http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/oct/23trans.htm

Indian chip to power Airbus A380, Boeing Dreamliner

October 23, 2005 20:01 IST
Last Updated: October 23, 2005 20:06 IST


When the world's largest passenger jet, Airbus A380, takes to the skies in 2007, it would rely on an Indian chip to communicate with ground controllers.

Believe it or not, a version of the same chip would find a place in Airbus' trans-Atlantic rival Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, the latest flying machine coming out from the US aerospace firm.

"Co-developed and verified" by Indian IT major, HCL Technologies, this chip would be integrated into the system data acquisition computer of the aircraft, a top company official has said.

The software would be used for real time advanced data communication needs of on-board critical electronic devices and the delivery to Airbus would happen by this year-end, HCL Vice President and Head of Aerospace, Sanjay Ganju said.

"The delivery to Airbus for its A 380 programme will take place in the current year through the tier-1 partner of Airbus and that of Boeing will happen after the integration phase of the Dreamliner," he said.

The company started this chip development about four years back and received the contract from the first tier partner of Toulouse-based aeronautics major about three years ago for the largest airplane ever built.

Code-named Super Jumbo, A-380 is a double-decker aircraft with a capacity to seat 555 passengers under a three-class configuration and capability to fly non-stop about 8,000 nautical miles.

"The chip will also handle all the network traffic across communication, navigation, surveillance and several other on-board subsystems, which are critical for the flight safety and operations," Ganju said.

For Boeing's 787 Dreamliner project, he said, HCL was working on development of large complex software platform for aggregation and manipulation of the data during the flight tests.

"We are also working on several subsystems using the latest technologies to modularise most of the software development, which will make the future changes and maintenance of onboard software easier and quicker," Ganju said.

Other than Boeing and Airbus, he said HCL has been providing its expertise and services to many aircraft manufacturers in the world, including Brazil's Embraer and Canada's Bombardier, either directly or through their Tier-1 partners (to whom the aircraft maker gave the direct sourcing contract) for their ongoing aircraft development projects.

"We have identified the potential of this sector and began concentrating on this sector about six years back. We will be investing a considerable part of our revenue for research and development works in this sector," he said, adding his company would aim to bag a major chunk of services market in aerospace software and hardware sector.

According to NASSCOM, outsourcing in aerospace sector is a huge market and it is estimated that Indian IT firms can look at $1 billion revenue from this market over the next four to five years.

1) This is NOT an indian economy news forum.

2) I would also prefer seeing a non-indian article since rediff is one of the biggest indian propaganda website.

india just developed something its good at and sold it, its just simple business

its like the pakistani company working for NASA, they are good at it, and so they do business

To be honest I don't really see the big deal. You should have posted this in some indian forum rather than on a Pakistani forum. It has nothing of strategic value for us. It just shows that a company was selected to produce a chip for another company, I would assume the primariy reason was cost because frankly there are companies and countries that far excel in hardware compared to India.

Seems like he is trying to impress us or something