Career in FPGAs

Read an interesting article on a technical forum electronicsforu about avenue into the field of FPGAs.

For those who don't know what FPGA is - it stands for Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) , is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable".


Here are some of the highlights from the article.

            As per semiconductor industry data, the total global programmable market was worth close to $5.1 billion in 2011, with $4 billion coming from FPGAs.

            India will grow as a market for engineers equipped with FPGA skillset. In the coming years, engineers equipped with FPGA skillset will be in demand at two levels—technology/block development and implementation.

          There is scope for career in  FPGA field not only in  manufacturing of these , but also working for organisations that design around FPGAs. These include Cisco, Juniper, Samsung and Tejas Networks. Firms like National Instruments, Wipro and Infosys too have divisions for FPGA engineers.

          A professor from IIT Bombay explains the role of an FPGA engineer: “A fresher’s job will involve activities like testing, emulation and verification, while an expert in FPGA will be asked to handle digital system design, system-on-chip, embedded hardware-software co-design, digital communication sub-systems, hardware accelerators for various computing tasks, embedded control systems and digital signal processing sub-systems/systems.”

Payscales for FPGA skill sets

Some of the Institutes that offer training in this field are Sandeepani , Veda-iit , CDAC .

You can read the complete article by clicking on this link.