From traditional applications such as ultrasound machines, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans to emerging ones such as home health monitoring, ECG machines with easy and common interfaces with computers and other devices, automated pathology equipment, India offers tremendous growth opportunities.

“We see several original equipment manufacturers developing products for the Indian market,” says Rao.

While leaders such as Intel and TI are betting big on embedded chips and dual core processors (a new technology that increases the speed of computing in electronic devices), smaller players such as Open-Silicon Inc., an application specific integrated circuit provider, think their offerings, particularly with radio and medical analysis capability, will play a big role.

Whether the medical chip sector will get divided in battle lines the way graphics chips today are trying to outflank each other in price and performance is a question that will need an answer a few years down the road when health care becomes accessible to a larger population. Currently, just about a third of India’s population has access to hospitals, according to the country’s drug prices regulator National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority.

Still, as of now, the challenge for the industry, according to ST’s Markowitz, is mastering a “knowledge network” that includes expertise in physiology, biology, chemistry, and regulatory issues that “semiconductor companies have little experience with”.

The other catch is affordability. While features in medical applications are certainly an advancement over what is required for most commercial applications, pricing the products within the consumer’s reach remain a challenge.

It is for this reason that some of the leading firms in this area may not look at India and developing countries seriously for technology-intensive opportunities such as SoCs, fears Chandrasekhar Nair, founder director of Bigtec Pvt. Ltd, a biotechnology company that is currently testing a SoC-based handheld diagnostic device in Hyderabad. “This is also possibly because the Indian market is very price-sensitive,” he says.

The developers could then emerge locally because India can serve as a proxy for the entire developing world.

“I am excited about how Indian players will step up to address the needs of the market, which is going to be the biggest growth driver not only for India but the global industry,” says Cadence India’s Ahuja.

Semiconductors in medical applications (Source Mint research)

• Smaller, lighter, and cheaper electronic devices like CT and MRI scanners, ultrasound and ECG machines
• Devices for drug dispensation like insulin pumps
• Implants for tissue repair; for example, deep brain stimulator for Parkinson’s disease
• Monitoring devices like glucometer, blood pressure meters
• Automated pathology equipment that do blood tests, clot detection, test for diseases such as hepatitis, avian flu, malaria, et al. For instance, GE and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are developing a ‘virtual microscope” that would let clinicians analyse slides from computer monitors and share their results with an expert anywhere in the world