AI, IoT fuel new chip designs, and India is at the centre of it

• Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft are all accelerating efforts to design chips
• Most are poaching talent from traditional chip designers like Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and from each other
• Google’s setting up a team in Bengaluru for chip design, and the majority of its 66 job openings in the city are for this function
• Qualcomm has 263 job openings now in India (130 in Bengaluru, 107 in Hyderabad), second only to California at 458.Only other country with a three digit figure is China
• Intel’s city-wise job openings has Bengaluru at the top, with 403, followed by Hillsboro (Oregon, US) at 244
Put all of that together, and what we have is a picture of something dramatically new happening in chip design, and India, alongside the US, being at the centre of it. That new is an effort to integrate new digital technologies such as AI, machine learning, and internet-of-things (IoT) with silicon. The more tightly software and hardware features are integrated, the better the applications run.
Apple did it for iPhones, and is now increasingly doing it for other products. Google’s doing it for its Pixel phones and AI-controlled gadgets. Amazon’s created a chip focused on AI, and is working on one for its cloud infrastructure. The traditional chip giants, at risk of losing business from some of their biggest customers, are on the same path.

“Silicon has come back into vogue. There’s this big resurgence of specialised hardware, of chip design,” says Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence Design Systems, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of software tools to the semiconductor industry.
He says specialised AI chips can beat the traditional CPU by orders of magnitude. “You will see more of the car companies designing their own chips, cloud providers doing it, mobile phone companies and systems companies doing it,” he says.
Vincent Roche, CEO of Analog Devices, which designs chips that sense real-world phenomena like temperature, vibration, and air quality, says such analog chips integrated with AI algorithms can analyse and interpret data much better, and have a variety of applications, including predicting machine failure in factories.
Pradip Dutta, MD for India of semiconductor tools company Synopsys, says IoT-driven chips are going into the sensors on big turbines and aircraft engine blades to instantly communicate data about how they are functioning. “Security is another big area that’s being integrated into hardware design,” he says.
The US and China both have excellent chip design talent. But the US talent is just not enough for US companies, and it is to India that they typically look for the talent they need. Bipin Pendyala, managing committee member of the Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA), says new developments in chip design has spurred a huge demand for skillsets in analog design, physical design, digital design, ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) design and ASIC verification. “Electronics engineers with these skillsets command a 20-30% premium over their software counterparts in the IT industry,” he says. Fathima Farouk, HR head for India at semiconductor company AMD, says they plan to add over 350 engineers in 2019, and there are a variety of openings, including for performance architecture, physical design, performance verification, machine learning, drivers and compiler development, and in embedded.
Dasaradha Gude, whose Hyderabad-based chip design company Ineda was bought by Intel earlier this year, says China is falling out of favour globally because of issues like the trade war. So India is becoming a particularly favoured destination for chip design. “Every major semiconductor player is looking at India, which is why the number of jobs in this space, which currently stands at around 40,000, is poised to double over the next five years,” he says.