Okonomiyaki: Japanese dish for Indian Taste Buds

There was a time when I used to hate Japanese food. Over the years, I have slowly started acquiring a taste for it. Thanks to the numerous business trips to Japan.

This time around I had a very nice dish called Okonomiyaki. One of our local distributors in Japan, took us to this traditional Japanese place. Each table has a gas heated plate in the middle of the table. When you order Okonomiyaki, you are supplied with a mixture of items like egg, some veggies (mainly cabbage), french onions and mixed with some batter. You mix the whole mixture until it becomes viscous enough to hold up almost like a dough. After applying some oil to the heating pan, you pour the mix onto the heating pan to make thick crepe and let it cook for around 5 mins.  Then you turn it over and let the other side cook for a few minutes. What you end up with is something that almost looks like a super thick crepe. Then you apply some condiments to it before you eat it. For Indians, this dish can be called a close cousin to the south indian Uthappam.

If you are in Japan and looking for good vegetarian options suggest going to an Okonomiyaki place. The same Okonomiyaki heating pan can also be used to grill other items like veggies, potatoes and even noodles.

In San Jose Bay Area, there is a place called Izakaya Japanese restaraunt in North First street that apparently serves Okonomiyake, but I have never tried it myself. I will try it pretty soon and update my blog about my experience.

Solar Fabs in India

The other day after writing my previous blog on India’s latest incentive policy semiconductor fabs, I was wondering that for the short term there might not be that much scope for chip fabs. This is because the current world demand is being served by the fabs in US and Asia. With so many chip fabs coming up in China, it will be very tough for India to break the entry barrier. Attracting Solar fabs instead might be a wise idea mainly due to 2 reasons: 1. Competition from China and Taiwan would be lesser; 2. Moreover the solar cells is a capacity limited market right now: Demand exceeds supply. 

India creates incentives for Semiconductor Fabs

A step in the right direction: The Indian government is finally headed towards creating incentives for Semiconductor fabs. To really make this dream a reality the government should ensure that these SEZs also need to provide required infrastructure (uninterrupted power and other amenities). The dream will remain a dream if they cannot attract Engineering talent (NRI Engineers) back into the country. The government also needs to ensure these SEZs will attract and incentivize non-residential Indians back to their Motherland (ex-pats). For this, they need to provide good environmental and residential infrastructure. They need top class schools that would match standards with those in developed countries.

This is a step in the right direction for the overall Indian economy since this will attract foreign direct investment that will create jobs for a huge non-technical population also. Moreover, this investment is not as liquid as investing in services industry or the stock market. It is easier for MNCs to pull-back from services industry but difficult to pull back from investment in manufacturing (fabs). The semiconductor fab industry is part of a huge food chain. So this will trigger investment from other parts of the food chain. 

India is also a huge market for semiconductor goods. The government should provide special incentives for fabs that produce chips that go into products that are sold inside India.  

Next week, I will be flying to the UK to meet some of our customers. Hopefully I will find time during my flight to complete the HDMI story that is still pending completion.   

HDMI: Do we really need a multi-gigabit connection between our TVs and Set-top box?

I work on chips that are used as interconnect chips for broadcast video equipment. The video is transported within the studio environment (example: camera to production truck) in an uncompressed format for obvious reasons, quality & to not spend resources on compression and decompression since it impacts latency, power and consumes time. The interface used by equipment in a studio to handle digital video is called Serial Digital Interface (SDI). The article that Vikas and I wrote on SDI gives a pretty in depth background on fundamentals of studio quality video and goes in-depth on how to build an SDI interface. It also goes into current market dynamics in the studio broadcast world.

Getting back to the point, digital video signals need to maintain a high quality inside a studio. But unfortunately they cannot be transmitted to TV viewers like us at the same bit rate at which they were captured in the studio. Before they get shipped out of the door for broadcast they need to be compressed since the transmission medium connecting to the consumer premises is usually bandwidth limited (can only handle bit rates in the tens of Mbps) . The transmission to consumer premises is usually over-the-air using RF modulation or digital wireline transmission using cable and/or optics. The bandwidth for all these media is extremely limited. With IPTV taking off, broadcast video signals will be delivered to your home through a DSL line or Cable network at a BW of less than 10 Mbps per link.  The signal captured at extremely good quality in the studio (at approxiamtely 1.5Gbps rates for high definition and 270Mbps for standard definition) is compressed to a signal of very low bit-rate (any where from 1 Mbps to 20 Mbps) using either MPEG2 orMPEG4 and delivered to your home. All MPEG schemes are lossy compression schemes, ie, the compression gets rid of redundant information and also reduces amount of information transmitted (bits used) for visually unnoticeable characteristics of the video image. For a given compression scheme, more the amount of compression, poorer the quality of the reconstructed video at the destination. The video getting into your set-top box is usually in the range of ones to tens of Mbps per channel.

HDMI is a high BW connection between a TV peripheral (set-top box, DVD player or XBox) with a fairly expensive cable (cable can cost upto $100 for the seemingly higher quality ones) . HDMI transmits uncompressed/decompressed video from TV media peripherals to the TV. One of the main functions of the set-top box is to decompress (MPEG2 decode) the incoming compressed video and display it on your TV. In new set-top boxes (especially the HDTV ones), the decompressed data from the set-top box is delivered to TV through an optional HDMI connection. Given that lot of new TVs already have MPEG2 decoders built-in (for ATSC decoding) why can’t the set-top box transmit the video to the display in compressed format and let the TV decode the MPEG2 data before display. From a solution standpoint, you would then replace an expensive cable with a cheap cable followed by a piece of silicon device (MPEG2 decoder) which when manufactured in volume would cost way lower than the cost incurred to buy the HDMI cables. This might also remove the need for a stand-alone set-top box, it could just be integrated into the TV by adding a few more chips to the TV board. If the data is delivered compressed through out the video distribution network why is it not carried all the way into the TV set at the reduced bit-rate. If you compare two methods of interconnect, set-top box delivering decoded data at high datarates to the TV and TV decoding the MPEG2 data directly, there would be no difference in the quality of the display. Then why has HDMI been so succesful and created so much buzz? 

I will try to answer this in my next blog. I will also try to provide a few other alternative interconnections that TV and set-top box industry should consider in a subsequent blog (which are not standardized or popular yet but makes logical sense from a cost standpoint).

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What’s hot today is not tomorrow!

I was reading Gokul’s post on how things that were hot once could get “boring” eventually. This happens very commonly to tech professionals in any industry.

I guess any application, once it hits mainstream market and starts seeing cycles of cost reductions will eventually get commoditized. With so much R&D money invested by big corporations things become standardized and will be perceived as commonplace or perhaps “boring”. This is what happened to PC hardware industryin late 90s, networking gear in 2000s. It happens a lot in semiconductor industry as well. When I entered the semiconductor industry I got the chance to work on High Speed Serial I/O which was considered state of the art during that time. Now Serial I/O IP is available for sale by multiple vendors and it is headed towards the direction of becoming a commodity.

When things get “boring”, I guess you can take two routes: 1. Get into a different field that requires most of your skillset but still is not commoditized and has lot of open challenges; or 2. Move up the value chain in your field/domain so that you are working on where the challenges and fortune lie in your industry. (Examples:  Adding more services on the top of your infrastructure, adding more software features to your existing hardware, adding applications to your solution that are complementary so that you provide a broader portfolio of products, or just sheer improve the horsepower/performance of your current app if there is a market need for it) 

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Should my Tech Blog be separate?

There is my personal side and the way I view things that are happening in the world, which I love writing about and there is also the tech world which I am passionate about from a professional stand-point. I am debatting if I should keep all my tech material confined to a separate blog mainly geared towards my profession. The number of tech blog entries is going to be lesser and the content is going to be much more in-depth just focussing on narrow field. Comments welcome!

Flights, Bags and Singapore Airlines

I am back and already buried in the world of work. Still trying to cope with my jetlag. My sleeping patterns have not completely settled down yet. It is 5:00 am here and I have been up for almost a couple of hours.

Backing off to where I stopped in my previous blog, my flight back to San Francisco was pretty good. My bags did show up at SFO as scheduled.  My overall experience with Singapore Airlines has always been relatively way better than my experiences with other airlines. The inflight service is one of the best. On my way out to India, I was on a middle seat and I requested one of the crew members for an Aisle seat. The crew member was very courteous and hooked me up with an Aisle seat. The flights were always on time, food was pretty good and no lost/delayed luggage. What else do you need on a 19 hr flight?  

Back to the Bay

I will be flying back tonight. I have a tight connection at Singapore (I have 90 mins in between flights and I need to switch terminals). I will be fortunate if I make it on time to the connection. It will be a miracle if my bags make it all the way to San Francisco on time.

I have a huge list of things that I could chose from to do during the next 24 hrs of travel:

1. Read “Good to Great”. Been reading this for a while. For people who are dreaming to become entrepreneurs or getting to the exec management level and is interested in becoming CEOs, a must read. It compares some good companies that have grown at moderate rates to great companies that have grown at substantially high rates. It does lot of analysis on data as well takes opinions from the good and great companies and tries to articulate ”what is missing” in the good companies compared to the great companies. 

2. Watch the in flight entertainment in the flight.

3. Work. I have some work related docs to review.

4. Shop at the Narita airport. I have 4 hour break in Tokyo.

5. Read the latest issue of Outlook Business or Business World. I find Indian business magazines to have better content than business magazines in the US. Maybe I am biased, but I like the indian ones better.  

6. Meditate during the flight or simply go to sleep.

Hopefully, the steam will not die out as soon as I get back. I will continue blogging. This trip to Chennai has been great. Got back in touch with a whole bunch of old friends and expanded my network in Chennai. And found a new hobby, Blogging.  

My first Tech Blog – Measuring BER for serial links

One of our customers once asked me, how to measure BER for a serial NRZ data communication link with clock and data recovery. It turns out that bit errors are caused due to multiple reasons, mostly random. Moreover, even though one has a way to detect and count the number of errors over a given period of time how can one predict the future BER given the random nature of errors. Given such a scenario how can one reliably measure the BER of a link. The result of the research I did to answer this question was a technical article:

http://www.analogzone.com/nett1003.pdf

Subway Chennai – Quick and Easy Subs with an Indian touch

I met with Gokul at Subway in Khader Nawaz Khan road in Nungambakkam a couple of days back for lunch. They have ensured that looks, ambience and furniture match any Subway that you would find anywhere in the world. The major difference was in the menu: you can find an Indian touch to some items in the menu (like Chicken Tikka). For vegetarians, the Subways in US offer the Veggie Delight and Veggie Patty sub. The subway here also offers the standard Veggie Delight as well as a patty version: Aloo patty. The patty tasted very Indian and I am sure the Indian taste buds that have been used to Subs in US will love this version of the Veggie Patty. The other ingredients and condiments available were exactly the same (tomato, lettuce, onions, olives, etc). The bread varieties were also the same (Italian, wheat, parmesan oregano, etc). I ordered a 6-inch Aloo patty. As far as the sauces go, they had a flyer posted with the suggested sauces for each type of sub and mustard was listed as the recommended sauce for Aloo patty. I always hated mustard with any Sub and decided to try a different one. I was offered mint Mayo, which I believe is the standard Mayonnaise mixed with mint chutney. Without hesitation I went for that one. Once my sub was wrapped, I went to the cash counter and was asked for my choice of a drink. The only options available were the standard carbonated soda-types. This totally goes against the “eat healthy” propaganda pushed by Subway. Of course, the Subways in the US offer sodas as well but they do offer a few choices of bottled juices. The people who have a good appetite for Subs, please note that the size of the bread here is easily 30% smaller than what you might find in the US. If you are real hungry, you should go for a foot-long (12-inch). I enjoyed my highly Indianized sub, the presence of Aloo and mint amidst the standard American sub did taste good, the bread was pretty fresh and soft as well. The same place also has a small ice-cream parlour for a quick dessert after your meal.

If you have a laptop and would like to get connected, there is free wi-fi. I don’t think I have found this in any Subway in the US yet.

Next one on my list is Residency Towers Buffet. Gosh, seems like this blog is becoming a restaraunt review blog. Hopefully, once I am done with my vacation I will start writing more mainstream topics.