Designs on the future

Deepika Janardhan / Mumbai

After IT-enabled services, the Indian IT industry is chanting a new mantra: chip design. Nasscom predictions that the industry will grow to $808 million by 2005 have all the more raised expectations. Research studies have further corroborated that the semiconductor industry can thrive in India. Faced with recession and overwhelming costs of construction, maintenance and equipment, global semiconductor companies decided to outsource the manufacturing of chips. Countries like India—with its talented work force, low cost and basic skill sets capturing a significant proportion of the emerging opportunity of chip design—were the obvious choice.

So, on the one hand, there were multinational companies like Intel and Texas Instruments setting up chip design centres in India. On the other hand, more and more semiconductor companies and OEM organisations began to outsource the development of complex technologies such as system-on-chip to Indian start-ups and established companies with design expertise.

Sanjay Bhan, manager-staffing, Texas Instruments (TI), says, “All major semiconductor companies have opened up shop here and are beginning to do more and more chip design. Companies such as TI have already demonstrated that we can achieve chip design excellence. Services companies as such are getting more and more into chip design services.”

TI, the first semiconductor major to establish an R&D centre in India in 1985, started the trend, soon to be followed by companies like Analog Devices and National Semiconductor. Motorola, IBM, Cisco, Ishoni Networks, Cypress Semiconductor and Sun followed suit. Besides these, there are software service players like HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro and several Indian startups like Arasan Chip, Bluefont Technologies, Cradle Technologies, Sasken, Moschip, MindTree Consulting and Indra Net-works among others hoping to partake from the $150 million Indian chip design industry.

Growing demand

With chips and processors now used in everything from computers and complex electronic gadgets to everyday appliances, the demand for semiconductor content in consumer electronics is continually growing.

Other factors that have influenced the demand for chip design according to Nasscom are: The return of the enterprise PC buyer, along with the continuation of stable consumer and emerging market demand; return of the communications infrastructure buyer and wireless handset growth in units and semiconductor content. Nasscom in fact is so bullish about this space, it believes the semiconductor design space in India is at the same stage as IT services a decade ago.

Pratul Shroff, CEO, eInfochips, an Ahmedabad-based chip design and verification firm, agrees, “We believe this will be the fastest growing segment over the next five years.”

Wanted chip designers

It is not surprising that demand for chip designers has shot up in the last two years. And considering the target of $1 billion in revenues in chip-design exports by 2004 set by the Indian government, India would need to produce almost 5,000 chip designers every year, as against the current output of 400 chip designers, according to a report brought out by Tata Consultancy Services.

According to a research based on primary and secondary data collected by Nasscom to ascertain manpower skill requirements in the Indian software sector, demand for EDA/ASIC/VLSI skills are growing rapidly and account for 5 percent of the total job openings in the Indian IT industry. (The survey was conducted from June to September 2002 across leading job websites, recruitment advertisements in the print media and a dipstick survey among 20 HR professionals in the Indian software sector.)

Says Bhan, “While the last decade established India as a software power house, this decade India has a unique opportunity of establishing itself as a chip design powerhouse. In short, the career prospects are very bright.” So bright that the scarcity of design engineers is now a cause for concern. Since chip design is relatively nascent industry in India, awareness of the potential opportunity therein has been a major stumbling block.

Mohnish Shah of Indra Networks explains, “There is a shortage of experienced chip design engineers, because the industry is very new.” It hasn’t been around long enough to produce experienced engineers.” Generally, experienced engineers would be returning NRIs, he adds.

Chip design training

To deal with the dearth of chip designers some companies are tying up with institutes offering training in chip design. Take eInfochips for instance. The company has tied up with the Calorex Institute of Technology that offers a diploma in VLSI design (an 18-week course costing Rs 45,000). Besides, the short-term courses in Verilog HDL and VHDL and FPGA, the fee, for which varies from Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000.

Institutes like CDAC offer diplomas in VLSI design, circuit/layout design, verification, and logic design. “All IITs have MTech level specialisation in Micro-electronics/VLSI design,” adds Bhan.

However, Mohnish Shah of Indra Networks points out, “The problem with most private institutes is that they are not selective in their enrolment process. Therefore, they turn out many graduates who really don’t have the aptitude for this field in the first place.”

To deal with this problem, most institutes have set up eligibility criteria to enroll students. Calorex, for instance, will accept only candidates who are a BE (Electronics, Computers, Electrical, IC or EC) or MSc Electronics, with adequate knowledge in basic electronics, digital electronics, microprocessor and microcomputer.

Recruitment scenario

While there is no agreement over whether companies prefer hiring out of institutes or recruiting fresh engineers and training them, wannabe chip designers may consider taking up a certification course to gain some exposure to the skills required. Salaries may also vary accordingly.

“Time-to-market was always an issue in the high-tech industry and a company needs to ramp up the operation either for quicker time-to-market or higher revenue in the case of consulting companies. Hence there was little option of training manpower until a little while ago,” explains Shroff. Off late however, he adds, the emerging trend is for companies to recruit fresh engineers and train them.

The basic skill requirements would then vary depending on the domain that one desires to specialise in, but in general strong background in electrical/electronics engineering and computer engineering is essential. “Since the advances in VLSI happen at a rapid pace, ability to quickly and continuously learn is a must,” says Bhan.

In terms of specific skills, knowledge in following areas is required: digital design fundamentals, VHDL/Verilog, simulation and synthesis tools, computer architecture. Some specialised area would require additional skills—for example, mixed signal design, which requires analog design skills as well.

But for the IT industry, more worrying than the dearth of chip designers is the fact that there are not enough institutes to offer training in chip design. Nasscom believes that the focus on IT in education institutions needs to be upgraded to enable Indian companies to further enhance their global competitiveness. Only a handful of engineering colleges have introduced engineering design in their curricula. The organisation is actively working with the Ministry of HRD and nine engineering colleges to serve as a key link between market requirements and skills imparted through the formal education system.

Researchers say that India trains only 350 microelectronics engineers every year, as compared to the requirement of over 3,500 per year. Hyperbole? May be or may be not. But, the good news is: companies are hiring.Box: