Demand areas
Talking about the top functional areas and geographical locations, Vivek Madhukar, COO, TBSL, which operates TimesJobs.com explained, “Validation and verification is also known as quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) in industry parlance. QA/QC jobs are highly specialised in nature and are expected to be in demand in the near future, as they form an integral function in all sectors employing high-end electronic equipment. It is therefore quite evident that the IT, telecom, engineering and biotech sectors appear to be the biggest recruiters of these professionals. In terms of locations, the four major metros—Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai—account for most of the demand.”
According to the data provided by TimesJobs.com, the major share of the jobs available are
in functional areas such as IT/telecom, which constitues about 45 per cent, and engineering is about 33 per cent. The remaining are scattered amongst other areas such as healthcare/biotechnology, banks, etc.
The top industries hiring verification and validation engineers are, of course, the IT software industry with about 37 per cent share of jobs followed by the healthcare/biotech industry with a share of 21 per cent. Automobile, banking/financial services and IT hardware industries offer 8 per cent, 6 per cent and 5 per cent of the jobs, respectively. Remaining 13 per cent of the jobs are scattered amongst different sectors.
Apart from Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi that feature in the list of top locations for verification and validation jobs with 32 per cent, 15 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, Mumbai and Pune are emerging cities with 12 per cent and 9 per cent of the jobs, respectively.
Pay package
As found on payscale.com, the average salary for a design verification engineer is Rs 711,635 per year. People in this job generally do not have more than 10 years’ experience. A skill in Perl is associated with high pay for this job. A validation engineer earns an average salary of Rs 416,412 per year.
Usually, for beginners in this field, the pay package is up to Rs 500,000 annually with 79 per cent jobs available for this salary range.
Juniors get anywhere between a half to one million rupees, mid-level experts draw something between one and 1.5 million and the seniors are paid anything above 1.5 million as per TimesJobs’ statistics.
Talking about CVC, Venkataramanan, shares, “Our company is a VLSI ecosystem company—one that enables a vibrant VLSI ecosystem through our innovative approach to incubating role-based engineers, both freshers and the experienced alike. Hence we enable lot of freshers (approximately 150-200 engineers per year) to enter this domain.
“We also enable high-end EDA technology deployment in India (for US-based EDA start-ups) and hence we require workforce that we typically hire from freshers lot. The pay package starts around Rs 2,40,000 per annum but big product companies pay as high as one million per annum, though they hire mostly from IITs, NITs, etc. However, it is very important to realise the steep jump in the pay package in this domain (against the likes of SW siblings). Typically, after 1-2 years experience, our own CVC employees get hired for salaries as high as Rs 6,00,000 per annum.” eInfochips too recruits freshers for this domain offering a pay package of anything between 2,00,000 and 3,00,000 rupees per annum.
Talking about Adroit IC Design, Masiwal says, “Our company is very selective in hiring freshers and we prefer candidates to have prior internship experience of at least six months. Fresh graduates’ pay package varies from Rs 4,00,000 to 6,00,000 per annum. Based on type of degree and experience, professionals’ pay package is a mix of fixed salary (Rs 6,00,000 to 20,00,000 per annum), company shares, and performance bonuses.” On a similar note, Ravinder Gujral, director, Dexcel Electronics Designs Pvt Ltd shares, “We always look out for bright engineers in the area like FPGA/ASIC design and verification along with board design and embedded software. The salary range for verification and validation engineers usually depends on their technical aptitude and experience. Engineers with around 2-3 years of experience typically get salary around 5,00,000 to 7,00,000 rupees per annum.”
It is not just programming
Ensuring that designs meet requirements could be a challenging task, but a career in this field has its own rewards and perks. VLSI/semiconductor domain has been a vibrant, albeit small field (relative to its software sibling) since last 15+ years in India, believes Ajeetha Kumari. She says, “It is driven by passionate electronics engineers than by just those who seek some quick success.”
In brief, this domain requires engineers with deep electronics knowledge and also various other skills in adjacent domains.
The author is a senior technical correspondent at EFY, Bengaluru
