Abstract:
Although IC Designing Industry has proven to be lifeblood for Economies of many countries
including USA, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and India but in Pakistan we are still lacking
far behind in this field. The reason being the absence of relevant courses of micro electronics from
University Curriculum that make the fresh engineer qualified for IC Designing. Responding to the
need of time, a state of the art IC Design center was built at National Institute of Electronics,
Islamabad, which provided excellent design facilities for ASIC Design. The center is equipped with
top ranking design software and hardware. Keeping in mind the objectives of the center, the IC
Design center took the initiative to train the faculty of Universities and other prestigious Public
Sector Research organizations in Pakistan and further provided R&D services to public and private
sector. The main aim was to create a knowhow of IC Designing among engineering professionals
to fulfill the critical needs of industry. The next step was to provide assistance in establishment of
similar design centers in different universities and include relevant courses of Micro Electronics in
Engineering Curriculum. For this purpose Higher Education Commission provided state of the art
CAD tools to all major Public Sector universities in Pakistan. The faculty which already had been
trained by our IC Design center made full use of the lab by training undergraduates on CAD Tools.
The successful collaboration between the IC Design Center and Universities covered a number of
other areas such as industrial attachments and final year (graduate) project development at National
Institute of Electronics with joint supervision, joint research publications and presentations,
organizing seminars and conferences, etc. During our proposed research paper data will be
gathered from different participants belonging to industry, faculty as well as students to assess how
much the IC Designing industry has benefited from the design center by removing the bottlenecks
of weak workforce.
