Indian designer shortage hits hard at VLSI Design Conference

By Chitra Giridhar, Contributing Writer -- Electronic Business, 2/6/2007

Gather hundreds of chip designers and engineering managers in one location in Bangalore, India, and you will also find eager tech company executives trying to recruit scarce talent.

That was the scene at the recent 20th International Conference on VLSI Design.

"Companies such as Sasken have expressed interest in our solutions. This event has been helpful for securing inquiries," says Lauro Rizzatti, vice president of worldwide marketing for EVE, headquartered in France.

EVE started operations in India in December 2006 and is now recruiting technical personnel for a planned development center there. The company has an agreement with Ahmedabad-headquartered eInfochips to develop a synthesizable transactor library for EVE's ZeBu emulation platform.

Another business entity looking to make it big in India is the Tanner EDA division of Tanner Research. "We think this conference and exhibition has been helpful in promoting our company and will help us find a partner in India," says Rajinder Jit Singh, Tanner's regional manager for South Asia. The company is looking at setting up a support-and-development center in India within the next few months.

More than 48 companies participated in the exhibition that ran concurrently with the conference. "If space had not been a constraint, the number of booths would have gone up to 80," says Rajiv Kapur, managing director of LSI Logic India, who chaired the exhibits and sponsorships. The VLSI event attracted more than 1,350 delegates, including 100 foreign delegates. The theme of the event (which has the status of an IEEE conference) revolved around challenges in nanometer design.

"The focus of this event is to enhance ideas and improve the local knowledgebase," says Apurva Kalia, general chair of the conference. "With more companies moving toward 65-nanometer and lower geometries, completely new design paradigms and tools are needed," he observes.

Because many cutting-edge nanometer design and verification flows are being defined at companies in India, the conference attracted substantial attention among the local community of design engineers.

"We are on the cutting edge of power analysis and want to make sure that when customers tape out, the chips work. Some of our customers are already working in 45 nanometer," says Aveek Sarkar, vice president of Product Engineering and Support, Apache Design Solutions. That company is in the process of assembling an R&D team in Bangalore and plans to set up operations in Hyderabad too, to support one of its clients.

Qualcomm, whose Bangalore design center does cutting-edge VLSI chip set designs, has already rolled out two chip sets since the company acquired Spike Technologies in 2004. The company now plans to launch an India-specific low-cost chip set for mobile handsets. Sheetal Chittawar, senior program manager, Qualcomm Bangalore, says the conference helps companies identify potential partners and showcases designs done in India.

Silicon Hive, a worldwide supplier of semiconductor intellectual property and a subsidiary of Royal Philips Electronics, announced that it will open an office in Bangalore.

Ramanathan Sethuraman, director of Bangalore operations for Silicon Hive, says the company will focus on new systems and applications software partnerships. Silicon Hive already has a partnership with Allgo Embedded Systems, based in Bangalore, for developing a video-signal-processing demonstration system. Sethuraman wants to develop five such partnerships and says he is hopeful that the event will raise the profile of his company among conference attendees. Silicon Hive plans to start operations in March 2007 and will be setting up an engineering design and development center in Bangalore.

In his keynote speech, Wim Roelandts, president and CEO of Xilinx, talked about innovation—and the challenges of creating a supportive environment. He exhorted Indian companies not to limit their innovation to engineering but to go beyond it by promoting a people-centric culture. Xilinx, which has a large development center in Hyderabad, employs 75 people there for IP core development and design verification.

Scarcity of talent prevails

If industry predictions hold true, India's design industry will employ 780,000 people by 2015. But the overriding challenge confronting companies seeking to expand semiconductor design activities in India is the supply-and-demand gap for competent professionals.

The industry, even at its current growth level, will need 10 to 12 times the current supply of manpower, observes J. Parthasarathy, director of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), Bangalore.

"One reason for not opening a development center in India is the dearth of talent. Finding the right people is tough," admits Razak Mohammadali, product marketing manager, Asia Pacific, Altera Semiconductor India. The company started a university program two years ago and in 2004 set up a lab in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as a resource center.

To address the talent shortage, STPI is coordinating with the heads of technical universities to integrate VLSI design skills into the regular engineering curriculum. "We are also talking to universities in Singapore and Israel about support and collaboration," Parthasarathy says.

But it is not just the quantity of engineers that worries the design company honchos; it is also the quality and skills. "Educational institutions focus largely on linear thinking. They have to focus on lateral thinking if innovation is to happen," observes Ranjan Acharya, corporate VP–HR at Wipro.

In response to this conundrum, the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, is running an experimental postgraduate program that emphasizes hardware and software engineering equally, says Professor G. N. Srinivasa Prasanna.