Sun, Cadence plan VLSI engg institute

HYDERABAD: Taking forward the industry-academia initiative further, Sun Microsystems, Cadence and Veda IIT have announced a joint proposal to set up the country's first institute for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) engineering in Hyderabad.

Christened Center for Competency (CoC) for R&D in VLSI engineering, design automation and embedded system engineering, the institute would focus on bringing product design orientation to students.

"India has been widely recognized for the talent pool in software, now is the time to lay our foot strong on the hardware front. India could be poised as the electronic hub for semi-conductor design. For this, we need to have huge amount of human capital, and brand awareness of the country globally," said Cadence Design Systems (I) Pvt Ltd India & SAARC executive director, Himanshu Singh.

"More than 60 percent of the design companies have a presence in India and more than 6,000 VLSI designers work on various products. This number would grow to about 12,000 over a couple of years. So it is imperative that the human capital that India has is not only quantitative but qualitative too," he added.

CoC is a program of Sun Microsystems that is presently offered to select few institutes such as the Aachen University, University of Washington and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore. The Hyderabad institute is based on Sun's Grid Infrastructure technologies and EDA tools enabling users to evaluate the grid, distributed management and portal technologies through a series of projects.

"We have been partnering with various institutes to assist the human capital to take up research in new and emerging technologies. Our association with Veda IIT to help budding engineers in this sector would prove to be a silicon success churning out resource pool of talented students in VLSI engineering," said Sun Microsystems India education & research sales manager Gautam Desai.

"We are attempting to offer a set of courses ranging from a fourth month diploma course to a MS program. It would be a one stop career path for students seeking a career in VLSI engineering," said Veda IIT chairman Dasaradha R Gude.