Bangalore: Shachi Nandan Kakkar, a national level VLSI industry blogger recently gave his views on  “Engineering The Next Generation”  at the DesignCon conference for chip design, semiconductor and the electronics engineering community. The conference was held in Santa Clara - CA from January 28 – 31 2013 at the Santa Clara convention center.

According to Kakkar, kids are naturally curious and want to figure out how things work. It is this tendency of theirs to break apart things to understand their functioning, that should be encouraged.

Kakkar chuckled that his dad is an engineer and that he motivated him to look at engineering as a cool career option with scope to have lots of fun designing products which better the quality of our lives.  His dad, Sunil Kakkar, who founded a chip design and verification company - SKAK Inc., serves on the technical program committee of DesignCon.  When asked who his hero is in the engineering world, Shachi mentioned that his dad is his hero in the engineering world since he simplified his career choice by giving him an insight into the domain of engineers and what they can achieve.

Shachi also feels that engineering is involved in every aspect of life.   His mom, Sarini Kakkar, designs costume jewellery for Sarini’s creations and it dawned upon him that she also architects and engineers every piece of jewellery to bring out the inner beauty of a woman.  The relative dimensions, the colors, the stones are meticulously selected just as an architect designs a building.  So, engineering is involved in everything that we do.    Once on the expo  floor, the lighted booths with lots of product demonstrations going on, attracted Kakkar towards them, but not so much for the technical content as for the goodie bags which they were handing out like lighted pens, candies and free gourmet Pete’s coffee and signature desserts. He made lots of friends with senior executives of various companies.  He realized that engineers do not code the entire time but have their relaxing moments too.  He mingled with the chip veterans of the industry and they were eager to get his perspective.   

When Kakkar came back home that night, he took a picture of his booty that he had managed to grab at the conference, but was happy that engineers like to have a good time and socialize.  Shachi also made a new friend that day, Mr. Chiphead.