With as many as five lakh engineers passing out every year, the academia responsible for technical training has to implement radical steps to redress the skill imbalance. GH Rao, corporate V-P and head, engineering and R&D services, HCL technologies, in an interview with FE?s S Saroj Kumar, talks about critical issues like the widespread availability of electronic design automation (EDA) tools will play a crucial role in ushering in a talent ecosystem. Excerpts:
Do you think the current training centres are enough to address the market requirements?
The country?s differentiator in comparison to China and Taiwan is our current qualitative and quantitative strength in chip design. According to F&S and the recent Nasscom Booz study, India?s share in global product designs has doubled over the last five years. In terms of complexity of chip design, we are increasingly seeing 10 million plus gate ASIC design requests from our customers, a 200% to 300% increase from 5 years ago. Top engineering colleges are offering masters in VLSI design as a proper course and this will increase the quality of engineering talent. Even though enough raw talent is available in the country, there is a gap in required skills between classrooms and industry.
Key challenges that needs to be addressed in the supply side are: widespread availability of high-end EDA tools at academic and training level. EDA tools are expensive and early access of tools is crucial to develop engineering talent; training will provide the basic knowledge of tools & chip design to engineers. However, engineers need a prolonged live project experience to be ready for end-to-end chip design. Training institutes may not be able to provide opportunities like this to the students.
What are the sectors that will gobble up new chip designs?
There are two major growth drivers for new chip designs — global demand and domestic demand.
Domestic demand will be driven by fast growth in consumer and personal electronics, white goods, automotive and personal medical devices. The products for Indian market will need custom chip designs not only to address price sensitivity issues but also additional factors like operating in extreme conditions, ease of use and UI issues. At a global level, two major trends are driving new chip designs: increased electronic content in devices enabling real time device monitoring, higher operational efficiency and comfort in verticals like automotive, medical electronics and telecom.
Can India come close to Taiwan in competition in future? What is your take on it?
Taiwan focused on developing an ecosystem of original design manufacturer. The country encouraged both chip design and manufacturing through incentives and private public partnership. India has a very robust design ecosystem but doesn?t have the manufacturing and productisation ecosystem to compete with Taiwan, limiting out competitiveness to chip designing.
While Taiwan will continue to enjoy the competitive edge for quite a while, India can reduce the gap over the next few years by leveraging on its strengths.
Do you think e-learning integrated with web 2.0 and collaborative learning could address the industry needs?
Levering web 2.0 technologies and collaborative learning are the first steps to address the ever widening demand-supply gap for chip designers. In addition, increased industry academicia partnership is also required to educate and encourage engineers to follow chip design as a career option during their engineering courses. This includes campus training programmes, research funding and in-company training for students and faculty.
