Current Job Opening @CDAC, Hyderabad

VLSI and Embedded Systems courses

1. National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, Calicut (Kerala) offering 6 months training program in VLSI and embedded systems.
http://www.cedtic.com/html/course/VL500.html
Course starting date: 24th Feb 2014

2. A course on Physical design at Institute of Silicon Systems, Hyderabad starting from 31st March 2014.
http://www.siliconsys.in/

Internships in VLSI Companies

Internship is one of the effective means to enter into the field of VLSI.
There are good number of VLSI companies that offer internship for the final year or just finished BE/ME students.
There are few companies who have tie ups with respective colleges/Universities in which case it becomes bit easy for the students of those particular institutions to have this opportunity. However there are plenty of companies who offer internship to any candidates based on their required skill sets.

Different companies offer different sums to the interns while undergoing training, ranging from Rs. 5000-25000.

One has to have a constant watch on when companies offer internship programs.

Following are few tips and links which would help you in this regard.

Internship at IBM,
ME, MS or PhD candidates are eligible.
http://www-03.ibm.com/employment/internationalstudents/files/110309_Blue_VIP_flyer_2011.pdf

Internship at Xilinx,
http://www.xilinx.com/hr/ncg/intern.htm

Internship at AMD, Hyderabad (Only for specific colleges, OU Campus, JNTU Campus, Vasavi College etc)
http://www.amd.com/

Internship at IIT Kharagpur:
http://conf05.iitkgp.ac.in/avlsi/logf/?id=st1&page=recr

Internship at SmartPlay:
http://www.wisdomjobs.com/view_job.php?jobid=98110

Internship at TechInnovate: (Summer and winter programs available)
http://www.techinnovates.com/index.php

Internship at Vyas informatics (Not Paid, not related to VLSI but to general Electronics)
http://www.vyasindia.com

General info: (Internships in India)
http://www.indianinternship.com/

General Info: (Internships Abroad)
http://www.ams.org/programs/students/undergrad/emp-internships

Things to Take Care While Undergoing Internship:
While undergoing internship, generally you will be working under a supervisor. Following are few tips to make you internship more effective and productive.
1. Clarify expectations
2. Take performance feedback regularly from your supervisor
3. Try to make your first impression as the best.
4. Always be a good observer
5. Be punctual
6. Communicate effectively. Write mails short and free from Grammatical mistakes.
7. Maintain good relationship with co-workers.

For more details:
http://www.indianinternship.com/2008/04/some-useful-tips-for-internship-success.html

Few Useful links

Gives informaiton about Interview questions, Tutorials, Projects and Companies:
http://www.asic.co.in

A very good link for Interview questions:
http://asic-soc.blogspot.in/

Gives general information about VLSI field:
http://www.asic-vlsi.com

Discussion sites:
http://www.edaboard.com/
http://www.vlsibank.com/
http://vlsigroup.com/
http://www.vlsi-world.com/
 

VLSI Design Flow

 

This blog is specific to the Floorplanning and Automatic Place and Route of the Design flow.

Frequently Asked Interview Questions in Physical Design (PD)

I would like to put the most frequently asked interview questions related to Physical Design.

Questions on the database required for PD flow:
1. What are the various input database required for backend design flow?
2. What does a netlist consist of?
3. What is PVT? Where do we have information about PVT?
4. What is lookup table?
5. What is LEF/MW?
6. What are various LEF files? What do they contain?
7. What are various MW formats? Why do we different formats?
8. What is captable?
9. What is LVT and HVT? How do they vary in their layout?
10. What are major contents of SDC file?
11. How does the delay of a cell vary with temperature?

Questions on Floorplan:
1. What is a dataflow diagram? Why do we need it?
2. What are floorplan targets?
3. How do you calculate die area for a given design?
4. What are floorplan guidelines?
5. How do you decide the spacing between two macros?
6. What extra care you need to take when you have analog and digital logic both in your design?
7. What will you do if you have pretiming issues?
8. What would you do if you have huge LOL?
9. What are tap cells and end cap cells? Why do we need them?
10. How do we calculate distance between two latchup cells?

Questions on PowerPlan:
1. What are the targets of Power Plan?
2. What are various power networks required for your design?
3. How do you decide stripe width and spacing?
4. Why are only top metal layers used for power planning?
5.  What is Electonmigration? How do we take care while doing power plan?

Questions on Placement:
1. What are the targets of placement?
2. What is congestion? What are various means of reducig congestion?
3. What are various types of Placement blockages? Explain their usage?
4. What is cell padding? When do we use them?
5. What are various operations that happen while doing placement optimization?
6. What is scan reordering? How does it affect in congestion?

Questions on CTS:
1. What are CTS targets?
2. What is CTS spec file? what does it contain?
3. What do you mean by insertion and skew? How do they affect in timing?
4. Why is it required to balance insertion delay?
5. What is single point and multipoint CTS? What are relative pros and cons?
6. What is the difference between normal buffer and a clock buffer?
7. What is a stop pin, exclude pin, ignore pin in CTS?
8. What is float pin and how it is used?

Questions on Routing:
1. What are routing targets?
2. What is global and detail routing?

Doing Masters in VLSI in India

It is always recommended for a BTech in ECE/EEE who wish to get into the world of VLSI to do Masters from reputed institutes. This is because after BTech, anyway we have to pay hefty amount for doing course in VLSI. Instead of that doing Masters will fetch you a degree as well could bring a good offer through your campus itself.
But remember: You have to do it from a reputed institute which has got all industrial VLSI tools (Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Xilinx)

There are lots of reputed nationalized/private Universities offering Masters degree in VLSI/Microelectronics.

The best among them is to get into IITs/NITs/IIITs through GATE/AIEEE exam. All these institutions generally have all sorts of industrial VLSI tools.

Options in Hyderabad:

BITS-Pilani (Pilani, Hyderabad, Goa, Dubai) which conducts their own entrance exams. It has got all sorts of industrial VLSI tools.

IIIT-Hyderabad offers a very good course as MS by Research. It has all sorts of industrial tools.

IIT-Hyderabad is another option for doing MTech in VLSI. It is also expected to have all sorts of Industrial VLSI tools.
OU & JNTU Campus.