IC DESIGN HUB

 

Companies  need to think to map India as the hot spot in the semiconductor  with the  larger  talent market. Companies with   vigor capabilities   in the sub continent will help the same domain company to grow,up-skill  and   use their resources. Essential infra to be planned with the Government so as to sail the business. 

India accounts for about 16% of the global outsourced ER&D services which is expected to rise   to 35 - 40% by 2020 according to NASSCOM. There is urgent need for basic IT skills across the spectrum for delivery of government services with estimated 3 to 3.5 million jobs over the next three years. By FY 2025 the Indian IT-BPM sector is expected to triple its current annual revenue to reach USD 350-400 billion.

 Companies are exploring opportunities in Indian Stock and Commodity markets with HFT(High Frequency Trading) of late. Semiconductors have been the backbone of the technology industry for many decades and have ushered in a wide range of technologies that touch multiple aspects of businesses and societies­­ from data centers and smart phones to drones and satellites.   The widening talent gap is a global issue: major semiconductor hubs face talent shortages of varied proportions.

Government has adopted an initiative-centric approach and Make in India have helped  life into India’s manufacturing sector. There is a great push for Hardware Industry and every company is excited about winning a bigger pie in IoT,Cloud and Low-Power Design, Parallel processing, Automotive, Memories and Communication Market. In Hardware Industry, whoever wins, remains winner for a decade unlike a software industry where trends can change quickly. Hence every company is trying their best to be the ultimate winner in their respective market segments by providing best hardware solution to OEMs.  

             While VLSI is big in Bengaluru, Noida holds the biggest chunk of EDA operations in India. According to a study released by Technavio, the global electronic design automation market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over five per cent during the period 2017-2021. According to that report, persistent decrease in the size of semiconductor chips and increased scale of integration have compelled semiconductor manufacturing companies to use the available EDA tools help reduce the overall product development time from two to three years, to two to three weeks.

                  RTL design  job profiles are good in Product companies, but in service companies, there are very few vacancies.  In case of Verification, there are a lot of opportunities and demand  for Analog or Digital Verification and you can find good verification job profiles in service companies as well. Plus there are a lot of vacancies for verification. In the product companies, the job profiles are similar to what they have in US. If you are competitive enough, the work is also good enough. Demand for Verification is more as compared to RTL design   If you are an expert in RTL design as well as Verification, you can get a very good job in a very good company at a very good salary package.

                   Trend - demand for Design Engineers in RTL and HLS(high level synthesis) will increase in future mainly due to fact that FPGAs will finally make a cut from Embedded SoCs to Desktop/Server SoCs. There would be demand for Design engineers who can do both software and hardware RTL/HLS designs and then design skills would become more important than verification as there would be more focus on porting accelerating algorithms on FPGA  hardware than verifying them. It will be just like any other software engineer job - design, implement, debug/test/verify, maintenance - only additional thing would be that you would be doing it for a system with integrated CPU,GPU,FPGA.IoT and Automotive segments are still evolving, hence there are many opportunities in design as well as verification space. Remember, Opportunities are there as long as designs start becoming mature enough to support global requirements.

               Once complete ecosystem gets developed, things start getting saturated. IoT has enabled many design challenges in the field of Low-Power Design, Parallel Processing, Memories and Networking. Automotive segment is enabling design challenges with different safety standards, Real-time processing, connected cars. Until these products becomes successful, design challenges will remain for sure. 

Advent of portable devices(Smartphone, tabs etc.) have enabled greater demand for memories PPA(performance, power, area), so there are also quite a lot innovations happening in terms of testability and design.IPv6, 5G, 4G, connected cars, there are so many other things which are driving communication markets which mainly includes base-station, micro-cells, pico-cells. There are so many companies which are trying to solve different problems by designing relevant hardware.Instructions and tell the software guy what he must use to achieve a particular function.

India’s strength in design systems is based on three main factors, as follows:

·         Strong capabilities in embedded system design. 

·         Large number of electronics engineering graduates (even though the useful percentage of those  who  can   be employed is still around 10 per cent).

·         Increased demand due to a sizeable number of Indian SMEs and startups focusing on the IoT

    Continuous growth in the semiconductor industry has triggered an increase in the demand for EDA tools. The Indian electronics design market is expected to be driven by this global trend. The Indian IT-BPM industry is expected to grow at about 10 to 12% CAGR as compared to global IT spends, which are expected to increase at 3.6% YoY, over the 2014 to 2019 period leading to an increased India’s share of the Global IT spends. It is predicted that about 35 per cent of the technology and business services expenditures will likely be on digital technologies by 2020, with the proportion rising to 60 per cent by 2025. 

            HFT in nutshell: FPGAs with Algorithms running on it  will be placed near exchange to make trading decision in split second. In Emerging Markets like India, HFT is becoming trends have known many firms in India who are exploring this territory and make use of technology in Indian, Singapore and Hong Kong Market.  

      In USA and European markets, there are many big companies who are doing HFT and they are successful. So, with verilog, you can help solve any problem you assigned by designing in a way that help your end-product to succeed.      When you design hardware you are certain, in most cases, that the hardware on its own is not enough to attain the functionality you desire. You require software to program the hardware to achieve the required functionality. To program the hardware, the software can only provide a set of instructions to it so that it does a particular operation. 

Scopes

                        Designer need to be  expert in Verilog, using Design Compiler for Synthesis, LINT Tools, PrimeTime for timing analysis, BIST/DFT insertion tools,Perl/Python scripting (for automation), and using some of the physical layout tools to help with physical block layout.A verification engineer works with SystemVerilog, Verilog simulators, emulators, and sometimes SW models (using C++). Verification engineers don't develop any experience with designer's tools.At this point in time, there are enormous number of opportunities in my opinion.   

       Trend is the increase in scope of Verification engineers from mere functional verification to a broad spectrum of other areas like Power, clocks, Security, Hardware/Software Co-verification, Formal verification, Performance Verification etc which are increasingly crucial for any design to be successful.

         Designs are also trending to become more of System on Chip (SOC) and hence there is a need of System level verification and Hardware+Software Co-Verification to make sure that not just the hardware but the entire system works. Hence there is increasing of scope for FPGA/emulation based prototyping and the need of Software and hardware verification engineers to work closely. This is another area with its own challenges for Verification engineers.

       Of course every engineer will have his own areas of interest, but based on above trends, a career in Verification is equally interesting and challenging.There is equal involvement of Verification engineers in product definition/architecture phase, design phase, Software development and even customer interactions and I have personally seen some great people in Verification who are respected more in the company along with the design/architects/Software engineers.

        Power aware Verification and Clock domain Crossing Verification are also now considered important and critical to Verification as designs have increasing number of asynchronous clock domains and multiple power domains. Meeting the power intent of design is considered crucial for any design wins as market demands products with lower power and better performance.