IIT Bombay to partner with industry for new semiconductor design course

The proposed Electronic Design Automation programme will rely heavily on industry executives in its initial phase as academia struggles to keep pace with rapidly changing chip-sector skill requirement

The Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay) is preparing to roll out a course on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) in the coming academic year with greater participation from industry players.

 

EDA tools enable the design, verification, and manufacturing of software, hardware, and services for the country's chipmaking industry. NITI Aayog underlined the steep costs and learning curve associated with EDA tools in its reports on the future of the semiconductor industry earlier this year.

 

“They (Industry executives) are preparing a program that we hope to roll out next year on EDA development, which is a skill which is a little bit missing. We have more applications folks than development folks.  And we don't have that many professors in Indian academia to do that. So this program will be manned very significantly, in the beginning at least, by these industry executives,” Swaroop Ganguly, associate professor at IIT Bombay, said at a panel discussion at Semicon.

  

He mentioned that the institute is looking to tweak rules to enable greater involvement of industry professionals over IIT professors. This industry-academia partnership follows the institution’s review of its standard testing.

 

“We offered two kinds of tests to the students who just went through what we were teaching. One was a regular test. The other was a more unstructured hackathon type experience. And the interesting data that came out was that there was not a strong correlation between the performance of those two,” Ganguly said.

 

“The unstructured hackathon was testing students on how they would process the things that were given and apply them to a new situation and the standard exams  are not training them to do that. So that was sobering for us,” he said.

 

Premier national institutions – who are at the forefront of the skilling initiative – face evolving industry demands for a skilled as well as sizeable workforce owing to the push on deepening India's chipmaking ecosystem.

 

“We initiated a programme and in eight months, it (industry requirements) changed. It is just too quick for an academic system to make those changes,” said Shankar K. Selvaraja, professor, Indian Institute of Science.

 

Amid such dynamism, certification programmes gain traction over conventional degree courses, Selvaraja noted. “The question is whether the industry is willing to accept such kinds of training programs through the certification programs,” he said.

 

“Can we change the course curriculum every year? No, it's not possible, not practical. Why can't we think about static as well as dynamic? One is a static course curriculum and then dynamic course curriculum,” added Dinesh Mishra, director of HR at KLA, which provides tech solutions to the semiconductor industry.

 

Notably, the Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw earlier said at Semicon that discussions are underway to set up the country’s first precision manufacturing institute alongside a multi-level model for developing talent.