The semiconductor industry started in India when Texas Instruments started their development centre in Bangalore more than a decade ago. I remember, ten years ago not many people were aware of the VLSI market in India. We had read about the term in textbooks. The concept of ASIC verification was not much known. Then gradually some educational institutes started incorporating topics in their curriculum. Some more institutes started running some short term certificate courses.
In the following five years things started changing. There was a huge demand in the market for skilled VLSI professionals in India because outsourcing had started big time. An engineer with some basic knowledge of digital electronics and HDL was considered a great asset. The pay was good those days. Everything looked very green and promising. Once you entered the VLSI industry, you were considered to be one from the esteemed class. Then recession came, it was bad for Software as well for VLSI. But VLSI resource base was still limited, so impact of recession was not felt to a very high extent. But software engineers were losing jobs in a big way.
After the recession, 2003 started to look up. Things were improving and the market was good. VLSI engineers were again in high-demand. The general engineering pool was full of a lot of attitude. People were very choosy and picky in terms of work and salary. Services companies were obliging them because they could easily afford a big "buffer" strength. But this was not to last for more than five years and 2008 started to look down. This time the recession had a full-grown global nature. It affected every possible sector. Semiconductor, for the first time in India saw what it had never seen before. Major semiconductor companies ramped-down rapidly. Consequently service providers had to reduce their additional resource pool. "Buffer" was considered a dangerous word. "Bench strength" as it is often referred to, was reduced nearly to zero. There was a huge set of unemployed people who had nowhere to go, because they had skill sets which could not be used anywhere else. A Java programmer can switch a domain from finance to retail and still do Java programming. But what would ASIC verification engineers do with their Verilog or VHDL knowledge. Their C/C++ skills were just good enough to do the processor programming or their PERL/UNIX skills were just enough to build the environment. They could not write code to build applications. They could only do ASIC verification. They could not enhance their skills because they needed simulators which were highly expensive. Opensource simulators were limited in functionality and could not simulate HVLs like SystemVerilog. There were very few engineers who had knowledge of domains like wireless, graphics etc. because most of them were only running regressions and debugging failures. A true analogy would not even compare to an industrial worker. Because an industrial worker with a specific skill set has more versatility in career choice than an ASIC verification engineer.
2010 started to look a little better and a few companies started recruiting. For 4 positions, companies would get 200 applications. And every company wanted experts in SystemVerilog or hands-on project experience in SystemVerilog. But until 2009 very few companies were actually active in SystemVerilog. They now needed people with strong SystemVerilog skills. This was ironical. On top of that there was recession. Then there were EDA companies who kept on pushing for SystemVerilog to get their business going. They also needed to survive. For an average ASIC verification professional life was really bad. People who had engrossed themselves completely in their work suddenly woke up to find that they were jobless, because they had kept themselves away from the management politics. So when the time came, there was nobody to back them up. In India there is no system of government aid to the unemployed. People who had financial liabilities and a family to take care saw the worst nightmare of their lives.
Joblessness as it is is a very difficult situation. But generic skill-sets enable a professional with more versatility in terms of career options. ASIC verification skills are very specific. At the same time in Indian semiconductor companies, there is very limited exposure to domain knowledge. Most of the semiconductor industry in India is comprised of subsidiary branches of American, European or Japanese semiconductor companies and Indian service providers. There is hardly any Indian company which is willing to take the risk to develop a product. The work that is done in the Indian branches of the MNCs has as it is very limited developmental content. On top of that the more repetitive and laborious kinds are outsourced to service providers. Engineers who are from reputed institutes work in the coveted MNC's in their Indian branches. In a country with a population of 1 billion a handful of IITs or similar colleges, the majority of the engineering talent belongs to the average group. However as far as ASIC verification is considered, any average engineer can learn the technologies and tools and perform verification. It is only a matter of opportunity.
Humanity is not a characteristic of economics. In business the only thing that is fair is profit. The current economic recession has taught us many lessons. These lessons can help us if they are remembered and practiced. We may not be able to change the business dynamics of the semiconductor industry as individuals, but we together can definitely make some significant changes in our respective careers. I can think of some of them as follows:-
1) Those of us who are not doing too well in terms of skills or performance in asic verification can either think of changing skill sets early in career or revamping existing skills to meet the future challenges. The domain of knowledge is huge and there can be other fields that can generate passion and money
2) We must realise that Indian semiconductor industry is small. Though there are a lot of companies, the positions are less
3) Most of the recruitment happens through internal referrals. Companies should open-up their positions to everyone and conduct recruitments in a fair manner. Most of us are aware of the plausible areas of corruption in the recruitment process
4) License costs of simulators and tools are humungous. So Indian semiconductor startups would never take-off, until their primary overhead, which is the license cost of tools, can be compensated for. This can happen only in one situation. That is when we start developing our own tools. A good solution to the problem is to develop opensource simulators and tools. The whole world has witnessed the opensource revolution and the great products and tools that are developed through collaboration. Opensource tools would be a big leap for not only the semiconductor market in India but also for the whole world. The wherewithal needs to be affordable for the product to emerge out of the foundry
Refer to the following article in eetimes:-
http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/columns/tool_talk/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17404385
5) Lastly we all must collaborate with fellow engineers with a spirit of camaraderie irrespective of affiliations
Though businesses can apparently grow at the cost of ethics and morality, but such businesses are doomed to be failures. The current recession has shown this to the world. Economics though harsh is a great leveler and is driven by fundamentals. Fundamentals after all are driven by values. Hence businesses without values cannot survive, and so is the case with technology.
