Bisiness Line
May 04, 2022

MeitY partners with academic institutions for semiconductor chip design

A centralised chip design infrastructure to be set up at the India Chip Centre, setup at C-DAC to train 85,000+ students at 120 academic institutions across the country

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Wednesday said that it is in the process of systematic overhaul of semiconductor design approach.

MeitY is partnering with 120 premier academic institutions across the country to debut an era of creative enablement where anyone with innate skills, can get semiconductor chips designed, MeitY said in a statement, adding that this is in line with the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that - ‘Design in India’ is as important as ‘Make in India’.

Understanding chip design as a strategic necessity, a pilot deployment was successfully tested by MeitY earlier in 2021 under the Special Manpower Development Programme for Chips to System Design (SMDP-C2SD), wherein a centralised design facility at C-DAC was enabled for remote access by over 50,000 engineering students at 60 academic institutions for chip designing.

Leapfrogging, MeitY now intends to make accessible a centralised chip design infrastructure to be set up at the India Chip Centre setup at C-DAC to train 85,000+ B.Tech, M.Tech, and PhD students at 120 academic institutions across the country in chip design areas for next five years.

For making available the chip design infrastructure at the India Chip Centre (C-DAC), leading industry vendors from EDA (Electronic Design Automation), Electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD), IP Core and Design solutions industries are being partnered with, it said.

Specific collaborative arrangements are being made available with Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, Siemens EDA, Silvaco, and other leading tool vendors, IP and design solution providers, and Fab aggregators, MeitY said.