In today’s scenario Indian semiconductor companies spend millions of rupees every year on just recruitment and training its new hires to make them productive. Typically, in hiring a new employee companies have to bear the recruitment cost ranging between 10 to 30 percent of the gross salary. For a recruitment team comprising of 3-5 experienced professionals heading a placement drive at a college anywhere in India have to consider expenses such as travel (Air/Train/Taxi), accommodation, food, promotions, stationary, and most importantly the cost of non-productive billing hours of its experienced employees, which sums up to a huge figure. Even at the end of a long recruiting process companies still face the hard reality of losing out some of its offers to other competition. Those who accept the offer undergo rigorous training for an average of 4 months to make them productive and billable resources to companies. These months of training come with added expenses of training materials, technology/infrastructure usage and cost of trainers to the company which is approximately 1.5 months salary of the employee, plus the cost of payroll for the non-productive months. A recent study indicates that the highest attrition is seen in the first two years of an employee joining a company and the national attrition rate stands at 18 percent. The failure of an employee to stay on during this initial period puts the entire process in the same loop.

This is a challenge that RV-VLSI is working to nullify. RV-VLSI, by producing a pool of talented VLSI engineers from around the country, acts as a one stop destination to fulfill all the recruiting needs of core semiconductor/embedded companies. “Our objective is to practically bring down the recruiting costs of a company to zero, by providing the best trained talents from across the country who are productive to the company with little or no training expenses,” says Venkatesh Prasad, Founder & CEO of Bangalore based RV-VLSI Design Center.

Core electronics companies have limited their recruitment to a very few colleges, mainly due to the large costs they incur if they widen their talent hunt. At the same time majority of the non-core or services companies recruit students agonistic to their core discipline. Electronics students and students from other related branches join these companies out of lack of option and works in domains that are outside their field of specialization. As a result the domain expertise of over 85 percent students that could have been of much value to core companies are being underutilized in non-core companies.

Apart from misplaced talent, another major problem is the knowledge gap in the industry. “Unlike other domains there is a large gap in the expectations of the semiconductor industry and that offered by the academia. To bridge this gap RV-VLSI has taken on various initiatives and programs to bridge the industry-academia gap right from the grass root level of 4th semester engineering, and also to fresh engineering graduates from the electronics and related branches,” says Venkatesh Prasad. “We intend to further widen the scope by working closely with not only academia but also with the industry to bridge the industry-academia gap, and act as a catalyst to enhance the productivity of students with a low TTP (Time To be Productive),” he adds.

The institute offers a variety of post graduate diploma programs in VLSI and Embedded Systems, short term VLSI certificate courses and a range of corporate training programs covering VLSI Front-end design, VLSI Back-end or Physical Design, FPGA design methodologies, full custom design methodologies, and Embedded Systems. According to Prasad the programs are designed with the intention of nullifying the void present in today’s UG programs and are at par with PG programs. Further the programs are structured in such a way to incorporate experiential learning by our industry experienced faculty and a majority of time is spent in applying concepts to solve industry relevant problems just the way it is done in the industry.