Accenture buys Indian chip design firm to expand semiconductor smarts

450 Excelmax Technologies employees to get new badges

Global professional services company Accenture on Monday announced the acquisition of India-based semiconductor design services provider Excelmax Technologies.

"The acquisition further enhances Accenture's growing silicon design and engineering capabilities," explained Accenture in a canned statement.

Bangalore-based Excelmax specializes in very large scale integration (VLSI) and offers a range of services – including development and design of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), embedded systems, and static timing analysis. By purchasing the biz, Accenture gains 450 employees who work across emulation, automotive, physical design, analog, logic design and verification.

Karthik Narain, Accenture's group chief executive – technology, opined that the addition of Excelmax "enhances our expertise across every aspect of silicon design and development."

Given that few people are even aware Accenture has a dedicated silicon services unit – or, more verbosely,"team-based managed services for expert ASIC and SoC development" – The Reg wrote to the consulting firm to better understand its current structure and headcount.

The spokesperson told us it's offered such services since 2018. Accenture's ASIC engineering manager has been onboard at Accenture Research building a "design integration team based on client need" since June 2020.

In 2022, Accenture acquired another silicon design services outfit: Ottawa-based XtremeEDA.

The Canadian biz specialized in FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) design, ASIC design, and verification services – including those used in consumer devices, cloud datacenters, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) computational platforms to enable edge AI deployment.

That acquisition added 40 chip professionals "working across industries including software and platform, telecommunications, consumer products, avionics and defense" to Accenture Cloud First, according to Accenture.

Accenture is not the only outfit shopping for Indian silicon design talent: local construction and manufacturing firm Larsen & Toubro yesterday announced [PDF] the acquisition of startup SiliConch Systems – a developer of power delivery and datapath tech for the USB-C ecosystem. ®