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Date: 30th May 08
India's automotive electronic growth.
With zooming car and bike sales in India,
the automotive industry in poised to grow for some more years.
Along with the manufacturing and assembly of imported cars,
there is great amount of automotive design research going
on in India to produce cars and motorbikes highly customized
for Indian environment. Strategy Analytics, a research firm
predicts, a total market of US$1.5 billion for automotive
electronics in Indian produced cars. In a year more than 50
new models of cars are released to market.
Few relevant examples are Tata Motor's
low priced car; Nano and various bike models from Bajaj and
TVS motors. Irrespective of the cost of the car, the share
of electronics hardware is raising in every car.
Though the Indian made entry-level cars
have limited electronic system such as engine monitoring,
dash-board display and few other basic switching controls;
the volume of demand created by Indian car sales is the driving
point for automotive electronic industry. For semiconductor
vendors to gain the market share, they got to keep their hawky
eyes wide open for any design requirement from Indian auto
maker to get an early bird advantage. Generally in India,
the chance of changing the selected semiconductor is less,
after once the component is successfully used in the system.
One more notable point is, every entry-level
car will come with two or more models. The electronics in
basic model is as said above very minimal in use, but advanced
models will have the differentiating factor through various
electronic based passenger comfort and safety enhancing features.
Here is the broader opportunity for all types of electronics
systems and components.
It can be roughly estimated, the average
share of electronics in Indian car is in the range of US$1000
to US$ 1500 per car. The share is growing with the times.
A decade ago, a motorcycle hardly had a
microcontroller based hardware unit. The most common electronic
ingredient during those times was simple transistor multivibrator
(or some other RLC oscillator based turning indicating flash
light controller).
In today's scenario, every motorbike is
at least fitted with one or two microcontrollers and other
associated electronics.
The applications include dashboard digitization, ignition,
lighting, engine monitoring, and fuel saving systems.
Another interesting trend is, India is
registering a growing market demand for electric cars and
bikes, where the electrical and electronic semiconductor components
and systems are the engines of the vehicle.
To get better share of the market, the
semiconductor vendors need to provide very high level of customer
support by becoming part of the vehicle design team.
The cost is a big issue in Indian market
!!
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