MeitY: ChipIN Centre Enables Extensive Circuit Design Training Across Premier Indian Colleges

In a major initiative to enhance India's semiconductor design skills, the ChipIN Centre has become a key player in offering comprehensive circuit design training to students from top institutions.

According to data published by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Union Government’s ChipIN Centre has driven lakhs of hours of circuit design training by students at the top electrical engineering institutes.

Anuj Grover, an associate professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Delhi, said that the government had paid “through its teeth” to obtain these licenses, with great benefits for students. EDA tools from one company, Cadence, were used by IIIT students and researchers for more than 31,000 hours in April, according to MeitY’s data.

“Both graduate and Ph.D. students at IIIT are designing ‘small circuits … that would go into chips' using these tools,” Dr. Grover said. These tools give students an advantage when they enter the industry, as most firms making chips also use EDA tools by the same vendors — Synopsys, Cadence, Keysight, and Siemens. “At internships his students undertake,” Dr. Grover said, “IIIT students were put to work directly, while students from other institutes were given time to learn the EDA tools.”

Additionally, the tools are a “vital step towards generating industry-ready manpower and a self-reliant chip design ecosystem in India,” M. Hari Hara Sudhan, correspondent at the Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology in Coimbatore, stated. He also added that the Chips to Startup program was “inculcating the culture of entrepreneurship among students and researchers.”