The Chips to Start-ups (C2S) Programme is emerging as a key pillar of India’s efforts to build a globally competitive semiconductor design ecosystem and make India a global hub for semiconductor chip design, with more than 68,000 students trained so far and 254 chip designs successfully taped out by participating institutions across the country, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada informed the Lok Sabha in a written reply.
The programme, implemented by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), seeks to address the workforce talent gap in chip-design infrastructure. It aims to create 85,000 industry-ready professionals at the B.Tech, M.Tech and PhD levels with specialised expertise in semiconductor chip design.
Under the programme, 332 academic institutions across the country have been provided access to advanced Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools from leading technology companies, including Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, Ansys, Keysight, Silvaco, Renesas-Altium, AMD-Xilinx, AsterQuanta, Compcarta and Cadre.
The programme has also enabled participating institutions to move from academic training to actual chip development. So far, 254 chip designs have been taped out, including 175 designs at the 180-nm technology node at Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL), Mohali, and 79 designs at overseas semiconductor foundries.
C2S programme expands footprint in Andhra Pradesh
The programme has made significant progress in Andhra Pradesh, where 23 academic institutions have been provided access to advanced EDA tools. These institutions have collectively clocked more than 4.34 lakh tool-hours, providing students and researchers with hands-on exposure to industry-grade chip-design platforms.
To further strengthen semiconductor research and innovation in the state, the government has financially supported four research projects across academic institutions.
At IIT Tirupati, researchers are working on the development of a secure RISC-V processor for cryptographic applications. The IIITDM Kurnool project focuses on developing a hardware accelerator to enhance computing performance for high-performance computing and cyber-physical systems.
At NIT Andhra Pradesh, research is focused on an energy-efficient neuromorphic processor for edge Internet of Things (IoT) applications, while Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women, Bhimavaram, is developing a memory-efficient co-processing unit for edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.
The projects are currently at different stages of design and development and, depending on their scope and maturity, are expected to progress towards prototype validation and, where applicable, tape-out at semiconductor foundries.
(with inputs from PIB)
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