The international semiconductor sector requires 1,00,000 skilled talent in chipset designing annually to escalate the production
Union Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) Rajeev Chandrasekhar recently told the media that currently, there are 1,20,000 semiconductor design engineers available internationally, which is about 20 percent. There is no secrecy in India’s design potential because the international semiconductor firms such as NVIDIA, Micron, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Applied Materials, and NXP Semiconductors carry out their R&D aspects in India mostly by carefully examining the nation's design human resources.
Now, it is a well-known fact that after the coronavirus pandemic along with the supply chain imbalances, Russia-Ukraine war, geopolitical scuffles, semiconductor production slump have forced the world to move in a different direction. Historically, countries that have been the global superpower are now adopting different strategies to lead the world in technology.
Now, speaking globally, there has been a huge shortage in the field of semiconductor design talent space since 2022 and is speculated to get together in various segments of the industry in 2023. It will prove to be a massive impediment for the countries that are trying hard to boost chip manufacturing domestically. The situation could be optimistic from an Indian perspective because the huge chunks of design engineers who pass out every year could boost the in-house manufacturing and spearhead the design-led chipset innovation for its dream to lead the international semiconductor industry.
According to a report of the Business World, Ministry of Electronics and IT Scientist 'E' Prashant Kumar opined during a panel discussion that India lacks proficient talent to operate semiconductor manufacturing plants and around 10-13,000 such talents are needed to operate the manufacturing plants. Now, India can hire these talents from abroad until the country develops its human resources.
Highlighting the statement above, K Krishna Moorthy, President and CEO at IESA told BW exclusively "I don't see lack of skilled talents as an issue. But yes, we will require international expertise for the first one or two years at the senior technical level – people who know how to operate the fab, control the processes, improve the yield and make sure that the safety of the operation is properly established and managed."
Deloitte also added that the international semiconductor sector requires 1,00,000 skilled talent in chipset designing annually to escalate the production. The point is that every country in Asia has its own set of hurdles to perk-up the skilled talent. KPMG, on the other hand, mentioned that around 67 percent of the company's talent supply chain, development and retention to be the No.1 strategy for semiconductor manufacturers this year.
According to an exclusive report of Business World, MeitY has sought applications from 100 academia, R&D organizations, startups and MSMEs under its Chips to Startup (C2S) Programme with an eye on training 85,000 engineers in the area of Very large-scale integration (VLSI) and Embedded System Design as well as result in development of 175 ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), Working Prototypes of 20 System on Chips (SoC) and IP Core repository over a period of five years.
