‘India has engineers, but needs more chip-ready ones’

India is not short of engineers, but of engineers who are ready to build chips, panelists said on Tuesday, arguing that the talent gap facing the semiconductor mission is one of practical competence, exposure and experience across the whole value chain, rather than of numbers.Speaking at the ‘Who Will Build India’s Chips? Bridging the Semiconductor Talent Gap’ panel at SRM Presents The Hindu Semiconductor Summit 2026 here, Ranjith Kumar T.C., Director, PRSsemicon Technologies, said the country had 10,000 to 15,000 engineering colleges and 15 lakh to 20 lakh engineers passing out every year. “The actual shortfall is not the number of graduates that we have. The actual shortfall would be the skilled or the industry ready engineers that we are looking at,” he said, describing the shift needed as one “from knowing to doing,” that is, from learning a concept to bringing out a chip, inculcated during college itself.Sujhatha, Senior Manager, Guidance, Government of Tamil Nadu, agreed that India was not short of people. India was home to 20% of the world’s semiconductor design talent, she said, but manufacturing was still nascent, leaving a shortfall across outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), wafer fabrication, materials and machines, which is a gap the India Semiconductor Mission, in its first phase and now its second, has been expanding beyond fabrication and OSAT to address across the ecosystem.Vikas Makhija, Senior R&D Director, Synopsys Inc., said that the deeper gap was of mindset. Indian semiconductor start-ups had innovated mainly in services, he said, while the United States and China had the real designs. Schemes such as Design Linked Incentive (DLI), which made electronic design automation tools easier to access, and Chips to Startup, under which students could learn the basics and design chips, could change that, he added.Basics firstAsked what he wished every graduate entering the industry already understood, Mr. Makhija said industry expectations had never changed. “We still look for the basics,” he said, pointing to core electronics. Tools and languages would keep changing, and artificial intelligence (AI) was now enhancing productivity “by, say, 10x or even 100x”, but only for those who could judge its output. “An average engineer using AI is still not seeing a gain in productivity, but a good engineer using the same AI is seeing 100x,” he said.Shaik Ayman Hameed Baig, a third-year B.Tech. student in Electronics and Communication Engineering at SRM Institute of Science and Technology and the panel’s student voice, said students tended to become “the first customers for the chip, building projects on it, rather than the true designers”, with many projects in robotics and embedded systems but few in designing chips. With AI automation entering Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, students were also confused about what to learn — manufacturing, fabrication or design — he said.On the mismatch between what companies need and what education produces, the panel pointed to curriculum and exposure. Mr. Makhija recalled that at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, where he did his master’s in 2006, laboratories were sponsored by companies and students worked on industry projects, and said industry and universities should together design and continuously evolve the syllabus. Mr. Ranjith said the All India Council for Technical Education had restructured the curriculum in 2023 based on industry needs and industry sat on the Boards of Studies of universities such as SRM and Anna University, but the real challenge was dedicated resources and sustained investment, including in centres of excellence. “It is not actually a shortage of talent; it is more a shortage of exposure,” he said.Beyond classroomsFor Mr. Baig, the most meaningful learning came from a university programme with Sony, working on its Spresense microcontroller with an industry expert. It taught him to submit on a deadline and to take ownership of his work, he said, and, in a conversation with an application engineer who had built the chip, about implementing a programme in Rust, that “there are multiple roles required to get a chip to where it is today and give it purpose”.Ms. Sujhatha said working life had taught her how painstaking the industry was. “It is all about the yield, end of the day,” she said, pointing to the attention to detail that went into processes starting with a pristine clean room. Mr. Makhija said professional life, unlike college, had no ideal scenario. As a verification engineer whose job was to find bugs, he had learnt to be ready to fail and to find software or hardware workarounds when something was missed. “Things may not be ideal, but you need to figure out a way to make them work,” he said.A meaningful industry-academia partnership, the panel agreed, should be judged by what students could actually do at the end of it. Beyond just a memorandum of understanding, Mr. Ranjith said, it was about building capability that translated into employment and innovation. “One student whom we train and develop should be developing a chip as well,” he said. Mr. Baig asked for industry to bring real problem statements to faculty and students, and for long-term collaborations. For example, the Sony collaboration, he noted, produced two journal papers. Asked why companies should invest in making graduates employable for other companies, Mr. Makhija likened it to electrons and holes: when one electron left, another came in, and a trained pool benefited the whole ecosystem.Beyond designThe overlooked roles, the panel suggested, were often the ones that held the chain together. Mr. Makhija traced a chip from product planning and architecture through modelling, design, verification, synthesis and physical design to tape-out, fabrication and lithography, and then post-silicon validation, software bring-up and deployment. “Just think of it like the string of lights that you put up on Diwali. If you just pull out one, it will not glow,” he said. Mr. Baig said design verification, which students assumed was merely checking a design, proved far more complex, since “finding bugs in what is supposedly already right is a really hard job”. Mr. Ranjith pointed to design and register-transfer level work and, in the analogue domain, to analogue design and layout as an even more niche area.Ms. Sujhatha pointed beyond the chip itself to equipment. Several companies in Tamil Nadu were making semiconductor equipment, she said, and in the current geopolitical scenario, with countries banning imports of certain equipment, even the small components that went into that equipment would become critical in a blockade. The moderator, Nagaraj N, Vice President, Content Analytics and Data, The Hindu, noted that supply chain and logistics roles had proved similarly critical when the industry halted during COVID.IP and productsWhy a young engineer would choose a specialised career in India, over another engineering career or going abroad, divided the panel less than might be expected. Awareness had been minimal in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Ranjith said. His organisation had created awareness among 10,000 to 15,000 engineers in the last four to five years. But the chip was now “the heart and brain of the entire technology”, and the mission’s aim of making India a product nation offered scope across design, manufacturing and assembly. He added that the gap was not uniquely Indian: a student from the University of California, Los Angeles, trained by his organisation on a RISC-V project had gone on to an internship at Apple in the United States.Mr. Baig said most students chose software because it paid well from day one, while semiconductors demanded intense dedication and often a master’s degree. What inspired him, he said, was seeing seniors build chips that were fabricated in his own college: “It shows me this is not something impossible.” Mr. Makhija said the next decade, with the investment flowing under the semiconductor mission, was the opportunity, noting that though 20% of the world’s design workforce was in India, less than 10% of that, or 2%, worked on Indian semiconductors, against 85% of China’s workforce working on Chinese semiconductors.Asked how success should be measured, Ms. Sujhatha chose intellectual property (IP) creation over training numbers and certificates. Governments were funding India’s own designs and products, she said, through the Centre’s DLI and Tamil Nadu’s design promotion scheme. She also announced a School of Semiconductor: a small-scale production fab planned at Central Polytechnic College, Tharamani, with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and industry partners, for prototyping and training on an actual production line, on land already allocated and expected to be running by next year. Mr. Makhija said the outcome had to be products and more start-ups, and Mr. Ranjith said skilling worked only when knowledge was transformed into capability, capability into employment, and employment into innovation. Mr. Baig, for his part, pointed to a simpler metric: the number of openings for freshers, which remained low compared with other fields.In a closing round on the next 12 months, Mr. Baig asked for more industry problem statements and for student projects to end up fabricated in their own institutes, Ms. Sujhatha said exposure should begin in high school. “Five to 10 years back, robotics was the word. And now I think it’s time for semiconductors,” she said. Mr. Makhija called for feedback to be collected and course corrected, lest schemes existed only on paper.Mr. Ranjith said capitalising on schemes such as ‘Chips to Startup’ and the centres of excellence already established could, in roughly three years, give India very good capability. “The course of learning VLSI itself will take about one year,” he said.