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The secret to talent retention

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CIOL Bureau
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Money can't buy everything, surely not talent. Geniuses work for the kick they get from solving challenges, greater the challenge headier the feel. For electronics engineers, working for a cutting-edge technology, is electrifying.

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And when young and aspiring engineers find expression of their talent at every stage of the product development – from conceptualization to design and its implementation – the satisfaction is complete.

Xilinx India knows this well. How else, despite acute shortage of talent in the semi-conductor industry, has the company managed to retain and attract skilled manpower?

Surely, not by throwing money alone.

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"We give our engineers the opportunity to get involved in high-end and challenging work," says Xilinx president, CEO and Chairman Wim Roelandts. He and Xilinx India Managing Director Akshya Prakash reveal the company's secret of talent retention in an exclusive interview to Idhries Ahmad of CIOL Bureau.

The Xilinx top brass also explain the reason why India is not able to produce enough number of  engineers for the semi-conductor industry, trends in global semiconductor industry, Xilinx Asia Pacific technology growth fund and also India’s emergence as a player in global semiconductor space.

Excerpts:

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Attracting and retaining quality talent are becoming extremely difficult and complicated for high-end industries like yours where talent is scarce and, most of the time, overcompensated for. How does Xilinx look at this shortage and how does it attract quality talent?

Akshya Prakash: Many companies come to India only for the low-end maintenance work. Though initially the companies rope in lot of engineers to work for them, what happens thereafter is that they have huge attrition. In a high-end industry like semiconductors, one of the primary motivators for engineers to work is to allow them work at the cutting-edge of technology.

Xilinx is here for high-end work and we believe it is one of the primary motivators for attracting good talent and developing the talent in the country.

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At our design center in Hyderabad, we work across what we call ‘full life cycle’. This means the engineers are not just involved at the last stage of the product life cycle but right from the beginning. From the conception of the idea, design, coding and the final delivery of the product, engineers are fully involved.

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We as a design house want to attract the best people. And the only way to do so is to bring good work, bring in work across life cycle and bring interesting work in new areas. These are the key points that help Xilinx differentiate itself from many other Indian companies.

Why do you think India is not producing enough talent in the semiconductor arena?

Wim Roelandts: Talent is available, but it is raw. Producing engineers who can work in the semiconductor industry is a very difficult job. The main reason is that skills are not fully developed in the country as yet. It is not like the software industry where you have thousands and thousands of people who are already trained. In the VLSI, especially the FPGAs, the skill set is relatively new.

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Also, a fundamental problem for high growth in semiconductor industry has been the lack of management power. Developing top end managers takes 10-15 years of training. Since there was no high-tech industry in India 10-15 years back, there was a lack of high end management power.

So you have people with few years of experience. There is not enough expertise to groom, train and develop them.

Akshya Prakash, Managing Director, Xilinx IndiaHow is Xilinx trying to fill the gap?

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Roelandts: Fortunately for the semiconductor industry there are large numbers of Indian engineers who are working in the US for the last 10-15 years. Xilinx is encouraging the Indian engineers who are working is the US to come back and work at Xilinx R&D Centre at Hyderabad and through them, train people.

Prakash: To attract the engineers at the entry level, Xilinx has a very good relationship with academic institutions and the Government of India. We are actively involved in the SMDP (Special Manpower Development Programme) and this covers 32 of the leading institutions of the country including IISc Bangalore, IITs and 25 NITs.

This is one of the key ways that we are partnering with the government and the institutions to build the curriculum for the use of VLSI and FPGA - both for education and research. This is the second phase of SMDP that Xilinx has participated in. The first phase is over and was quite successful. We got 60 resumes just this week from IIT's.

You are planning to increase your head count in India from the present 90 to 300 in the next two years. How do you see the growth of the semiconductor industry in India?

Roelandts: If you look at the big picture, the Indian economy is doing really well. India always been very strong in soft technology, intellectual property and design work. But now more and more manufacturing is taking place in the country. This in itself is a great sign. I think the country will create an infrastructure of knowledge necessary to build a high-tech industry in India.

 

This is the next wave in India. The first wave of growth in India was the software growth and then the big wave of support.

I think the coming of high-end industries like VLSI industry and FPGA industry is the next wave of technology that is coming to the country.

I have been really encouraged to see the number of startups here. Many people who worked in the US have started companies in India with the backing of American venture companies. That is very encouraging. What that means is that there is a nucleus of high-tech industry that is being created as we speak.

How do you see the India as a market for your products?

Prakash: For Xilinx, two kinds of markets exist in India. One is the end market, typically the end customers who use Xilinx hardware directly. But the second and equally important and even bigger market for Xilinx is the design community. Across the world all the leading design houses including Cisco and Agilent have big teams working in India.

Being a privately designed company, we look at the design houses as our customers and sell it to them and they then sell it to their customers.

Roelandts: Due to the size of the market that designs houses bring, Xilinx considers it very important to have a strong base here.

Although not much of manufacturing is going on here in India, though it is increasing, a lot of design work is going on here.

Any specific application area that Xilinx is targeting?

Roelandts: The programmable logic chip market is not an application-specific market and can be used across a wide range of different applications. An example in case will be MPEG router and packet router. These are two very different logic products, but both can be done with different programme logic. On the economic point of view, 2006 was a very strong year for the first half but it weakened in the second year. I believe the reason was the cost of energy for the raw materials.

Xilinx has recently launched the Xilinx Asia Pacific Technology Growth Fund. How will the fund be used, with special reference to the Indian context?

Roelandts: It is a $75 million corporate venture capital fund. The fund is for all of Asia and is managed from our headquarters in Singapore. It will be essentially used in two areas. The first area is where we can use FPGA technology in a very innovative way, and second to develop technologies that we believe we will use sooner or later.

We recommend that the companies who like to have participation from Xilinx contact our office in Singapore and have discussion about their business plan with us.

Will the money spend on the Hyderabad center…?

Roelandts: Absolutely. This can be India or China, it doesn’t matter. It is the idea and the technology that matter.

 

In 2000, 80 per cent of our revenues were from the telecommunications sector. Today it is only 45 per cent of our revenues. It really throws up a whole of new range of applications in the consumer electronics business space. Anything that is logic designed has the potential to use programmable logic. High-end display using FPGAs, Flat panel TVs, Liquid crystal plasmas, cellphones using Xilinx chips fall in our target areas.

What are the trends you see in the programmable logic chip market itself vis-à-vis the Fixed Logic chip market?

Roelandts: I believe we are at the beginning of the transition from a very niche market to mainstream market. Programmable logic market was a very niche market used in very low volume type of applications.

However, with triple play getting traction in the market and more voice and video getting transmitted over the Internet, the programmable market is going mainstream. Fifteen per cent of our revenues today come from the consumer electronic business, 45 per cent comes from networking.

Well, clearly the semiconductor market is entering a period of slow growth. Historically, the semiconductor market witnessed growth of roughly 17 per cent year on year. But in the last 10 years the average growth is roughly less than 10 per cent. Most people expected the growth to be 5-10 per cent.

For the year 2006, it looked like the semiconductor market grew at 8-9 per cent and people forecast a similar growth for this year for the overall semiconductor industry.

I think we are entering a phase of slow growth. However, if triple play really gains traction in the market as expected, the growth rate will show rise. Probably that would reach its peak around 2010, then the market will grow.

 

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