Coffee Talk with Ramakant

Hi Readers,

I am rolling out second coffee talk with Ramakant Kapatral, please find the short Bio below.

Ramakant Kapatral

Director at Orange Semiconductor Pvt Ltd

About Ramakant:

30+ years of experience in diverse fields and in varied roles. Contributed significantly to the growth of ‘Orange Semiconductor’, a design service startup company. Worked closely with CEO to define goals, plan the course and realize the goals by successful execution of same. Handled multiple roles simultaneously as required in any startup.

In previous companies successfully grew the team to 150+ and customer accounts to multi-million dollars. Technical expertise and Skills cover wide spectrum - FPGA/ASIC/SoC Design verification, Mixed Signal Board design, System Design, Avionics, Industrial Automation.

Took a break in career to pursue hobbies in Sept 2011. Recently published a fiction novel in IT background, 'Certainly Uncertain', <www.apkpublishers.com>.       

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramakantkapatral/

Coffee Talk:

Vikas: First of all, congratulations on the acquisition. Few insights about this?

http://moschip.com/moschip-press-release-on-acquisitions/

Ramakant: MosChip CEO, Ram Reddy, has nicely summarized already about the acquisition in the link above. What I can say is, Orange Semiconductor is going to play a key role in further roadmap and growth story of MosChip. I strongly believe, we at MosChip are poised to become one stop solution provider from Spec to Silicon to (IoT) System.

Vikas: What do you think about this Mergers, Acquisitions - Is this good for VLSI Industry?

Ramakant: Good or Bad, it will be inevitable. In my opinion, analogy (and also the reason) is, in non-IT industries (e.g. chemical, textile) they go for the forward or backward integration in supply chain, to not only gain monopoly but also achieve tangential growth.

From the perspective of ‘acquired’ company the good part is your value, be it unique Product/IP/solution/offerings or your expertise in growing business, is recognized & awarded. You get to chance to move-up value chain quickly. In general, in any product segment, to meet the market demand at right time (boiling down to consumer’s demand), collective efforts of different/diverse value-chain suppliers are essential and I think one of the reasons of continued Mergers and Acquisitions is to achieve same (since you have better control now).

The bad part of it? well it depends. For example, imagine that a specific product/solution business unit plan simply goes to trash bin since it does not fit in to the new roadmap after M&A. Now the team working on it passionately remain bewildered worrying about their career and possibly thinking, were they fools working devotedly on it so far?

The ‘bad’ part of it can also emerge when the ‘integration’ phase is not-so-successful. During integration process, not only the product portfolio / offerings are integrated, but teams (people) are also to be integrated. These teams have achieved success with their own working style, thinking style, work culture, and motivation. So, there is a challenge in integrating them under one style/work culture/process and yet make them deliver more efficiently that past. Sometime the aggressive style gets diminished after acquisition and 3+3 does not even become 6 ( as against expected result of 3+3 = 9).

Vikas: Walden C. Rhines, Chairman & CEO Mentor Graphics Corporation in one of his presentation said that “by 2020 we’ll all Work for the same company”. What are your thoughts on this?

Ramakant: If I take this statement literally, I don’t think it will happen. As per his slide, 2015 is showing change in trend of % revenue of top 10 companies. But I am not sure if this trend will continue. In my opinion, consolidation and de-consolidation cycle will continue. whenever consolidation curve moves up, disruptive technology/business model or some sort of crisis world over will reverse the trend.

Vikas: How did you start your career?

Ramakant: I started my career with BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) in 1985. The first instrument I developed was 8051 based control system, a part of shutdown system of nuclear power reactor. I continued in developing Data Acquisition Boards, Data Acquisition systems and subsequently transitioned to FPGA & ASIC design verification.

Vikas: What are the factors motivated you to write certainly uncertain, a fiction book covering semiconductor industry?

https://www.amazon.in/Certainly-Uncertain-Rush-Ramakant-Kapatral-ebook/dp/B00BLYPYAA

Ramakant: I like reading suspense thriller novels. It is one of my hobbies. It stimulates my mind and imagination. Around 2011 I was toying with an idea of taking a break in career. My wife fully supported the idea, but cautioned me to find some activity that will keep me busy. That’s where I decided to take break and explore writing something. I was in dual mind, whether to project my learnings so far or write pure fiction, ultimately ended up mixing up these two (but this made the spectrum of readers narrow). However, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I was surprised at myself when it took good shape.

One of the reasons to focus on lifestyle of engineers working in Semiconductor-IT was to highlight their consistent hard work, non-stop challenges, which people in other industry might be unaware of, except the attractive salary part of it.

Vikas: Your thoughts on IoT?

Ramakant: We were in similar situation close to 2 decades back when mobile telephony was emerging. At that time many (including myself) felt, who needs expensive handset coupled with costly call charges when one can always reach out over reliable landline phone connection. But look at how our life style (personal, professional, and social) and the way of working got influenced (across all sections of our society).

This was the result of connecting all ‘humans’. Now there is possibility to connect all living and non-living things, 24X7, using IoT. Thanks to falling prices of silicon+connectivity+integrated sensors and further, all operating at small size battery power. This has opened up numerous possibilities of applications in all industries, limited only by our imagination, which were not possible earlier.

In mobile technology, consumer did not mind buying costly handset & pay expensive call charges when he saw value. Similarly in IoT also, the application scenario projected to consumer should have a real value in it. Till then this may remain as a hype. I think the development efforts are progressing in right direction, especially in the last leg of the solution i.e. processing huge data with predictive, prescriptive data analytics and applying AI techniques.  

Application of IoT in Industrial automation seems promising field. Maven Systems (now part of MosChip) has good product/solution portfolio in Industrial IoT and non-consumer space.

Vikas: What's the one question you wished someone would have asked you, but never did?"

Ramakant: I may be able to answer this after couple of more interviews J

Vikas: Is VLSI domain seeing a dead-end career?

Ramakant: I don’t think it will be dead-end career. But, the role and expectations will keep changing. As, we have moved from ASICs to complex ASICs integrating sub-systems to SoCs (integrating yesterday’s system on to a single chip), the verification task actually has changed from complex logic verification to SoC (system level verification) verification, targeting use case scenarios on simulation/co-simulation/ emulation platform. The present day systems are built with multiple SoCs containing multiple processor cores & high speed connectivity peripherals, executing complex software algorithms in realtime. So in future most of its hardware along with some software part may get integrated in to more complex SoCs (what we should call it – Super-SoC ?). So, the verification engineer will be expected to understand such complex system and verify its functioning at system level.

Vikas: Where do you see yourself after 5 years?

Ramakant: The dream continues……Enjoying sunset from the lawn of my sea-side villa! On career front, definitely something new, learning new role, applying my experience to solve technical/business problems in the field

Vikas: What do you do when you are not working?

Ramakant: Read novels, watch action movies, listen to old songs.

Vikas: Whom do you love more, your parents, friends, spouse, kids, siblings, yourself?

Ramakant: Spouse and my Son

Vikas: What is the best gift/compliment you've ever received?

Ramakant: You inviting me for the 2nd session of ‘Coffee with Vikas’

Vikas: Your advice to the budding VLSI engineers

Ramakant: Make sure you have sound fundamentals in digital-analog electronics and digital systems. This is the only field where you continue to work in the field you have learnt in 1st/2nd year of the college. For verification engineers, in particular I suggest them to be thorough at verification fundamentals (what, why, how of verification). Also, another “must” skill for verification engineer is the art of problem solving.  There is tendency to focus only on language- methodology, which is required, but not enough alone.

Vikas: Any suggestions for Coffee with Vikas blog?

Ramakant: I am sure you have already planned it; try to cover folks from different roles (right from VCs to project engineer), different types of organizations (big/medium/startups, IP/product/service providing…etc.).


*********************************************************************
Thanks Ramakant for your time and wish you all the success a head.
*********************************************************************

Coffee Talk with Srini

Hi Readers, 

As mentioned earlier I am rolling out my first coffee talk with Srinivasan Venkataramanan, Please find the short Bio below.

Srinivasan Venkataramanan
Entrepreneur and Technology Evangelist in VLSI
Chief Technology Officer, CVC

About Srinivasan:

Srini, as he is more known as, is a technology evangelist and a passionate engineer. With over 18 years of experience in VLSI industry, Srini has published several books, papers, articles etc.  He has presented at various technical events across the globe. His areas of interest are the advanced verification solutions and methodologies such as SystemVerilog, UVM, OVM, VMM, Assertion-Based Verification, formal verification etc. Since 2009 Srini has been an entrepreneur in EDA and semiconductor domains.

LinkedIn Profile: http://in.linkedin.com/in/svenka3

Coffee Talk:

Vikas: How did you start your career?

Srini:  First of all, glad to be speaking with an enthusiastic, energetic, passionate engineer.On my career – right from my engineering days (Bachelor degree) I was clear to do pursue a specialization. I started my GATE exam preparation as the way to higher studies right from 2^nd year of my B.E. The reason I am telling your readers this is to highlight the importance of long and sustained efforts needed to make it big in this industry. Once I got my GATE score well above the rest, I had the opportunity to join any IIT/IISc. I even joined at IIT-Madras/Chennai to begin with. Then came a pleasant surprise from IIT-Delhi regarding a new VLSI program starting in 1996 there (called VDTT). It was my mother Smt. V. Parvathi who took great efforts to explore that VLSI is and what the future for that field is; having come from a small town of Mayiladuthurai in Tamilnadu, I could not imagine the value of VLSI back then. My mother enquired with her office colleagues and came back saying we should strive for this. VDTT program at IIT-Delhi is clearly the most sought out programs for engineers across India as it is a perfect blend of EE-CS and CARE (Centre for Applied Research in Electronics). Such an interdisciplinary program for VLSI is perfect as it offers engineers a wide perspective of VLSI domain from deep micron electrical issues to core digital electronics. On the CS front it covers CAD of digital systems, computer architecture, algorithms and data-structure, graph theory etc. Involvement of CARE enables researchers to go deeper in fabrication, packaging etc. Though I sound like marketing for VDTT – I want young engineers reading this blog to understand that VLSI is a vast field and choosing the right place to study is key to their long career in VLSI. Now if I look back at all my projects in the industry, almost everything had a beginning at IIT-Delhi. This is wonderful as many engineers in India complain that what they study is not what they work-on. Fast forward to 2016-17, I am using many of the CS concepts picked up during IIT-D days in our new start-up VerifWorks (http://www.verifworks.com) to develop innovative EDA products.

Once in VDTT, my VLSI career took off very well with my Master’s thesis done at Philips Semiconductors, Albuquerque, USA. My first job was at Philips, Netherlands at the heart of Natlab (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Natuurkundig_Laboratorium). Then I decided to return to India and worked with an exciting start-up named Realchip communications at Chennai, whilst my wife (Ajeetha) was pursuing her M.S by research at IIT-Madras. The engineer in me pushed me to visit IIT-M labs often to see how research is done.  Ajeetha was working on some novel data acquisition prototype and it was amazing how much we could see in boards and systems sitting at the labs of IIT’s here. I started to develop passion towards Verification at Realchip thanks to my mentor Mr. Ramnath who showed me that a complex BFM based SoC Verificaiton environment can be coded in plain Verilog back in 2000-2001! I moved on to using Specman at Intel and SystemVerilog at Synopsys and then to my own ventures since 2009!

Vikas: What are the factors that motivated you to start CVC?

Srini: Having started working at Europe, I got exposed to the deep passion and dedication professionals there have towards their career; it was not for money only that they worked (Recall that in Europe many taxi drivers earn almost equal salary as engineers at Philips). The other big urge in me was to give back something to the society in India. Another big role model for me is my father Sri. K. Venkataramanan. Read more on how he inspired me to become an engineer in at a partner blog “What inspired you to become an engineer?” (https://www.aldec.com/en/company/blog/89--what-inspired-you-to-become-an-engineer).

During my Realchip days I used to contribute to several online technical forums in VLSI. Having analyzed the type of questions budding engineers in India were asking at that point in time, I realized that we need a distilled version of VDTT (@ IIT-Delhi), affordable for all and approachable by many (not just few elite who could clear GATE etc.). I for one believe that skills can be horned through sustained efforts even by an average engineer (provide he/she is motivated to do so).

To be honest, I did not start CVC, it is Ajeetha who did it back in 2004. She did it as she was working as independent consultant for many EDA companies across the globe and felt a need to expand the resource pool. Back in those days we used to hunt down any engineer who could spell “Verilog/VHDL”, literally. So CVC started of an elite group of “Consultants” and hence the name “Contemporary Verification Consultants” (CVC).

I joined CVC in 2009 after my Synopsys stint as I felt a strong need to impart my 13+ years of learning to wider engineering community in India and abroad. I always believed in “Knowledge grows when shared”. In my native language Tamil, there was a great poet and freedom fighter named Bharathiyaar. Some of his songs are great motivation for me, especially the one that goes like below:

English summary: Won't you give me the strength to live as a contributor to my Mother-land?

For non-Tamil readers, below is a link with some translation to English:

http://bhaarathiyaar-kavidhaigal.blogspot.in/2013/03/nalladhor-veenai.html

Sorry if that sounds like a diversion to this topic, but to me these lines keep ringing in my ears and keep motivating me to do more to disseminate whatever little I learnt through my great mentors, teachers et al. And I hope some of your readers will develop a similar inclination towards our great culture and literature and lead a meaningful life.

Vikas: Few insights about CVC Training's?

Srini: It is interesting that many across the globe associate CVC with high quality training solutions. As I mentioned earlier, CVC was started as a consulting firm to offer EDA services. During 2009 when I joined CVC, my main motivation was to increase the employability of young engineers in India through a 6-month finishing school in VLSI. Looking back, we have clearly achieved that in great style. I am proud to say this as my main contribution to CVC.

We also offer short term courses to working professionals in many topics related to VLSI Design and Verification. According to recent internal count, we have close to 50 different training offerings! That’s a lot for an indigenous company to achieve in 12+ years.

We have so far trained over a whopping 10,000 engineers in this domain across the globe. We have expanded to USA (Bay area, Austin, East Coast), Europe (Germany, Poland) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam).

We are the only training company from India to have done this in VLSI.

As a gift to this wonderful community in Bangalore, we also offer several free training – a notable one being a series of free, short sessions on selected topics that we offer around Dec every year – to mark our founder’s day. For 2016-17 we have a great list lined up at http://tinyurl.com/free-uvm-cvc

Another information that some of your readers may benefit is the free training that we offer to various academic institutions via our Go2UVM portal http://www.go2uvm.org/resources/free-go2uvm-training/

Vikas: What is the motto to start VerifWorks/Labs/News venture as a separate entity besides CVC?

Srini: CVC is now well established as a global training vendor in VLSI Design Verification. Just like how grow a baby to a child and then an adult, we believe CVC is now on its own. CVC’s focus continues to be global and local training with its own growth targets.

Over the years we have developed several niche products in EDA and we need a new entity to see its deployment. VerifWorks, a product based company develops products, offer value added consulting along with our tools to our customers.

Also, as you are well aware, CVC has been prolific in publishing. We have written several articles at EETimes, DAC, DVCon etc. We have co-authored several books in Assertions (SVA, PSL), VMM etc. We have also been at the center stage of bringing big technical events like DVCon to India. We have contributed to all DVCon events across the globe since 2006 if my memory serves right. Especially in 2016 we have delivered UVM tutorial at USA and Europe (Germany) events. Our team had 4 papers in DVCon India 2016. With so much activity around publishing it is a natural next step for us to spin these off to a new venture named VerifNews. As you may appreciate, writing and publishing is a different skill-set than training or product development.

Vikas: How CVC is contributing to the VLSI ecosystem?

Srini:  CVC has been based solely out of India to keep our tricolor flag flying HIGH! We are proud to be an Indian company making waves across the globe. Keeping the local ecosystem in mind, we have worked hard and brought an Indian edition of our SVA book(s) via http://verifnews.org/publications/books/

As I mentioned earlier, we offer free training to local academia on UVM via our Go2UVM.org site.

Our contributions to bringing DVCon to India has been well known and deeply appreciated by all stakeholders. Mr. Dennis Brophy, Director of Strategic Business Development, Mentor Graphics acknowledged CVC’s value in DVCon India - http://tinyurl.com/cvc-dvcon

Vikas: About DVTalk?

Srini: Given the highly energetic Indian engineering ecosystem, we believe a yearly event like DVCon while great, is insufficient and too small to accommodate all. Hence we initiated more informal, high frequent event named DVTalk. We have held successful events across southern states in India and Mumbai so far. We hope to continue that with contributions by emerging technical leaders like yourself!

Vikas: Is VLSI domain seeing a dead-end career?

Srini: Absolutely not! It is growing bigger into a merger of embedded and VLSI in the form of IoT, automotive etc. If you define VLSI as going lower and lower in geometry of transistors, clock speed etc. yes there are some slow-downs. However VLSI as a field is critical for our life time with huge growth of mobile phones, tablets, digital India movement etc. The convergence of safety, security and VLSI will be a big push for this industry in near future.

Vikas: Where do you see CVC and yourself will be after 5 years?

Srini: Well, I am bad at predictions. I believe strongly in hard-work, sustenance  and passion. So, for sure we will be around rocking in 5 years. As far as an individual – I will be happy to see myself mentoring emerging local leaders, entrepreneurs etc.

 Vikas: What projects you are currently working on?

Srini: We recently released a first version of our DVCreate PSS (Portable Stimulus Standard), we are collecting feedback from early stage customers. We will sure be updating with all the feedback hopefully by DVCon US 2017 timeframe.

Vikas: What do you do when you are not working?

Srini: I must confess that I am a workaholic and love my work. But I also like many other things such as playing with my lovely kids. I am a deep listener of Indian classical music, primarily Carnatic (Though recently I started listening Hindustani as well, albeit much less do I understand that). I love swimming and cycling though I don’t do them often. I have keen interest in spirituality and Hindu religion.

Vikas: Whom do you love more, your parents, friends, spouse, kids, siblings, yourself?

Srini: All! Yes, it is difficult, but that’s me!

Vikas: About Mergers, Acquisitions - Is this good for VLSI Industry?

Srini:  I believe so. Though I am not an expert in this domain, but as I mentioned earlier the field of VLSI is expanding and such mergers in long run should be good. However, for short term, we do see issues with EDA start-ups like ours (VerifWorks), but we are augmenting that with services for now.

Vikas: Your advice to the budding VLSI engineers?

Srini: Work hard, play hard! Be passionate about your chosen field. Stay technical if you can (I am still hands-on – if I don’t code or write for a week I feel horrible). I see the attitude of budding engineers needing to be lot better – don’t compare yourself with a Uber/Ola driver – he/she may make more money in the beginning but you are an ENGINEER and will achieve much bigger things in life if you stay focused.

Especially in India there needs to be lot more technical leaders as opposed to just managers. Given that we are fast loosing cost advantage to other emerging economies, we should go up the value-chain and remain indispensable to the world of VLSI. This is possible only with passionate engineers in India.

Vikas: Any suggestions for “Coffee with Vikas” blog?

Srini: I love this idea. Informally I have spoken about Vikas to few other seniors who have worked with you and all of believe you have the passion that’s largely lacking with young engineers. So we are happy to have you and we would all support your initiatives like this.

Keep them going!

Wish you and your readers a very happy new year 2017!

*********************************************************************
Thanks Srini for your time and wish all Readers will get excited while Reading this.

*********************************************************************

Hi Reader's ,

 Happy to see you browsing my blog "Coffee with Vikas".

The objective of this blog is to talk with the people in VLSI industry and share their valuable experiences here, I will touch upon on their entry point and contributions in this field as well as their suggestions for all the budding engineers like me and you...and much more about recent trends and future etc..

Please be tuned in .. the curtain raiser of "coffee with vikas" will be available in mid December.

Suggestions/comments are welcome.

Happy Reading
Vikas Billa