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Ramesh,
Good point, most EDA companies will start a University Program were EDA tools are provided to qualifying schools with the idea that the tools get used in the curriculum. Larger EDA companies have the foresight to start these programs while smaller companies consider it kind of a luxury item.
Because the EDA tools are offered at low cost or no cost there cannot be much support expected from the EDA vendors themselves. You'll have to study the tutorials and hopefully come up to speed on the technology. It would be nice to have a video-based training class for self-paced learning.
Who knows, you may even be able to create some training materials and start selling them to other Universities!
Product design and IP development is no trivial task. This is a very specialized field and EDA just plays a small (but significant) part. So you need to distinguish IP and Design from EDA (tools, training, etc ...)
What I think will make sense is to farm out layout (analogue and digital synthesis) and verification to a country like India. This is becasue these tasks are very resource intensive and will benefit from India's "man power".
When this is achieved (experience + revenue), then the "design, innovation and IP development" will happen naturally.
I am working for imec, a micro-electronics research institute. One of the tasks we do is provide training for the academic world. You can find how the European program looks on the idesa website. On request we also organize courses for other part of the world. If you are interested in more information it is best to contact Bart De Mey. I don't know if you are looking for such things.
Vijay,
The EDA industry really started out in the early 1980s with Daisy, Mentor and Valid offering schematic capture. In the past 30 years we've seen the industry grow from $0 to about $5B annually, with semiconductor IP added in. Although the revenue growth has slowed down in recent years this mature industry will certainly explode once again when we find the next nano-technology to complement and eventually replace bulk CMOS.
My advise to you would be to continually learn new tools, especially the ones that are the best selling in order to personally survive in EDA.
Thanks for the information. In India there are already there are some online videos provided by IIT(Institute of Information Technology).
But not as this advanced topics.
I am not sure that in India colleges go to these very high end topics. They may be very few.
I don't know if you are aware of MIT OpenCourseWare. There are also a few basic free courses on microelectronics. It does not cover the usage of the tools in full detail though.
Can I know is there in any country that Industry is directly involve in college activities to increase the VLSI man power?
In india there is already a program run by Department of Information Technology, i.e SMDP (Special Manpower Development program ) where Indian govenment had selected about 33 primear institutes (including IIT, NIT,etc) and supplied the tool bundles fo Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys.
Each primear institute has to design a blok and has to submit their GDSII file in the end of year. The top institute (either IISC/ some IIT) will make integrate all the blocks and make a full chip. This will be send for fabrication either fab unit at Chandigar/ out of country where ever the fab supports.
Right now even the local colleges in India as procuring one of EDA tool bundil. (Thanks for the syllabus change in Indian Univ)
But for the permier institutes the situation is OK. When it comes to the local colleges some one has to initiate the trigger (either Gov/ some indusrty/ EDA distributor).
This where I want to know what the structure followed in the other countries for generating heavy manpower in VLSI.
I think the support from EDA industry to Indian universities is excellent as far as educating the students about the tool usage is concerned. In fact due to this continuous support a strong talent pool of VLSI design engineers has been created. But companies need to think of ahead and need to involve research students in development of tools. Research programs in Indian Engineering colleages, particualrly in IITs, are very strong and companies should deploy mechanism to get the benefit of these programs
But another area I would like to touch where I feel there is substantial need to improve university relationship not only for EDA companies but for all semiconductor companies. That is interaction with Business Schools. Semiconductor Industry is not still very well known in Indian B-Schools and very few students from B-Schools come to semiconductor industry. This is created a scenario where we have extermely strong technical talent in India, but there are very few Indian companies in this domain. India's success in semiconductor industry depends on the success of Indian companies in this domain and to enable this creation of techno-commercial knowledge is very important
