SEER (Synopsys Electronics Education and Research) Akademi Private Limited, a spin off of software provider for semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing Synopsys Inc, is planning to partner Indian universities to jointly promote product development in the area of electronics.
“Our idea is to foster electronics talent and entrepreneurship and help students build a small electronics company. We will be providing micro-funding and grants till the students develop a prototype and then connect them with a venture capitalist,” Srikanth Jadcherla, chairman and chief executive of Seer Akademi, told Business Standard.
SEER, which takes Synopsys’ 30-odd courses in micro-electronics covering all aspects of electronics products worldwide, has already extended grant to a team at the JNTU-Hyderabad, which is developing a consumer electronics product for the Indian market. Synopsys’ courses have been adopted as the reference curriculum at over 1,100 colleges globally.
Jadcherla said the academy had set up five centres of excellence – one each in Punjab, Karnataka, Hyderabad, Assam and Orissa – to train qualified specialists for India in the field of very large scale integration (VLSI) design and embedded systems.
“India will import about $320 billion in electronics goods by 2015, from the present $32 billion. However, we produce very little electronics ourselves, exacerbating the trade deficit, which threatens to overshadow the oil import Bill. The industry needs skilled graduates to increase its output,” he said, adding that the academy was looking at introducing more India-relevant programmes in energy efficiency and energy management space shortly.
According to a study conducted by the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA), India currently has 280,000 electronics engineers, while the demand for the next couple of years is expected to touch 500,000. Of these, one in seven such jobs is in the area of VLSI while the remaining are in electronics product design and systems design.
SEER Academy, besides adopting courses from Synopsys, pulls content from industry players, like Intel into its platform. It offers 24X7 access to students to labs that are equipped with software worth Rs 20 crore
“We are partnering Indian institutions where our curriculum and quality matrix will apply and the certification will be given by the institutions,” Jadcherla said, adding the academy was looking at increasing the student intake from the present 125 to 300 in 2010 and scale it up to a couple of thousands in the next calendar.
