Mumbai, March 31: Powai Labs Technology Limited, a company incubated within the business centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), launched its globally competitive product, IMAGE (I Made A Great Emulator) at the institute on Friday.
The product which is designed to seamlessly accelerate the simulation of a digital system can also be used for embedded system verification and software development. “The basic utility of IMAGE is to build or emulate a model of a particular system or circuit and evaluate how that system works,” said Madhav P Desai, professor at IITB’s Electrical Engineering department. It can also monitor any signal in the entire design and can be used by a design or verification engineer with little or no training.
What started as a two-member venture by Desai and Powai Labs Chief Executive Officer Reapan Tikoo five years back has developed into a 20-25 member team and the product is “now ready for industrial and commercial use”.
“Image works at a much faster rate which subsequently increases the productivity to a great extent which is the primary advantage of the tool,” added Desai.
Adds Tikoo: IMAGE as a simulation accelerator and emulator is five times cheaper than any equivalent international product with performance and feature that is better than any tool.”
The Powai Labs has now filed for an Indian and a USA patent for the product. Memory extraction tool, internal signal visibility and availability for in-circuit emulation are some of the other features of the image.
Powai Labs which was built at IITB from 1998 to 2002 and was later incubated as a company is the first indigenous Electronics Design Automation (EDA) company in the country and one of the pioneers in academia-industry-government collaboration.
Specially-designed electronics education tools by Powai Labs are used at institutes like the IITs, VNIT Nagpur, A C College of Engineering-Karaikudi, JNTU-Hyderabad and VJTI-Mumbai among others. It has also set-up the “National VLSI Faculty Development Centre” to train the faculty from engineering colleges all over India.
