New Delhi, March 21
In a bid to make chip design a strategic necessity, the government is in the process of systematic overhaul of semiconductor design approach at more than 300 organisations across the country — including 250 academic institutions and 65 startups.

According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), with graded and proactive steps, these steps aim to debut an era of creative enablement where anyone with innate skills, anywhere in the country can get the semiconductor chips designed.

In the process, chip design will be democratised in line with the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that ‘Design in India is as important as ‘Make in India’.

“The C2S Programme aims to generate 85,000 number of industry-ready manpower at B.Tech, M.Tech, and PhD levels specialized in semiconductor chip design,” said the ministry.

The programme takes a comprehensive approach by offering students complete hands-on experience in chip design, fabrication, and testing.

This is achieved through regular training sessions, conducted in collaboration with industry partners, and by providing mentorship and access to chip design, fabrication and testing resources to students, including EDA tools, access to semiconductor foundries for fabricating their chips etc.

These opportunities include implementing the R&D projects for development of working prototypes of ASICs, SoCs, and IP Core designs.

According to MeitY, ChipIN Centre has been setup under C2S Programme as one of the largest facilities established at C-DAC, aims to bring the chip design infrastructure at door-steps of semiconductor design community in the country.

Towards the semiconductor mission, the indigenous development of the ‘BLDC Controller Chip’ has been awarded to Vervesemi Microelectronics Pvt Ltd.

This ‘BLDC Controller Chip’ will have 90 per cent BOM (bill of materials) made in India for self-reliant semiconductor solution, complete power and control solution under $1.50 and scalability at 10 million units/year, according to the ministry.

Vervesemi is a fabless semiconductor company incorporated in 2017 and developing high performance ASICs for sensors and wireless, exploiting the expertise of state-of-art data converters and differentiated Analog IP.

Centre doubles down on systematic overhaul of semiconductor design approach