VESIT Mumbai and IIT Kharagpur win 2010 Cadence India design contest

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cadence Design Systems (India) Pvt Ltd, the Indian subsidiary of Cadence Design Systems Inc. has announced the winners of its annual Design Contest.

The winners are VESIT from Mumbai in the Bachelor’s category and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in the Master’s category. The runners-up are Jadavpur University in the Bachelor’s category and Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in the Master’s category. Winners and runners-up receive a cash prize and a certificate of merit.

In its fifth year, this contest is aimed at fostering innovation and creativity among electronics engineering students in India, and encouraging them to address industry imperatives of System, SOC and Silicon Realization. The contest is open to all Bachelor’s and Master’s level students from institutes that participate in the Cadence University Program.

“Cadence recognizes the value of close collaborations with engineering institutes across the country to foster talent and innovation in the student community,” said Jaswinder Ahuja, corporate vice president and managing director, Cadence Design Systems (India) Pvt Ltd, said: “The Design Contest provides an opportunity for young engineers to showcase their creativity and technical skills. We believe that the Cadence Design Contest is highly successful because of the quality and quantity of submissions that we attract. We congratulate VESIT and IIT Kharagpur for their outstanding work.”

Prof. Hardik Shah, guide of the winning entry from Vivekanand Educational Society's Institute of Technology (VESIT), said: “Cadence’s Design Contest allows us the opportunity to not only creatively apply our skills, but to also have our ideas reviewed by an eminent panel of industry leaders. This kind of real-world relevance is an excellent stepping-stone for students in a technical stream.”

This year, the Cadence Design Contest received over 130 entries from 28 institutes that use Cadence technologies. Entries for this year’s contest were reviewed by a panel of judges that include veterans of electronic design industry.

Talent is of essence in a knowledge-intensive sector like electronic design. India produces a large number of electronics and computer science graduate engineers every year. So, while there is no dearth of manpower, the challenge is finding “design aware” engineers who are trained specifically in VLSI design and can ramp up quickly.

Simply put, the industry is facing a “quality gap” with regard to talent. With systems and semiconductor companies going through a disruptive transformation in their approach to design to a new applications-driven paradigm (what Cadence calls System Realization), it is also important that students get an early understanding into the semiconductor industry’s challenges of productivity, predictability and profitability, apart from gaining technical skills.

Cadence has been committed to closing the quality gap in education through the Cadence University Program, which gives students access to best-in-class EDA tools. Cadence is also involved with programs such as the Indian Government’s Special Manpower Development Program (SMDP) and a Finishing School Program in association with University of California-Santa Cruz Extension and Infotech Enterprises.