Embedded Systems & VLSI Design: Key Skills To Drive Technological Evolution In Next 20 Years
The electronic manufacturing business has exhibited a remarkable growth over the past few decades, particularly due to the swift advancement in very-large-scale- integration (VLSI) skills and logic design applications.
Computer Science and Electronics Engineering walk hand in hand. Every development in software technology demands better hardware to support it. As semiconductor fabrication progresses globally, the VLSI design sector predicts enormous prospects fostered by requirements from the cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems, automotive and Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven industries. Hence, VLSI, IoT, embedded systems and AI are mutually dependent.
Evolution of IoT has significantly transformed the world around us. There has been a rapid growth in VLSI design and hardware requirement with trillions of sensors being ubiquitous. Trillions of sensors means embedded systems reimagined and subsequently VLSI reconceptualized. VLSI design for IoT/embedded chips necessitates a fresh mindset.
AI and deep learning are gigantic, so called “embarrassing parallelism”. There is going to be great demand for efficient hardware architectures to support machine learning based applications. Most big semiconductor IP/SoC industries like Intel, Samsung, etc. have started producing their own Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence accelerators with the growing market for ML and AI.
We can see VLSI devices, these days, all-around us. These highly developed VLSI chips are found in our cars, mobile phones, home appliances, digital cameras, medical instruments and many more areas. This rapidly developing sector offers immense possibilities in verification based career opportunities for those with sound basics in electronics designing and hardware-description-languages(HDL), strong hold in VLSI design and verification and the most noteworthy, the skill to apply VLSI concepts to application.
There is a high demand for skilled VLSI design and Embedded Systems professionals as products like mobile phones, smart TVs, computers are out in the market everyday with new features.
Every machine learning engineer might be conscious of this very fact that ML models cannot be trained on CPUs due to their ineffectiveness of handling high quality datasets, preferably images and videos. Here again, Embedded Systems and VLSI design engineers play an important role and design GPUs to resolve the problem.
India is taking significant steps to boost the Electronics manufacturing industry. The Government of India recently announced that electronic manufacturers including Pegatron, Samsung, Lava and Dixon have planned to produce mobile devices and components of over ₹11 lakh crore in the next five years under the government's new Production Link Incentives (PLI) scheme. The nine units of Apple, along with component makers, have shifted to India from China during COVID-19 period. Apple (37%) and Samsung (22%) together account for nearly 60% of global sales revenue of mobile phones and this policy is expected to enhance their manufacturing base in the country. It is also stated that plans put forward by the companies to the ministry will generate upto 12 lakh employment opportunities for Electronics Engineers.
There are around 150 corporations including the giants like Texas Instruments, Mentor Graphics, Freescale Semiconductor, Cadence, HCL, Intel, Lucent, Motorola, Philips Semiconductor, Qualcomm, Wipro and TCS working in this area. A career opportunity with a lucrative package in one of these companies is a dream of many and enhancement of Embedded Systems and VLSI design skills is the only solution to make this dream a reality.
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