Most of us often admire the latest operations and functions of a laptop, a cell phone or a play station. There is a tiny silicon wafer behind all of those devices that make them run. This tiny silicon wafer is commonly called as chip.

So you can easily understand how the work of designing chip is important to make the present era of supercomputers go on. The chip designers are actually responsible to design the chip in a more sophisticated and faster way, and to make them cheaper and more innovative than it was earlier.

Now, you can realize how the market of chip designing is flourishing day by day. Below, we have provided with some more important information on chip designing.

Industry Scenario

Being an Indian student you can always aspire to be a great chip designer because the market of cheap designing is not yet restricted to the outer world only. Our country is also setting up the bench marks in the same field. Here are some facts on that.

• It is now globally acknowledged that India has put up core proficiency in chip design. Presently there are 19 semiconductor companies among the top 25 companies in the world, which are having Indian operations. Apart from that, there are approximately 200 Indian small and large semiconductor companies.
• Additionally, there are some obvious profits of joining hands with the global chip design force. It is an interesting option for a budding chip designer to have an opportunity to come up with modernization for the existing automotive, medical, and engineering companies.
• In fact, the drift of small and high-end design boutiques emphasizing on one area in chip design can also become very commonplace in India.
• The India Semiconductor Association (ISA) stated, in their recent report ‘India semiconductor and embedded design service industry (2007-2010)’, that the Indian semiconductor and embedded design services market is actually expected to cross $7.37 billion in 2008.
• To reach this peak of growth, the industry requires to focus on the availability of quality manpower as well as on some of the value creations through innovation.
• “With the growing expertise and capabilities in complex end-to-end design, strong IP development, and increasing talent pool, India’s growth is nearly 22%, which is three times the global growth rate,” says ISA president, Poornima Shenoy.

Job Profile

Go through the information regarding the job profile of a chip designer.

• Ron Wilson, executive editor of a blog on electronic design ‘EDN’ states that far from being anything monotonous, chip design is actually a very challenging job. “This is how IC design teams actually work, across the globe: they struggle for chip power efficiency and performance, wrestle with (the ever-changing) semiconductor processes and design methodologies, and cope with the challenges of global design teams. To top that, they herd architecture, IP, design and verification into a successful tape-out,” he said.
• Once the team of architecture designs the chip, the logic design team starts to implement the defined design that is quite high in terms of language.
• After that the circuit design team is responsible to synthesize the logic description into a circuit. The physical design team actually gives details of the layout of the chip. This process is followed by the testing and verification stages.