Chip designers, VTU join hands

Semiconductor firms here, through two of their trade bodies, have launched a pilot programme to collaborate with important engineering varsities to increase the number of industry-ready recruits.

The India Semiconductor Association (ISA) and the VLSI Society of India (VSI), on Wednesday, entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Visveswaraya Technological University (VTU) to create a joint forum that would foster student and faculty training, and faculty research in areas key to the semiconductor industry.

The pilot programme will run in five centres and colleges affiliated to the VTU, Biswadip Mitra, president of VSI and Balaveera Reddy, vice chancellor of VTU told reporters here.

Websites, of VTU's e-learning initiative and the ISA, will be used to run this pilot, called the University Gateway Initiative (UGI). Semiconductor firms will make available to the students a large database of information, projects and courses through these portals.

The UGI is initially targeting postgraduate students in fields such sa VLSI design, who are potential recruits. But, industry experts will also play a greater role in deciding curricula for semiconductor related courses at the undergraduate level.

"The idea is to get the industry to support a student-project-to-Silicon initiative," Satya Gupta, an office bearer of ISA said. Faculty exchange programmes, and a more integrated effort to find industry mentors for prospective recruits will also be built into the UGI, over time.

Gupta added that the trade bodies were aiming to engage some 30 engineering colleges across the country starting later this year, to train some 1,500 post graduate students and 100 teachers in the latest in areas such as very large scale integration, analog signals and radio frequency design.

Mitra, managing director of Texas Instruments India, said, analog and RF design are examples of subjects that require "years of training, so through this collaboration, even if we can cut down the basic training by half, it will be great."

Today, the semiconductor industry here recruits only between 5 per cent and 15 per cent of its staff from the campuses. Most recruits, for a given firm, will come from hiring them away from competition. The new initiative is unlikely to address that issue in the short term, but over the years it could create a reliable source of good entry level engineers.

The fledgling semiconductor industry in the country will need more of them as it seeks to plug the gaps in the "eco-system" spanning concept to tape out to one day manufacture of semiconductor chips.