Saturday, December 28, 2013

What is the importance of training in VLSI?

There have been recent doubts and questions about why a fresh engineering graduate and sometimes even experienced engineers have to undergo a paid training/project implementation to be able to land up/shift to a coveted job in core VLSI and closely associated domains like embedded?

Let us try to answer this dilemma/confusion arising in the nubile minds of fresh engineering graduates/recent pass outs.

See we should accept the fact that there exists a huge gap of practical knowledge/hands on expertise between the industry and the academia. This is due to the undeniable fact that what is taught at college level is obsolete or too fundamental to be actually of any help while working at the industry level, whereas the industry expects that whatever manpower they are about to hire will be well versed with the basic concepts and some knowledge about relevant tools and that's the reason we have taken this initiative.

Another point to ponder is that in southern part of India, there are some good VLSI centric academic hubs but in this aspect northern India mainly Delhi/NCR is lacking way behind, irrespective of emergence of sizeable VLSI design industry especially in Delhi/NCR. The number of engineering institutions that have mushroomed in northern part of India in the last 10-12 years is phenomenal. Students passing from those colleges are not aware where should go if they want to take VLSI domain as their preferred carer as they and their parents are reluctant to send them to Bangalore etc.

It has been observed that there are some efforts to provide VLSI training in Delhi/NCR but they are focussing only on specific domain- Frontend (mainly design and verification modelling and coding), which equates to showing only one face of the coin and thus misses out on a comprehensive approach, that is a must for turning out industry ready VLSI skilled manpower. So, after analysing the ground realities we decided to kick start initiatives to provide comprehensive VLSI training targeted for engineering students and in fact related academic institutions in Delhi/NCR region.