Semiconductors and chip design

Semiconductors and chip design is the business of the chip itself. Its companies design the processors in phones, PCs and servers, license chip designs to others, build new chips for AI, make the small chips that sense, power and control machines and the chips that connect them, make memory and storage, sell the software every chip is designed in, and build the machines that make and test chips. This Industry Vertical holds the companies that build all of it.

India designs a great deal of the world's chips, though almost none are made here yet. NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel and Arm run large design centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, NVIDIA also works from Pune, Cadence and Synopsys build their chip-design software in Delhi NCR and Bengaluru, and KLA works from Chennai. The design, verification and software for chips made in Taiwan, South Korea and America is done here. India has begun to make chips too, with Tata Electronics building the country's first commercial chip fab, at Dholera in Gujarat.

For an engineer, this is work close to the silicon. Embedded firmware engineers lead the hiring by a wide margin, VLSI and FPGA engineers, rare almost everywhere else, are common here, and C/C++ systems engineers are far more common than at a typical product company. The door for juniors is a little wider than average.

Semiconductors and chip design is one of the Industry Verticals of Domain IX, Semiconductors and devices. Every company named on this page has posted software engineering jobs in India.

The eight Market Segments

The Market Segments follow the chip by what it does and how it is made, from the processors to the software that designs a chip and the machines that make it.

Processor and GPU makers

The chips that compute in phones, PCs and servers come from companies like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel and MediaTek.

Semiconductor IP companies

Chip designs sold as licences rather than as chips come from Arm, Imagination Technologies and SiFive.

AI chip start-ups

New chips built for AI, in the data centre and in small devices, come from companies like Cerebras Systems, Tenstorrent, SambaNova Systems, d-Matrix and Syntiant.

Analog, power and microcontroller chipmakers

Chips that sense, power and control machines, from the washing machine to the car, come from companies like Analog Devices, Infineon Technologies, Texas Instruments, NXP Semiconductors and Renesas Electronics.

Connectivity and wireless chips

Chips that connect phones and devices, and the servers inside a data centre, come from companies like Broadcom, Marvell Technology, Silicon Labs and Skyworks Solutions.

Memory chips and storage drives

The memory and storage in every device come from Micron Technology, Sandisk and Western Digital.

Chip design software (EDA)

The software every chip is designed and laid out in comes from Cadence, Synopsys and Altium.

Chip manufacturing and test equipment

The machines that make and inspect chips, the factories that make them and the instruments that test them come from companies like KLA, Lam Research, GlobalFoundries, Tata Electronics and Keysight Technologies.

Who they hire

What semiconductor and chip design companies hire software engineers for, and which roles they hire, is on the Semiconductors and chip design hiring page.

That is Semiconductors and chip design, where the chip inside almost every product in this collection is designed, and where India now begins to make one.