Cadence looks to continue adding employees for India unit at 8-10% CAGR

India head Jaswinder Ahuja says engineers feel their prospects in India are as good as elsewhere in the world

Cadence Design Systems’ India arm will continue to grow its employee count in the country by 8-10 per cent on a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) through both organic and inorganic routes, the company’s India managing director and corporate vice-president Jaswinder Ahuja said. 

“The industry is experiencing strong growth, with a CAGR well above 10 per cent. But what's notable is that our India operations have seen disproportionate growth compared to our global headcount, which highlights just how significantly India has become a key growth driver,” Ahuja said. 

The San Jose, California-headquartered company, which is one of the world’s largest makers and suppliers of semiconductor and electronics design software, electronic design automation (EDA) tools and services, as well as chip verification platforms, has about 4,200 employees in India, and accounts for 30 per cent of Cadence’s global workforce. 

The company started operations in India in 1987 when it acquired Gateway Design Automation, a small EDA player based out of Noida. Ahuja, who has been at the helm of affairs of the company since 1996, believes that talent retention in the semiconductor space has improved over the last two decades with more chip designing companies setting up their operations in the country. 

“Not just at Cadence, but across the industry, retention in India has improved over time. Young and mid-career engineers now compare opportunities in India versus abroad and often find that the prospects here are just as good, if not better,” Ahuja said.

The company has multiple partnerships with the government and the ministry of electronics and information technology and is not focused just on projects such as building of a graphics processing unit (GPU), he said. 

For example, Cadence is working with the IT ministry on providing industry-leading design tools and intellectual property to support government initiatives such as building of GPU, CPU (central processing unit), 5G/6G chip, or AI (artificial intelligence) processors. The company is also closely involved in the IT ministry’s chips-to-startup program as well as the Design Linked Incentive scheme, Ahuja said. 

“Under this initiative, we contribute to the EDA Grid, managed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, by providing our design tools to all these selected companies. While some might call this a partnership, we see it as our commitment to advancing India’s semiconductor design ecosystem,” he said.