In this article, I will address these questions and explain why learning processor is essential for your long-term career in the semiconductor industry.

Any chip, a simple embedded microcontroller, or a complex system-on-a-chip (SoC), will have one or more processors. Figure 1 shows a complex electronic system composed of both hardware and software needed for electronic devices like smartphones.

The hardware is made up of a complex SoC that incorporates almost all the components needed for the device. In the case of the smartphone, we integrate all the hardware intellectual property (IP), such as CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, application processors, interface IPs like USB, UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, subsystems like system controllers, memories with controllers, Bluetooth, and WiFi, etc., and create the SoC. Using SoCs helps us to reduce the size and power consumption of the device while improving its performance.

The software is composed of application software and system software. The application software provides the user interface, and the system software provides the interface to application software to deal with the hardware. In a smartphone, the application software could be mobile apps like YouTube, Netflix, and Calculator, and the system software could be the operating system like iOS or Android. The system software provides everything like firmware and the protocol stack, along with the OS needed for the application software to interface with the hardware. The OS manages multiple application threads in parallel, memory allocation, and I/O operations as a central component of the system software.

It all works together like this. When you invoke an application like a calculator on a smartphone, the operating system loads the executable binary from the storage memory into RAM. Then it immediately loads its starting address into the program counter of its processor. The processor [ARM/x86/RISC-V) executes the binary loaded in the RAM pointed by the PC [address of RAM]. This precompiled binary is nothing but the machine language of the processor, and therefore the processor executes the application in terms of its instructions [ADD/SUB/MULT/LOAD] and calculates the results.

Understating the processor Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) can help VLSI engineers deal with any complex chip at the system level. As part of the SoC implementation process, they may need to deal with various things like virtual prototyping for system modeling, subsystem and SoC functional verification, hardware-software co-verification, emulation, ASIC prototyping, post-silicon validation, etc. throughout their career. It demands a cohesive and complete knowledge and understanding of both hardware and software, especially to work independently as experts on specific things like verification or validation while communicating with software teams to deal with the software, RTOS/firmware/stacks.

So what can you do for a smooth journey in your long-term VLSI career? Answer: Implement a processor like RISC-V. It helps you to understand various things like RTL pipelined architecture and verification. Using the same processor, implement a small subsystem like an embedded microcontroller. Also, verify the same using the firmware code[C/C++ application program] on a simulator/FPGA board. It helps you to understand the complete product development cycle and deal with any chip/SoC.

For example, you may come across a complex SoC verification environment, as shown in figure 2. The SoC testbench [TB] will have all kinds of testbench components like standard UVM Verification IPs [USB/Bluetooth/WiFi and standard interfaces], legacy HDL TB components [JTAG Agent] with UVM wrappers, custom UVM agents [Firmware agents], and some monitors, in addition to the scoreboard and SystemC/C/C++ functional models. In this case, you will have to deal with both firmware and UVM sequences. As a verification engineer, you need to know how to implement this kind of hybrid verification environment using the standard VIPs, legacy HDL BFMs and firmware code, and more importantly, how to automate the simulation using EDA tools.

Knowing only UVM TB coding in HVL like SystemVerilog alone will not help. We need sound VLSI engineers who understand the processor and RTL well to debug the simulation failures and fix them, communicating the implementation issues effectively to both designers and software programmers. Most of the traditional verification engineers in the industry do black-box verification as testbench coders, managing the regression testing. As the application of AI in EDA will automate both RTL and testcase generation, the next generation of VLSI engineers should be ready with the complete understanding of both hardware and software to deal with the implementation of chips and SoCs, and knowing one processor well is the right way of taking the first step in their long-term career.

Source: https://semiengineering.com/vlsi-design-careers/

According to a SASTRA release, the programme was officially launched by Chairman, AICTE, Anil D.Sahasrabudhe, who congratulated the collaborative pathway that SASTRA had laid down with Tata Electronics and the two Taiwanese universities.

Students of the programme would spend a year at SASTRA followed by a summer internship at Tata Electronics in Hosur and work and industry internship course at the two Taiwan Universities.

The inaugural event held on Wednesday was attended by President Tsai of Asia University, President Yang Wu of Yuan Ze, Ranjan B CHRO of Tata Electronics, Director General of Ministry of Education, Taiwan, Peter Chen, Taiwan MoE representative in India besides faculty from the universities, the release added.

Source: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Tiruchirapalli/indo-taiwan-mtech-programme-on-vlsi-design-begins/article35978672.ece

Technology expert Jan-Peter Kleinhans from the Berlin-based think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV) recently referred to it as “a state-of-the-art facility for power electronics for the automotive portfolio Bosch has been specializing in.” All in all, though, the Bosch plant is little more than a drop in the semiconductor ocean.

Supply chain snarls

Toward the end of the year, European economies appear to be among those worst hit by a global chip shortage that continues to severely impact production flows. Carmakers have had to postpone vehicle deliveries. There is a shortage of internet routers, as well as gaming consoles and many other items that depend heavily on semiconductors. When it comes to chips for the consumer electronics sector, Europe is even more dependent on overseas suppliers. “We cannot hold a candle to the U.S., China and other competitors when talking about smartphones, laptops or cloud data centers — almost none of those come from European players,” Kleinhans told DW.

Lessons to learn

He and China analyst John Lee, who until recently was with the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), have co-authored an analysis on what Europe’s answer to China’s rise in semiconductors should be. They have formulated recommendations for policymakers on how to soften the impact of China’s growing clout in the chip industry on E.U. economies.

The European Commission is certainly aware of the recent chip supply bottlenecks and their far-reaching implications, and is working on the European Chips Act, a draft of which should be ready by the middle of next year. A lot of money is to be earmarked for strengthening the E.U.’s chip ecosystem and forging strategic alliances with international partners to achieve this goal.

Europe’s share across the whole chip value chain has been decreasing lately, including design and manufacturing capacity, relative to the growing capabilities of other nations. Brussels fully understands that relying too heavily on semiconductors from China and other major players can severely impact the E.U.’s tech sovereignty. What makes the E.U.’s ties with China so complicated is that while still a cooperation partner, China is increasingly seen as a competitor and systemic rival, meaning that dependencies can also involve crucial security issues.

Why chip design is key

In their December report, Kleinhans and Lee strongly advise European policymakers to encourage more investments in the bloc’s chip design ecosystem, “focusing on improving conditions for startups and spin-offs from research institutions,” while also demanding better and faster access to funding, private and public equity. “We don’t speak about a race with China in the report, or catching up with China — we’re talking about rebalancing,” Lee told DW. “The issue is not overtaking the Chinese in chip design, because that’s not going to happen. Europe does not have the ecosystem for it that the Chinese already have, but what we’re advocating for is mitigating dependence and potential risks from overly relying on the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem.”

The report singles out chip design as the step in semiconductor production with the highest value added and hence the biggest proportionate revenue generator. Design requirements are on the rise as demands on transistors increase with a view to implementing more functionality, making them more secure and enabling them to remain in service longer. Tuning them for specific end applications also plays an important role.

The problem with outsourced back-end manufacturing

Kleinhans and Lee also highlight the current imbalance in the final step of the semiconductor value chain that’s come to be called back-end manufacturing, involving the assembly, testing and packaging of chips. Silicon wafers contain many tiny integrated circuits that need to be cut out and protected from damage by encapsulating them before they are soldered into devices such as smartphones. The process is labor-intensive and has been mostly outsourced to Asia, with over 60 per cent of global capacity based in Taiwan and China, as the report points out. Increasingly, however, advanced packaging is crucial to developing chips with a higher performance and lower energy requirements.

Only about 5 per cent of that back-end manufacturing capability is located in Europe, creating yet another dependence on China and other Asian competitors. “Advanced packaging is one area on which the industry leaders in China and elsewhere are focusing heavily at the moment as an alternative way of increasing computing power,” Lee emphasized. “So, packaging is becoming a much more significant element of the value chain than it was five or six years ago.”

Apart from losing out on revenues, Europe’s excessive outsourcing to China in the advanced packaging segment also comes with a potential security risk. Producing more wafers in Europe itself is certainly a worthwhile effort, but if those wafers are then sent to China for assembly, testing and packaging, potential malicious actors could compromise the chips. Packaging processes provide an attack vector to implement a kill switch or hardware backdoor that would be harder to detect than a software exploit. This is certainly something that E.U. policymakers cannot afford to ignore when working on the bloc’s European Chips Act.

Source: https://frontline.thehindu.com/dispatches/explained-why-eu-needs-to-invest-in-chip-design-and-packaging/article38003318.ece

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.  

Source: http://www.businessworld.in/article/Embedded-Systems-VLSI-Design-Key-Skills-To-Drive-Technological-Evolution-In-Next-20-Years-/20-08-2021-401201/