe-IC Platform enabling Sense, Secure, Network and Intelligent Compute Framework. In-vehicle displays, infotainment and safety are becoming more digitized which requires different controllers, and software in turn increases overall complexity and cost of car electronics. This is driving the need of integrated solutions which will help car manufacturers reduce the cost and complexity for the consumers in more integrated user experience. With Automotive SeNSe-IC platform, BlackPepper enables integration of various functional domains, which were earlier disjoint like Instrument Cluster, Infotainment, Driver Assist and Autonomous drive, Heads-Up Display, Rear View systems and beyond. This will enable Car OEMs and Tier-1s in rolling out cost effective system with an integrated user experience.

Automotive SeNSe-IC platform leverages Integrated SoCs to provide the multi-vehicle-domain functionality, while ensuring the safety and security without compromising on performance. A combination of ARM MCU and MPU along with hardware accelerators are used to realize this.  For advanced autonomous driving features, the system has provision to integrate with GPU based AI/ML/DL algorithms.

The system includes close to product hardware platform with complete software system for enabling next generation clusters, infotainment and ADAS features. The hardware platform includes multiple displays (up to 4), multiple cameras (up to 8), vehicle communication interfaces (MOST 150, CAN, etc), V2X communication interfaces and a host of sensors including RADAR and LIDAR. Core software includes a safety-critical RTOS for driving instrument cluster, while a HLOS like Android (or Linux) based system power the infotainment system and a host of algorithms are used for driver assistance and autonomous driving.

The heart of the system is a SoC with multi-core ARM Cortex-M series and multi-core ARM Cortex-A Series. The multi-core ARM Cortex-M series drives the Instrument Cluster, HUD and Rear View System, while Infotainment runs on a multi-core ARM Cortex-A Series. These cores along with sensors provide the capabilities of ADAS to the unit.

Some of the features which are enabled in Automotive SeNSe-IC platform are:

Android based IVI

• 2D/3D Instrument Cluster on Linux and RTOS
• Heads Up Display and Rear View Camera
• V2X communication modules for integration of “Smart Home <-> Car” and “Car <-> Car”
• Sensor Fusion based Driver profiling
• DVR
• Driver Assistance Solutions including but not limited to

1. Lane Departure warnings, Forward collision warning and avoidance, headway monitoring
2. Pedestrian, Object Detection
3. Blind Spot Detection
4. Traffic Signal, Traffic Sign and Road Art detection and guidance
5. Road condition monitoring
6. Face ID, Drowsiness detection, Gesture control

In the near future, BlackPepper’s vision is to list with a minimum valuation of about USD 1 Billion and be the first company from India to do so in the pure hardware side.

The team behind the success

Harikrishnan Puravankara, Founder & CEO

Hari comes with about 16 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. He quit Magma to start building the vision for BlackPepper in 2010 and raised angel funding to commence the operations in 2012.

Hari has won a national award under the best engineering project category as well as a “Best Designer” award at an All-India IEEE design contest during his engineering days. Hari did his Bachelor of Engineering from Cochin University of Science and Technology in Electronics Engineering in 2000.

Jei Narayanan, COO

Jei has a vast professional experience of over 25 years in semiconductor and electronics industry. Prior to joining BlackPepper as COO, he was the Practice Head of the IC Design team at TATA Consultancy Services since 2011.

In his capacity as VLSI Competency Group Head, he was instrumental in hiring and training more than 700 fresh engineering graduates over two years to equip them to contribute to ASIC design programs. The initial 11 years of his career was spent in designing electronics for Inertial Navigation Systems in Satellite Launch Vehicles at ISRO. He has an M.Tech in Electronics from IT, BHU, Varanasi.

Manoj Sundareswaran, Executive Vice President: Delivery

Manoj is an industry veteran in the area of Chip Design and has been a SoC Product Specialist with more than 16 years of experience. He has been instrumental in implementing & delivering multiple first pass SoCs across automotive, wireless, wireline, health care domains for companies like Infineon, Lantiq, and Wipro.

Basavaraj Nagaraju, Executive Vice President: Strategy & Marketing

Basavaraj has diversified experience; he has been an entrepreneur, investment adviser, technocrat, teacher and a mentor. With about 21 years of corporate experience, he has worked at Subex, VeriSign & Syniverse at different levels and held the post of General Manager (GM) in his last organization. He has an MBA from Southern New Hampshire University, USA and a Bachelor degree (Engineering) in Telecommunications from BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore.

Salesh Kumar N V, Vice President: Strategic Initiatives - R&D

Salesh brings in 17+ years of industry experience in the ASIC, Microprocessor and EDA fields in both technical and management roles. Prior to BlackPepper, he was working in the capacity of Advisory R&D in IBM where he was responsible for mainframe microprocessor timing architecture for multiple generations of the P and Z series of processors. Salesh did his Bachelor of Technology from Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology (RIT), Kottayam in Electronics and Telecommunications in 1999.

"Our mission is to create an organization that is fundamentally rooted in hardware and recognized as the gold standard in product realization.”