Avnet (NYSE:AVT) is a trans-national electronics distributor of electronic parts, enterprise computing, storage products and embedded subsystems. Incorporated in the year 1955, Avnet is known worldwide for its unmatched design capability and is the only distributor with a state-of-art design center to undertake turnkey designs. The organization has a workforce of 3073 employees in 49 offices across the Asia-Pacific region. The Indian contingent consists of highly qualified and skilled personnel with 85 percent of the employees holding engineering degrees. It delivers leading technologies to 6,000 engineers in 36 locations world-wide. Ramani Sundaresan, Managing Director of Avnet Electronics Marketing, India, is responsible for formulating and executing strategies to grow the business in the fast growing India market. He is working towards making Avnet EM India as the premier distributor in the region and driving consistent profitable growth with a strong and knowledgeable sales force, marketing and field application teams. He has also developed teams to strengthen supply chain support to local and global manufacturers in India and enhance application design and solution support across local and global OEM�s and design houses. Major Achievements in India Almost 60 percent of two wheelers in India use the clusters, and half of the fully automatic washing machines use control boards manufactured by Avnet. The designs have been adopted by many customers and some have been deployed to the number of millions; a testimony to Avnet's design success. The company does not have a separate design organization as it is a collective effort from both the business and design teams, who work hand in hand to achieve the vision and mission of the organization. To get an FPGA to interface the memory in a very high performance DDR3 running at 1066 MHz is a challenge for a lot of designers. Avnet teaches designers how to implement such complex issues successfully. Powering up FPGAs is not a trivial matter owing to very tight tolerances and it is a real challenge which even expert companies are facing difficulty in developing power solutions for these devices. The development kits offered are developed by Avnet and they gain experience in designing and building to help customers with the knowledge gained via developing those kits, and not like their competitors who do on a contract basis. Selling these kits is a main starting point for our customers. Major Design Challenges Power and memory are the two most common challenges faced by FPGA designers. There are always challenges in new technology and differential implementation of products. ZYNQ, an extensible all programmable processing platform from Xilinx, poses new challenges especially in the aspect of software. Most FPGA designers are not software experts, so now the organization is building a bigger team of expertise within the customer base who will work together to develop solutions. ZYNQ is very different from off the shelf products Avnet custom architects the devices which influence and affect the software. Avnet engages in alerting the customer at the designer phase itself as to positively influence his choice of components so that the client purchases robust devices which have good scalability and shelf life. Going by the Trends In the coming years, Avnet wants to focus on three emerging areas. The first vertical is that of alternative energies which is growing at a high rate; secondly, the security surveillance vertical and finally medical electronics vertical which is a fast growing field. Alternative energy is poised to grow drastically as India is struggling to meet demand with supply since there is a severe shortage of power facilities in India. One of the reports released by the Indian government says that India is going to double its expenditure on alternative energy on 2012-2020 as compared to 1994-2012. However, the opportunities in emerging markets will be known in two or three years after careful statistical analysis. Challenges for Expansion in India As the markets evolve and manufacturing activities increase, Avnet has also strengthened its presence in the market. The firm has not only grown considerably but also doubled revenue over the last five years. However, there are still a lot of challenges that the company faces while working with customers. To overcome such challenges, Avnet is armored with many robust processes. As an organizational policy, we take support from all of our global centers when in a fix. X-fest and Breaking Records The X-fest is a series of one-day training events for FPGA, ARM MCUs, DSP and embedded system developers. Owing to the large number of design houses, and the highest number of original equipment manufacturers in India, Avnet found Bangalore to be the best option to conduct the X-fest. The main focus of X-fest is Avnet's commitment to introduce new technologies and new applications for customers. The organization aims to showcase two applications namely Vivado Design Suite, a new IP and system-centric by Xilinx, Inc., and Zynq-7000 EPP. Vivado Design Suite provides a highly integrated design environment (IDE) with a completely new generation of system-to-IC level tools, while ZYNQ is an extensible all programmable processing platform from Xilinx. It combines a dual-core Cortex�- A9 MP Core processing system with Xilinx�s 28nm unified programmable FPGA fabric. This year the organization�s focus was on the new seven series. The fest that concluded in early August set a new country attendance record by attracting more than 300 engineers, more than doubling the number of attendees last time. ZYNQ and Vivado � The new technologies on the block ZYNQ opens up a new dimension because it offers a dual core inside the FPGA'S and with the programmable peripherals it opens up several applications that were not possible in the past. Customers are incorporating ZYNQ in the CCTV cameras as it allows them to integrate several devices into single ZYNQ, thus reducing form factor and design complexity. Vivado provides up to four time speed in terms of implementation and up to 15 times faster results. It offers better speed and more efficiency in device applications. In the express HTO, Avnet focuses on new technologies and collaborates with sponsors and multiple partners to provide and emphasize on system network Solutions. (As told to Vignesh A)