Severe shortage of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) engineers threatens to deter multinational companies in semiconductor industry to enter India.

“The country could generate 2,000-3,000 VLSI engineers in the last 10 years, where as the country needs about 10,000 engineers,” Mr Dasaradha R Gude, Chairman of SoCtronics Technologies Private Limited, said.

Addressing a press conference here on Tuesday, Mr J A Chowdary, Chairman of TalentSprint and former Managing Director of NVDIA India, said that acute shortage had resulted in high levels of attrition.

“Unless we do something about this, MNCs working in VLSI may shy away from investing in India. Within short span of time, India could make strides in this area. If we do not act now to improve quality in engineers, we may be killing a golden goose,” he felt.

Besides lack of knowledge in this stream in engineering colleges, costs involved to set up facilities to teach students in VLSI too became an impediment. “It costs Rs 20 lakh to buy software per computer. In India there is no industry funding of colleges unlike in the West,” Mr Dasaradha said.

Mr Manohar Bommena, Site Leader (Hyderabad) of AMD, said that Hyderabad emerged as a leading player with over 30-40 prominent companies setting up their bases. He, however, felt that it needed a robust ecosystem and industry-academia interaction to address the issue of quality manpower.

International meet

Prof. Subbarangaiah K, Director of VEDA (VLSI Engineering and Design Automation), said the industry would hold 25th international VLSI Design and 11th Embedded Systems conferences in Hyderabad during January 7 to 11, 2012, in Hyderabad.

The conferences would see experts present and discuss VLSI designs, EDA (Electronic Design Automation), embedded systems and enabling technologies.

It would also have a competition for students where their project ideas would be evaluated for prizes.

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