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Accenture has acquired Excelmax, a semiconductor consultancy that helps companies design chips for data center systems, consumer electronics and other products. 

Financial terms were not disclosed. 

Many devices can’t make do with an off-the-shelf processor. The reasons vary: the existing options on the market might not have every single feature that a device requires, or the unit economics might not be right because the supplier’s profit margin is baked into the price. As a result, a fairly significant number of hardware companies opt to develop custom chips for their products.

Designing a processor from scratch is a heavy lift even for a tech-savvy electronics maker. As a result, many companies going down the custom silicon route bring in external semiconductor talent to ease the engineering load. That’s where chip design consultancies such as Excelmax, the firm Accenture has acquired, come into the picture.

Bengaluru-based Excelmax was founded in 2019 by former senior engineers from Intel, Texas Instruments and other major chip industry players. The consultancy’s approximately 450 professionals help clients develop semiconductors for data center gear, vehicles, telecommunications equipment, consumer devices and a range of other products.

Notably, developing silicon for AI hardware is also among Excelmax’s focus areas. Spending on machine learning equipment such as GPU servers has soared in recent years thanks to the rise of LLMs. There are several dozen venture-backed startups trying to take on Nvidia with their own AI chips, while a growing number of large tech firms are also investing in custom LLM accelerators. As a result, demand abounds for the kind of AI chip design expertise that Excelmax offers in its menu of consulting services. 

Technical considerations

One reason companies often hire a consultancy to help with chip projects is that developing a processor requires highly specialized knowledge. Even if a hardware vendor has an in-house chip development team, its engineers may not be well-versed in every single technical aspect of every single semiconductor project. Hiring a consultancy is often a faster way of filling such knowledge gaps than recruiting a new specialist engineering team. 

In other cases, a company’s chip team might simply be too busy to take on a new project. Offloading the work to an external consultancy removes the need to delay development until the in-house engineers wrap up their existing assignments.

In its announcement of the acquisition, Accenture stated that Excelmax provides its services with “full turnkey execution.” We reached out to the company for more information on exactly what chip design tasks Excelmax helps with during client engagements. Here’s how Ram Ramalingam, the Platform Engineering and Intelligent Edge lead at Accenture Technology, explained it:

“Turnkey refers to a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that covers the entire design and manufacturing process for custom integrated circuits (ICs) or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which include physical design, design verification, prototyping and testing for chip design.”

The initial stretch of the chip development process focuses on so-called logic design. In this project phase, engineers develop a relatively abstract blueprint of a processor that describes high-level details such as how data should move among its circuits and what computations will be performed on this data. Once the logic design is ready, the project moves to what’s known as the physical design phase. “Physical design is a specialized engineering discipline within the overall semiconductor design flow. It refers to the process of converting a digital circuit design into a physical layout that can be manufactured as a semiconductor chip,” Ramalingam explained. “This requires expertise in electronic design automation (EDA) tools and Excelmax brings specialized skills in this area.”

Another important aspect of the chip design workflow is design verification, an area where Excelmax is active in as well according to Accenture. “Verification services in silicon design refer to the process of thoroughly testing and validating the design at various stages which includes design, physical and reliability testing,” Ramalingam stated. “Again, this requires specialized skills and an understanding of design tools. Excelmax has dedicated talent with a focus on these services.” 

The acquisition of Excelmax comes about two years after Accenture’s last purchase in the chip services market. In 2022, the professional services giant bought XtremeEDA, a Canadian silicon design consultancy. The latter firm specialized in helping clients develop semiconductor products for the consumer, edge computing and data center markets. Accenture gained about 40 engineers and other technical professionals through the transaction.

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