Bhubaneswar: The state govt plans to help out engineering students aspiring to design minuscule chips that power everything from smartphones and cars to medical devices.
For them, access to specialised software used by semiconductor companies is often a major hurdle, which the govt seeks to remove.
The electronics and information technology (E&IT) department has recently enabled 13 institutions to access advanced electronic design automation (EDA) tools free of cost under the chips to startup (C2S) programme, giving students and faculty an opportunity to learn chip design using tools closer to those used in the industry.
According to the department, EDA tools are essentially digital workbenches on which chips are designed. Engineers use them to develop circuits, test whether a design works as intended, identify errors and prepare the design for the next stages of production.
While students at many technical colleges receive theoretical knowledge of chip design in classrooms, access to such specialised tools can provide them with hands-on experience.
“By making advanced EDA tools available free of cost to institutions, the state is seeking to lower one of the major barriers to semiconductor education which is the high cost and specialised nature of industry-grade design software. This move will give engineering students a chance to move from learning about chips in classrooms to actually designing them,” said educationist Prahallad Tripathy.
