“India has engineers but needs more chip-ready ones”
India does not have a shortage of engineers, but engineers who are ready to make chips, panelists said on Tuesday, arguing that the talent shortage facing the semiconductor mission is more hands-on skills, exposure and experience across the value chain than numbers.
Talk on ‘Who Will Build Indian Chips? Bridging the Semiconductor Talent Gap’ panel at SRM’s Hindu Semiconductor Summit 2026 here, Ranjith Kumar TC, director, PRSsemicon Technologies, said the country has 10,000 to 15,000 engineering colleges and 15 to 20 million engineers pass out annually. “The real shortfall is not the number of graduates that we have. The real shortfall would be the skilled or industry-ready engineers we’re looking at,” he said, describing the shift needed as one “from knowing to doing,” that is, from learning a concept to launching a chip implanted during college itself.
Sujhatha, senior manager of consultancy, Government of Tamil Nadu, agreed that India does not have a shortage of people. India was home to 20% of the world’s semiconductor design talent, she said, but manufacturing was still emerging, leaving shortages in outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), wafer fabrication, materials and machinery, a gap that the India Semiconductor Mission, in its first phase and now in its second, was expanding beyond manufacturing and OSAT to address.
Vikas Makhija, senior director of research and development, Synopsys Inc., said the deeper gap is in thinking. Indian semiconductor startups, he said, were mainly innovating in services, while the United States and China had real propositions. Schemes like the Design Linked Incentive (DLI), which made it easier to access electronic design automation tools, and Chips to Startup, where students could learn the basics and design chips, could change that, he added.
First the basics
When asked what he wishes every graduate entering the industry already understood, Mr Makhija said that the expectations of the industry have never changed. “We’re still looking for the basics,” he said, pointing to the basic electronics. Tools and languages kept changing, and artificial intelligence (AI) now increased productivity “say 10x or even 100x”, but only for those who could judge its output. “The average engineer using AI still doesn’t see an increase in productivity, but a good engineer using the same AI sees it 100x,” he said.
Shaik Ayman Hameed Baig, third year B.Tech. student in Electronics and Communication Engineering at the SRM Institute of Science and Technology and the student voice of the panel said that students tend to become “the first customers of a chip to build projects on it, rather than the actual designers”, with many projects in robotics and embedded systems but few in chip design. When AI automation entered Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, students were also confused about what to learn — fabrication, manufacturing or design — he said.
Regarding the mismatch between what societies 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 completed his master’s degree in 2006, labs were sponsored by companies and students working on industrial projects, and said industry and universities should jointly design and continuously develop the syllabus. Mr. Ranjith said that the All India Council for Technical Education 2023 had restructured the curriculum based on the needs of the industry and the industry was sitting on the study boards of universities like SRM and Anna University, but the real challenge was dedicated resources and sustained investment, including centers of excellence. “It’s not really a lack of talent; it’s more of a lack of exposure,” he said.
Outside the classroom
For Mr. Baig, the most meaningful learning experience was a university program with Sony, working on the Spresense microcontroller with an industry expert. It taught him to deliver on a deadline and take responsibility for his work, he said, and in an interview with the application engineer who built the chip about implementing the program in Rust, “it took multiple roles to get the chip to where it is today and give it purpose.”
Ms Sujhatha said working life has taught her how meticulous the industry is. “It’s all about yield, at the end of the day,” she said, pointing to the attention to detail that went into the processes starting with a pristine clean room. Mr Makhija said professional life, unlike college, did not have an ideal scenario. As a verification engineer whose job it was to find bugs, he learned to be prepared for failure and to find software or hardware solutions when something was missing. “Things don’t have to be ideal, but you have to figure out a way to make them work,” he said.
A meaningful partnership between industry and academia, the panel agreed, should be judged by what students could actually do at the end of it. Apart from the MoU, Mr. Ranjith said, it was about capacity building that translated into employment and innovation. “One student we train and develop should also be developing a chip,” he said. Mr. Baig asked the industry to bring real problem statements to the faculty and students and asked for long-term cooperation. For example, the Sony collaboration, he noted, produced two magazines. Asked why companies should invest in making graduates employable for other companies, Mr Makhija compared it to electrons and holes: when one electron left, another came in and the trained group benefited the entire ecosystem.
Beyond design
The panel suggested that the overlooked roles were often those that held the chain together. Mr. Makhija traced the chip from product planning and architecture, through modeling, design, verification, synthesis and physical design, to striping, fabrication and lithography, and then post-silicon verification, software release and deployment. “Think of it like a string of lights that you put up for Diwali. If you pull one out, it won’t light up,” he said. Mr Baig said that verifying the draft, which the students assumed was just checking the draft, turned out to be much more difficult because “finding mistakes in what is said to be already correct is really hard work”. Mr. Ranjith pointed to work at the register design and conversion level and in the analog domain to analog design and layout as an even more specialized area.
Ms. Sujhatha pointed to the chip itself on the device. Several companies in Tamil Nadu were manufacturing semiconductor devices, she said, and in the current geopolitical scenario where countries ban the import of a certain device, even small components that were part of that device would become critical in a blockade. The moderator, Nagaraj N, Vice President, Content and Data Analytics, The Hindu, noted that the roles of supply chain and logistics proved similarly critical when the industry came to a standstill during COVID.
IP and products
Why a young engineer would choose a specialized career in India over another engineering career or going abroad divided the panel less than one might expect. Awareness was minimal in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Ranjith said. His organization has 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 all technology” and the mission was to make India a product nation offering design, manufacturing and assembly capabilities. He added that the gap is not exclusively Indian: a student from the University of California, Los Angeles trained by his organization on the RISC-V project went on to intern at Apple in the United States.
Mr Baig said most students chose software because it paid well from day one, while semiconductors required intense commitment and often a master’s degree. What inspired him, he said, was seeing seniors build chips that were made at his own college: “It shows me that it’s not something impossible.” Mr Makhija said the next decade, with investment flowing into the semiconductor mission, was an opportunity, noting that although 20% of the world’s design workforce was in India, less than 10% of that, or 2%, worked on Indian semiconductors, compared to 85% of the Chinese workforce working on Chinese semiconductors.
When asked how success should be measured, Ms. Sujhatha chose intellectual property (IP) creation over training numbers and certificates. Governments funded India’s own designs and products, she said, through the DLI Center and the Tamil Nadu Design Promotion Programme. It also announced the School of Semiconductor: a small-scale manufacturing plant planned at Central Polytechnic College, Tharamani, with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and industry partners, for prototyping and real-life production line training, on land already allocated and expected to be operational by next year. Mr. Makhija said products and other start-ups must result, and Mr. Ranjith said skills only work when knowledge is turned into capabilities, capabilities into jobs and jobs into innovation. Mr Baig pointed to a simpler metric: the number of openings for freshers, which remained low compared to other streams.
In the final round in the next 12 months, Mr Baig asked for more statements about the issues in the industry and for student projects to end up being produced in their own institutes, Ms Sujhatha said the exposure should start in high school. “Five to 10 years ago, the word was robotics. And now I think it’s time for semiconductors,” she said. Mr Makhija called for feedback to be collected and corrected so that the schemes do not exist only on paper.
Mr. Ranjith said that leveraging programs like ‘Chips to Startup’ and already established centers of excellence could provide India with very good capabilities in about three years. “The VLSI course itself will take about one year,” he said.