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Cutting-edge work in a state-of-the-art facility with high-precision tools and world-class software, coupled with logic and high-degrees of passion-this fits the bill for a typical VLSI engineer. The brains behind the chips in your mobile handset, digital watch, MP3 player, microwave, washing machine, under your car's hood, or even inside your body monitoring your heart beats are from India.

The great Indian talent pool occupies an enviable position at the global stage. The abundance of high quality software and hardware engineers is the primary reason why India is today the most attractive design hub center. More than 80% of major semiconductor companies in the world have set up their research centers in India.

Accolades for the remarkable presence of such talent goes to premier educational institutes that are focusing heavily on VLSI, DSP, IC chip design, device fabrication, materials processing, device modeling, and MEMS. A significant amount of work goes into making India specific products for communications, and networking.

The industry body is actively involved in the Special Manpower Development Program (SMDP), a government initiative with the private industry. Under the renewed version of the scheme for 2007, nineteen new universities will be targeted, bringing the total to thirty-two. The objective is to facilitate faculty training.

Recently the industry bodies like India Semiconductor Association (ISA) and the VLSI Society of India (VSI) instituted the first Technovation Awards to honor academicians for their role in semiconductor research and development. These awards are amongst the initiatives undertaken by ISA to educate talent and create awareness about the immense opportunity that rests in the semiconductor space in India. IIT Madras and IIT Kharagpur were jointly selected for the TechnoShield trophy in recognition of their contribution in semiconductor research.

VLSI design is not for the weak-hearted. Here's a snapshot of how some leading universities and colleges across the country have encouraged the growth of research and development facilitating the semiconductor industry.

IIT-Kharagpur
IIT-Kharagpur has proven its dominance in microelectronics and VLSI. Some of the key achievements from the labs include country's first payphone telecard chip, first accelerometer DETF chip for ISRO, satellite relay driver chip for ISAC, ISRO, optical wave guides, power splitters, and electro-optic components to name a few.

The advanced CAD lab at IIT Kharagpur is one of its kinds in India and is currently running several projects sponsored by various national and international agencies such as Ministry of IT, DRDO, ISRO, Intel, and IHP Germany. The projects encompass the design and implementation of digital and mixed-signal chips for various applications related to digital signal processing, image processing and communication system.

Advanced VLSI Design Lab
Kaharagpur also boasts of the Advanced VLSI Design Lab (AVDL). The aim is to achieve excellence in design and research using latest technology at the global level prompted IIT Foundation and five industries including National Semiconductor, Sun Microsystems, Cadence Design, Synopsys, and Agilent Technologies to set up a visionary state-of-the-art Lab.

The lab has taken up several projects in design including DC-DC converters, oscillators, encryption circuits, 3G communication components, etc. Some of the ongoing projects include designing efficient power management circuits, design of low power RF modules, and work in the area of VLSI design and wireless technologies.

IIT-Madras
The institute carries out research and teaching in the areas of fabrication and modeling of microelectronic devices, design of analog, mixed signal, and digital VLSI chips, and computer aided VLSI design.

The VLSI design group at IIT-M is equipped with about 40 workstations having state-of-the-art tools for IC/FPGA designs. A testing lab capable of characterizing integrated circuits up to a few GHz is also available. Several mixed signal ICs in sub micron CMOS processes have been successfully designed, fabricated, and characterized in the last few years.

The faculty and students are involved in research in the areas of RF and mixed signal design, analysis and simulation of noise in circuits, VLSI DSP architectures, and reconfigurable computing.

IIT-Bombay
Microelectronics and VLSI is the largest group in the department of electrical engineering at IIT-Bombay. The group boasts of twelve core faculty and 110 postgraduate students. The state-of-the-art facilities include Class 1000 Clean Room (class 100 work areas) with facilities for complete IC manufacturing (optical and EB lithography, RIE, deposition, sputter, RTP, and furnace facilities)

Over sixty sponsored projects since 1985, totaling $8 mn, have been undertaken by the VLSI group.

Quite a few interesting projects serving communication needs have been taken up at IIT Bombay; for instance, the development of a hot-carrier simulator (Motorola), modeling of power semiconductor devices (GE), and CMOS device design and optimization for mixed-signal applications (Intel). This one has shown its competency in a challenging field of RF design. Some of the recent works have been designing RF Tuner for cable modem applications, dual channel RF receiver design, and power optimal RF data transfer for mobile heart monitoring.

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