The government is creating an enabling environment for the semiconductor design community with direct access to national chip design infrastructure. In line with that, ChipIN Centre, one of the largest facilities established at C-DAC, offers an extensive range of semiconductor design workflows and solutions, striving to bring national chip design infrastructure directly to the semiconductor design community across the country.

The ChipIN Centre is a centralised facility that hosts the most advanced tools for the entire chip design cycle (going up to 5 nm or advanced node).

It also offers compute and hardware infrastructure, IP cores, and expertise to provide comprehensive services for design fabrication at the SCL foundry and packaging to academic institutions under C2S (chips to start up)programme and DLI (design linked incentive) scheme of the Union Ministry of Electronics and IT.

To meet the objectives of Atmanirbhar Bharat, the ChipIN centre, presently engaged with about 20,000 students at over 250 academic institutions and entrepreneurs at 45 start-up projects, aims to provide access to state-of-the-art EDA (electronic design automation tools) to 85000 students at B.tech, M Tech and PhD level to design semiconductor chips within five years.

In view of the growing demand for EDA tools from researchers for an opportunity to scale the established infrastructure at the ChipIN Centre, Siemens has extended its current usage from 120 colleges to 250+ colleges under the Chips Start-up (C2S) Programme and the latest powerful Veloce™ hardware-assisted verification solution from Siemens, to the companies approved under the DLI Scheme.

Veloce from Siemens comprising the following main components – Veloce Strato hardware & OS, Veloce Apps and Veloce Protocol Solutions, has a compute facility of 128 CPU cores and a capacity of 640 million gates. This addresses the verification and validation challenges faced by designers of complex SoCs (systems on a chip) and highly sophisticated IC (integrated circuit) designs.

As group coordinator, R&D in (Electronics & IT), Ministry of Electronics and IT, Ms Sunita Verma, put it, “We were receiving the huge demand from students, researchers, faculty members & entrepreneurs across the country in respect of further enhancing & extending the EDA & design solutions from Siemens to more organizations. The enhanced support from Siemens at the ChipIN Centre will play a crucial role in fulfilling the vision of turning India into a semiconductor powerhouse.”