Government-purchased chip design tools used for lakhs of hours in universities

The ChipIN Centre, announced in 2022, licenses expensive chip design software and provides them to startups and universities for free. File
| Photo Credit: X/@ChipIN_GoI

The Union Government’s ChipIN Centre has driven lakhs of hours of circuit design training by students at the top electrical engineering institutes, according to data published by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). In 2022, the Union Government announced that it would be licensing Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and provide free access to these tools to startups and academia, under the Design Linked Incentive scheme and the Chips to Startups scheme. 

Anuj Grover, an associate professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Delhi, said that the government had paid “through its teeth” to obtain these licenses, with great benefits for students. EDA tools from one company, Cadence, were used by IIIT students and researchers for more than 31,000 hours in April, according to MeitY’s data. 

“Both graduate and Ph.D students at IIIT are designing “small circuits … that would go into chips” using these tools,” Dr. Grover said. These tools give students an advantage when they enter the industry, as most firms making chips also use EDA tools by the same vendors — Synopsys, Cadence, Keysight and Siemens. “At internships his students undertake,” Dr. Grover said, “IIIT students were put to work directly, while students from other institutes were given time to learn the EDA tools.”

IIIT was previously purchasing a limited number of licenses even before ChipIN stepped in, as the institute has established courses in the subject. Dr. Grover said, “The scarcity of licenses beforehand led to a small number of students being able to concurrently use the software. And costs for the licenses exceeded more than ₹10 lakh a year.”

The government has given these “EDA tools to 240 universities,” Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said at an event in April. At a separate occasion, while launching the Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme, Mr. Vaishnaw again pointed to the effort, saying that a visiting Japanese delegation was “surprised at the extent of democratisation” of these tools. 

It’s not just IITs and IIITs that are using the EDA software — the data shows, for instance, that the Vellore Institute of Technology clocked more than one lakh hours of tool use from Synopsys in April alone. Dr. Grover said that while open source tools did exist, ChipIN gave them access not just to the tools, but access to dedicated tech support for them, which is included in the licenses the government obtained.

The tools are a “vital step towards generating industry-ready manpower and a self-reliant chip design ecosystem in India,” M. Hari Hara Sudhan, correspondent at the Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology in Coimbatore, told The Hindu. He added that the Chips to Startup programme was “inculcating the culture of entrepreneurship among students and researchers.”