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.
