LAGE RAHO ELECTRONIC’S ENGINEERS

LAGE RAHO ELECTRONIC’S ENGINEERS

It is very interesting to see the profession of Medicine being used as a theme in the movie “Munna-Bhai MBBS”.

It is so apparent from the real life in India for engineers that this doesn’t even need a movie to be made because of the kind of choices our young graduating engineers are making at present to get into employment. The subjects you learn and the jobs you do doesn’t have a relation in most of the jobs, not to just blame the engineers, the demand in the outsourced jobs, is a part of the reason. Fortunate thing being electronics engineers not building the fly-overs and the civil engineers not doing the integrated circuit design, though there are exceptions everywhere.

Take the example of an Electronics Engineer who can get absorbed even well before he finishes his last semester by a company, which can mould him into their required skills.
Looking at the developments that are happening in India in the last few years in the semiconductor industry, employers complaining about the shortage of the skilled VLSI engineers (analog and digital) and the students looking for jobs even before they finish their final year and the academia still thinking of upgrading the implementation of the practical skills as part of their curriculum, it looks like a “chicken or the egg problem” for the industry and colleges (you teach us “from colleges” and your learn “from Industry). The I.C design itself being as complex as other disciplines, individual majors should be addressed by the people with expertise in implementing/designing the I.C’s.

You can divide the art of chip design into roughly two categories like front-end and back-end, and each of them in turn can be divided into Analog, Digital and Mixed signal designs etc.. FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) on the other hand are slower than their ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) counterparts and draw more power.
FPGA’s have an advantage of shorter Time To Market, can be reprogrammed and hence are easy to fix the bugs without throwing the device (just re-program it again) so the non-recurring costs are lower. They are also used for prototyping, before making a decision to go on to an ASIC.

ASIC on the other hand is customized for a particular use. Modern ASIC’s consists of number of blocks (that were ASIC’s by themselves in the past) which makes a system on a chip, also called an SOC. ASIC design needs more time because of their complexity and also needs tools that drive the design from the HDL (Hardware Description Language) to a polygon shaped database called GDS2. Tools are supplied from the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) companies like Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor Graphics etc.. Looking at all these, you can derive that “Idea+Talent+Tools(software)+Hardware(machines)” gives the ability to design ASIC’s

Idea comes from the technologists (Architects), Tools come from EDA vendors, Hardware comes from System companies (Wipro,Hcl, Dell, HP etc..), Talent has to come from individuals from the respective disciplines from engineering colleges. There are efforts coming from both the academia and the Industry in tackling this issue and it needs more pace and momentum to reach the required potential, only when the individuals get awareness of their field during their education so that they can sharpen their skills with Finishing School Programs whose aim should be to groom them with concepts and the practical experience that fills the gap between the colleges and the industry.

Are we all ready to watch “Munna-Bhai MicroElectronics” ?

Shashi.Deshpande
Manager
TIIT/ TTM Inc.
www.tiit.in
www.time2mkt.com