India isn’t a semiconductor manufacturing nation. But is one of the leading countries with an exceptional semiconductor design talent pool that makes India up to 20% of the world’s semiconductor design engineers. Over one lakh VLSI Design Engineers in India are largely working in global semiconductor companies and domestic design service companies, and are involved in cutting edge chips as part of the global teams and independently as well.

No wonder Muthukrishnan C, CEO of Semiconductor Fabless Accelerator Lab (SFAL) believes the Indian design engineers are very skilled and competent and rates them 9 on a scale of 10. “Through MNC design centres, Indian engineers impact every complex IC/ASIC/SoC done in the world today in some form or the other. Indian engineers are involved in every stage of the design process - from Specifications to Architecture, Design and Physical Implementation to Design and Physical verification and all the way up to Manufacturing support as well as post-Si(Manufacturing) Testing and Qualification.” He says he gave Indian design engineers one point less only because ‘we must have room for improvements!’

Acknowledged worldwide, back in 2005, even Jen-Hsun Huang, the then president and CEO of NVIDIA Corporation had told EE Times in an interview that the company knows from experience that India is home to some of the world's brightest engineers. Many of NVIDIA’s top employees were originally from there. Recently, the Indian arm of Japan-based Rakuten announced its plan to hire 1,000 junior, mid-level engineers in the next 12-18 months. And the American fabless company Qualcomm is rumoured to be creating jobs for about 8,700 professionals in the country. This only shows the talent the world is scouting for in India. “India has demonstrated capabilities and a talent ecosystem in semiconductor design services. India has been a preferred destination to set up offshore design and engineering capability centres for several large semiconductor OEMs. Capability centres in India have been at the forefront of driving innovation in semiconductor products at a global scale, which is also evident from the number of patents filed by the semiconductor OEMs in India,” says P. N. Sudarshan, Partner and TMT Industry Leader, Deloitte India.

But while the digital design skills are at par globally, Satya Gupta, President of VSLI Society says, “high-end RF and Analog design skills could be improved. Skills in the areas of New Product conceptualisation, Product marketing need improvement and increased focus.”
Source: BusinessToday