Ahmedabad: With the first chip expected to come out of Micron’s Gujarat plant next year, the state is poised to contribute to India’s semiconductor story. Experts estimate that with the expansion of manufacturing and design facilities in India, the sector requires about 30,000 trained personnel. However, the state will only produce about 600 engineers annually in addition to ITI/diploma holders for the sector.
At the 33rd IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS), organised for the first time in the city, experts stressed the need for a long-term vision for the sector and much deeper academia-industry integration.
Dr Satya Gupta, president of the VLSI Society of India, who is part of the event concluding on Dec 20, said that the sector’s requirement for both design and manufacturing is about 30,000 trained personnel. “Gujarat currently has four projects in the sector with different focal areas, from design to packaging. It is a major opportunity for local talent, but the need of the hour is to ensure the quantity and quality of human resources,” he said.
Sudhir Naik, VP (corporate affairs) at eInfochips, said that the sector has developed by leaps and bounds in the past few years and is poised for exponential growth. “I believe there is a rise in courses offered by academia and industry participation in course design and training,” he said on the sidelines of the event.
Sameer Chillarige, software engineering director at Cadence Design Systems, who was also the co-chair of the ATS event along with Prof Usha Mehta of Nirma University, stressed the technical aspect of training. “We need training in electronic design automation (EDA) software at college level and projects by these students for exposure to different aspects of design to manufacturing. While the industry is moving towards 2-nanometre chips globally, there is nothing wrong with chips in the 90-120 nanometre range where India can start and then scale up,” he said.
TOI talked to state-based educational institutes where experts said that the majority of specialised courses started in the past 1.5 years, but the integration of specialised modules or capsule courses for electronics and communication (E&C) and electronics engineering is seen as the way to cater to the growing demand. Prof Rajul Gajjar, vice chancellor of GTU, said that the university is working towards both signal processing and VLSI aspects.
“State-based institutions have MoUs with international organisations and leading manufacturers for hands-on training and exposure, as many have also been to the manufacturing facilities abroad.
The courses are often directly designed by the companies that help the students,” she said. Several educational institutes have either started offering specialised courses in the domain or have introduced modules for other disciplines where the number of seats has increased significantly in the past two academic years, said experts.
The ATS, attracting semiconductor sector experts from across the globe, discussed topics such as improving the quality and efficiency of chips, built-in self-test, design verification and validation, system on a chip test, and automatic test pattern generation, among others.