India’s Electronics and IT ministry, MeiTY, stated that it aims to train more than 85,000 engineers in chip design and will expand a central chip design infrastructure to 120 universities across the country over the next five years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that India is investing heavily to train and skill young Indians for the 21st Century needs at SemiconIndia 2022. “India has a remarkable semiconductor design talent, with 20 percent of the world’s top semiconductor design engineers.” Nearly all of the top 25 semiconductor companies have R&D centers in India.
MeitY tested a pilot deployment in 2021 under the Special Manpower Development Programme for Chips to System Design. This enabled remote access to a centralized design facility at C-DAC by more than 50,000 students from 60 universities. It plans to make available a centralized chip-design infrastructure at C-DAC to enable 85000+ M.Tech, B.Tech, and Ph.D. students from 120 institutions in India to learn about the chip design field for the next five years.
MeitY, a centralized design facility at India Chip Centre (C DAC), claims the most sophisticated tools for the entire chip design cycle (i.e., Front-end design, Back-end design, PCB design & analysis, etc. For Digital, Analog, RF & Mixed Signal design, advanced nodes up to 7nm will be made available. Industry professionals can also take an instructor-led or online course on design flows for five years. To make the chip design infrastructure available at India Chip Centre (C-DAC), leading vendors from EDA (Electronic Design Automation), Electronic Computer-Aided Design(ECAD), IP Core, and the Design solutions Industry will be partnered.
The government is expecting several academic start-ups to mushroom in the country. They will cross the initial entry barriers and open the door for the country’s entrepreneurship/startup-led design & innovation ecosystem, making indigenous IP Cores (SoCs), Chips, Systems on Chips (SoCs), and Systems that can be used for various application areas such as 5G/IoT, AI/ ML, or Automotive & Mobility in India for the World.
