Circa 1990. The twenty-five-year-old Indira Iyer found herself amidst a hall of experienced analog designers–all men–in a conference at Mentor Graphics, an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company in Oregon, U.S. She’s to present a complex analog design, analyzing and simulating it in multiple ways. The only woman in the crowd, she experienced butterflies in her stomach. Nevertheless, she delivered the presentation and was even awarded. “I was extremely nervous and automatically assumed that my relative inexperience would not allow my audience to connect with my presentation,” she recollects.

With $200 in her pocket, Iyer had left for the U.S. on scholarship to pursue Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ohio University. With an assistantship and a waitressing job during summers, she completed her Master’s program. Going through the grind in every sense of the word, Iyer reminisces, “My career and personal growth happened from joining a bunch of right dots at key inflection points, like steady, analog growth.”

Her growing interest in EDA, a natural progression from her master’s thesis on VLSI and analog design, had landed her a good start at Mentor Graphics. She was a key developer in the team building analog design tools used by semiconductor design companies then.

Like any toddler in the industry, Iyer was keen on learning more about various EDA domains. She says, “I wanted to wet my feet in several holes to know how it feels and how deep it is.” Her stint at Mentor and an industry contact found her a good position at Metasoftware. Experience in the analog domain initiated her into developing mixed signal based design tools. “I grew significantly in that role, donning multiple hats of a lead developer, architect, product manager and field/corporate applications engineer,” says Iyer. The finger-count number of people working on mixed design solutions gave her career a niche leverage.

Glimpsing the real world
When you meet Iyer, the striking fact about her is she’s never satisfied until she sees the big picture. Sitting in the lab, she had learnt the world of analog and mixed signal design solutions. But she quested to learn more about the real world of products, design flows and customers. What interested her was: What did customers want? How do you define