Design Your Career in Very Large Scale - VLSI

An article "Skilled manpower must chip in for semicon sector" from Financial Express:

Despite its huge potential, the semi-conductor industry in India is yet to pick up pace. The very large-scale integration (VLSI) design industry feels that the country needs to build an ecosystem to tap the emerging opportunities and the first move in that direction would be to create skilled manpower to support the growth.

For the record, the year 2008 was an inflection point in the global economic boom. However, emerging markets, including India, have limitless possibilities and opportunities for the growth of the industry.

Jaswinder S Ahuja, corporate VP and MD, Cadence Design Systems, and also president of VLSI Society of India, says there is a demand for application-driven innovation by talented engineers. Quoting a JP Morgan Research report, he says that while the US recorded a 1.4% growth and Europe 1.6%, emerging markets showed a growth of 5-7%. The important areas for the sector to tap would be education, energy, remote population and health verticals.

However, availability of skilled manpower and managing attrition is a huge challenge. Ahuja says the attrition rate compared to the three-year-ago period has increased by a few points, mainly due to MNC investments in India. This has opened up multiple opportunities, particularly in R&D, and there is a need for a fundamental makeover of engineering education. While there are only skilled 25,000 VLSI engineers at present, there would be a demand for 75,000 by 2015, says a Nasscom report. “The electronics industry is a sunrise industry now and a lot of opportunities are there to be exploited at the design, component and assembly levels. All these segments offer tremendous job creation potential for talent from the ITI level to the PhD level,” says JA Chowdary, chairman Talentsprint.

On a similar note, Neeraj Varma, country manager, sales, India, Australia and New Zealand, Xilinx, says that three years ago, the attrition rate in the semi-conductor industry was around 15-20%. The situation has improved marginally with the increase in the talent pool, to around 13-17% today. However, skilled talent that can cater to the specialised requirement of the industry continues to be a challenge.

“The IC design segment in India, which currently employs around 25,000 professionals , is expected to provide more than 75,000 jobs by 2015. Also, India's talent lies in hardware design and this offers tremendous growth potential for the industry,'' says Dasaradha R Gude, chairman, Soctronics. "We expect the VLSI and embedded industry to collectively employ about 7,50,000 professionals, with 6,80,000 jobs created by the embedded systems category alone," he adds.

According to a report by India Semiconductor Association (ISA) in April 2011, the semi-conductor industry in India employed a workforce of around 1,60,000 in 2010. The report estimated a CAGR of 20% to reach 2,30,000 by 2012. This anticipated growth is good news, but it does come with its own set of challenges. “While India’s availability of talent continues to be an advantage, the challenge that the semi-conductor industry in India has faced, and continues to face, is improving the young workforce’s productivity. With around 78% of graduates having a B Tech degree with no VLSI training, companies still have to spend considerable time in training fresh graduates. In particular, soft skills, management skills, product realisation experience as well as analog design skills are some talent-related challenges that the industry is facing,'' Ahuja points out.

“The hiring trends remain the same and opportunities abound for people with the specialised skill set needed by the semi-conductor industry. What has changed over the years is a general shift from hiring for front-level engineering jobs to people with deeper-level expertise, such as system level design, project management experience, et al. With regards to sourcing, we continue to face challenges as engineers graduating out of the colleges are not directly employable at present,'' says Varma.

The semi-conductor industry and the electronics ecosystem are waiting for a silver lining in the form of the National Policy on Electronics, which is expected to be formalised in in the first half of 2012. It aims at addressing the huge gap — estimated at $300 billion — between locally manufactured electronics and the consumer demand for electronics that we expect to see by 2020.

According to Ahuja, if immediate steps are not taken to address this gap, by 2020, electronics imports may far exceed oil imports. The NPE takes a holistic view of developing the Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) ecosystem with a view to bridging the demand-supply gap. It is not an exaggeration to say that the NPE will be a game changer; a huge injection of funds will fuel growth, provide impetus for new companies to enter, open manufacturing, create opportunities in education/training, etc.

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This article clearly explains that Semiconductor Industries will grow fast and there are plenty of opportunities for fresh electronics engineers who have been trained on VLSI Technology through professional development training courses offered by finishing schools like Maven Silicon.  So why don't you design your career in Very Large Scale? 

Sivakumar P R
CEO, Maven Silicon
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