e-Infochips plans tie-ups with academia

The industry-academia relationship has strengthened in recent times with a large number of companies introducing academic initiatives or associating with academics in some way.

The latest to join the list is Ahmedabad-based provider of electronic design services, e-Infochips. The company is on a drive to foster partnerships with engineering universities across the country.

e-Infochips plans to undertake seminars, campus presentations, teachers training and on-the-job training for engineering students along with organising mentoring and other academic programmes thin the campus.

The association would also enable students to get an opportunity to work in live-image processing and streaming media applications projects, which stand to benefit high-end consumer devices, like mobile phones, navigation systems, video surveillance, among others.

"Our focus in building partnerships with the academia is to bring together the flow of information, resources and expertise from our side and fresh ideas and enthusiasm from the students' end to come out with cutting-edge technology solutions," said Tapan Joshi, vice-president, marketing, e-Infochips.

Such initiatives would also fuel the growing need for trained engineers which has been estimated at 33,000 and 2,50,000 professionals for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and embedded space respectively, he said.

e-Infochips has approximately 500 engineers and is planning to double headcount by 2008, which would be achieved through its collaborations with universities, he added.

So far, the company has tied up with nine engineering universities in Gujarat, including DA-IICT-Gandhinagar, L D College of Engineering, Nirma Institute of Technology from Ahmedabad and DDIT-Nadiad among others. In Pune, it has formed associations with PICT, University of Pune, COEP, etc.

One of the company's collaborating universities in Pune has recently proposed a state-of-the-art solution for traffic monitoring and control.

The idea is based on a digital image processing application that streams video signals for detecting lane markings on a highway. e-infochips is presently trying to ascertain the technical feasibilty and marketability of the project and has plans to expand its collaboration with other universities in the coming months.