IN Brief:
- India's Chips to Start-ups programme has trained more than 68,000 students towards an 85,000-person semiconductor skills target.
- Participating institutions have taken 254 student chip designs to tape-out, including 175 on SCL Mohali's 180nm process.
- Access to commercial EDA tools across 332 academic institutions is giving students experience beyond classroom-level chip design.
India’s Chips to Start-ups (C2S) Programme has trained more than 68,000 students in semiconductor design and enabled participating institutions to take 254 student chip designs through tape-out. The government-backed programme is targeting 85,000 industry-ready professionals across undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral levels as India expands both semiconductor design capability and domestic manufacturing.
The latest programme figures show 175 of the designs have been taped out using the 180nm process at the Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali, while another 79 have reached tape-out through overseas semiconductor foundries. A further 332 academic institutions have been given access to commercial electronic design automation tools, providing students with software used across architecture, simulation, verification, and physical implementation.
Tape-out is an important distinction in assessing those numbers. It marks completion of the design phase at which the final manufacturing data can be sent to a foundry, but it does not mean every design has subsequently been fabricated, packaged, characterised, qualified, or turned into a commercial product. The figure is therefore better treated as evidence of practical design exposure than as a count of production-ready Indian chips.
That exposure still represents a considerable step beyond conventional semiconductor teaching. Integrated circuits have to satisfy constraints that are difficult to reproduce through schematic exercises alone, including timing closure, power distribution, design-rule checking, physical layout, verification coverage, and the relationship between logical architecture and the process on which the device will eventually be manufactured.
Access to commercial EDA platforms is consequently central to the programme. Institutions have received tools from suppliers including Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, Ansys, Keysight, Silvaco, Renesas-Altium, AMD-Xilinx, and other design-technology providers, allowing students to work with software environments closer to those encountered in professional semiconductor engineering.
The 180nm process at SCL Mohali also gives the academic programme a practical manufacturing target without pretending every design exercise requires a leading-edge node. Mature processes remain relevant for mixed-signal devices, controllers, sensors, analogue interfaces, power-management functions, and many embedded products where cost, voltage capability, process accessibility, and analogue behaviour matter more than maximum transistor density.
Several supported projects illustrate the type of architectures now moving through the programme. IIT Tirupati is developing a secure RISC-V processor for cryptographic applications, IIITDM Kurnool is working on a hardware accelerator for high-performance computing and cyber-physical systems, and NIT Andhra Pradesh is developing an energy-efficient neuromorphic processor for edge IoT applications. A project at Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women is focused on a memory-efficient co-processing unit for edge AI.
Those projects remain at different stages of design and development, so they should not be confused with the 254 completed tape-outs. Their value lies in exposing engineering teams to processor architecture, hardware acceleration, security, memory design, verification, and physical implementation — disciplines that become increasingly difficult to separate as embedded devices incorporate more specialised computing.
India’s semiconductor investment programme is creating demand for those skills on several fronts. New fabrication, assembly, test, packaging, design, and global capability centre operations all require engineers, but the skills needed to design an ASIC or mixed-signal SoC cannot be created simply by adding manufacturing floor space. Competence accumulates through repeated design iterations, verification failures, silicon bring-up, and exposure to the compromises between specification and manufacturability.
C2S is attempting to introduce more of that cycle before engineers enter industry. The approach will inevitably produce designs that never become products, which is normal for both academic and commercial semiconductor development. A tape-out that reveals timing, layout, interface, or physical-design problems can still provide considerably more useful engineering experience than a design that exists only as simulated coursework.
The figures also show why the programme’s next measures will need to become more demanding. Training 68,000 people and reaching 254 tape-outs demonstrate scale, but they do not establish how many engineers move into semiconductor jobs, how many taped-out designs return as working silicon, or how many academic devices progress into qualified products, reusable IP, startups, or commercial programmes.
With the original 85,000-person training target now within reach, those outcomes will become increasingly important. India’s design ecosystem already has access to a substantial international semiconductor engineering base; the C2S programme is trying to widen the number of institutions able to participate directly in chip development. The harder phase begins when training numbers have to translate into repeatable engineering capability and silicon that survives beyond the tape-out milestone.
