Engineering a talent pool in chip design

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: The semiconductor design industry that has been doing the Indian IT industry proud is facing a crisis in its rank and file – scarcity of talent. Set to touch a turnover target of $43 billion by 2015 from $3.2 billion in 2005 and ramping up to 780,000 professionals from the current 75,000 engineers, it now faces a harsh reality—not enough skilled engineers who can drive this growth story.

A problem that haunts many a sector within the larger IT industry, the talent crunch has wider ramifications, say experts. Where the focus of the IT industry has been on software services at the expense of product development and hardware design, the success story of the semiconductor design industry comprising VLSI (very large scale integration) design, board design and embedded software companies, has meant the coming of age of India’s design capabilities.

“The semiconductor industry is perhaps one of the few industries that really provides engineers opportunities to fully apply the knowledge that they have acquired during their studies, be it electrical sciences or computer science,” says Dr HV Ananda, Simplicity India MD.

The Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) estimates that engineering colleges are meeting only 20% of the industry demand for chip-design engineers. There is already a shortage of engineers possessing the right talent as global companies move design jobs to India and Indian design services’ firms expand. On the other hand, as the number of design start-ups and key research and development contributions from India increase, the country is set to emerge as a major design centre for integrated circuits (ICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and SoCs (system on a chip), say industry watchers.

Another trend will be the semiconductor and embedded products designed for India by Indian research and design centres. What this means is that the demand for skilled engineers will go up. Agrees Rahul Arya, marketing director, Cadence Design Systems India, “The issue is in terms of the number of readily employable engineers, rather than the number of engineers in real terms. Institutes have been churning out engineers but they lack industry exposure and are not ‘design-aware’. Hence there is a need for training and real-life design exposure before they can become productive.”