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With the Centre’s ‘Make in India’ initiative encouraging self-sufficiency in manufacturing, the ESDM (electronic system design & manufacturing) industry is gearing up to move from low-value to high-value manufacturing.
Currently, 65-70 per cent of the $90 billion ESDM market in India relies on imports. This is expected to be reduced to 50 per cent by 2016 by increasing local manufacturing and moving to high-value manufacturing. However, industry stalwarts say, that this will be possible only if the skill gap in the ESDM industry is addressed.
Jaswinder Ahuja, Corporate Vice-President and Managing Director, Cadence Design Systems India, said: “We are well placed in terms of raw talent but there is a huge gap at the skill level because engineering graduates lack industry exposure to real-life projects. We require engineers who are skilled in VLSI design and who can be productive as soon as they join the industry.”
Design awareCadence has established a university Programme to train readily employable ‘design-aware’ manpower for the ESDM industry. Over 350 engineering institutes are currently training their VLSI students on Cadence electronic design automation (EDA) platforms.
As the ESDM ecosystem develops, the need for technical expertise such as, layout, assembly and test arenas will also arise.
“The ESDM industry is essentially skill-based, where we need both high-end skills for design and manufacturing as well as skills in the layout, assembly and test arena,” Pradip Dutta, Corporate Vice-President, Synopsys Inc and MD, Synopsys India told Business Line . Stating that the shop-floor skill set in the country is still not the most organised, he said, “We would be creating millions of jobs in this space in the next decade and hence we should not only create more IITs but also more government-run Industrial Training Institutes.”
To build a talent pipeline, IESA, the trade body representing the Indian ESDM industry, signed MoUs with Electronics Sector Skills Council of India, Visvesvaraya Technological University and RV-VLSI Design Centre. Aninda Moitra, President and Managing Director, Applied Materials India, said, “For the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem to be sustainable, the government, in partnership with the industry and academia should create a R&D centre that provides technology research and R&D scale manufacturing capabilities.”
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