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Come January, about 1,200 technology experts, including leading industrialists and top design engineers, will converge in India's silicon hub to explore opportunities in nano-electronics for expanding product portfolio and the semicon industry.

The 20th international conference on VLSI (very large system integration) design and embedded systems space will be held Jan 6-10.

With the world of semiconductors moving from 90 nanometre (nm) to 65nm and 45nm for designing next generation of sensors and micro-controllers to make smart and affordable products, the Indian design community is moving towards nano-electronics in a big way.

"Advances being made in chip designing and embedded systems have opened up a host of opportunities to enhance the performance of components. With the size of chips shrinking and the number of transistors increasing, nano-electronics will determine the future of products in terms of features and applications," Texas Instruments managing director Biswadip Mitra said.

The conference on VLSI design will focus on the role of nano-electronics and the challenges ahead for the semicon industry, especially in CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology in the nanometre dimension.

The five-day conference, including plenary sessions and tutorials on the semicon design ecosystem will also deliberate on topics ranging from low-power design to system-on-chip (SoC) designs and radio frequency (RF).

"Though the Indian software and services sector has established in the global market, the hardware sector consisting of semiconductor (chips), VLSI design and electronics manufacturing is fast catching up, thanks to the sound ecosystem built over the last two decades.

With the domestic market witnessing a growing demand for electronic products and high-tech gadgets in diverse verticals such as mobiles, consumer durables, home appliances, security systems and automobiles, the industry is at a inflection point," Mitra said.

Unlike its big brother (software services), the Indian semicon industry is still young, with just 200 firms, majority of them multinationals, operating in VLSI design, embedded systems and manufacturing.

Since size does matter, the conference will for the first time focus on scaling in terms of human resources, investments and capacity. A survey by the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) and Frost & Sullivan has revealed the industry has 60,000 engineers in embedded systems, 11,000 in VLSI design and 5,000 in hardware segment.

In terms of market estimates for the next decade, the industry is projected to grow ten-fold — 750,000, consisting of about 680,000 in embedded systems, 75,000 in VLSI design and 10,000 in manufacturing.

"The semicon industry revenue is set to increase by four fold by 2010 from $1 billion presently. By 2015, the ISA study indicates the industry will account for around 12 percent of the national GDP," Magma managing director A. Anandkumar said.

Besides products and applications, innovation, intellectual property (IP) issues and venture capital funding will dominate the proceedings.

To ensure greater participation by the student community, the organisers are granting about 380 fellowships to attend the tutorials. A large number of faculty members from leading engineering colleges and technical institutes have been invited for first-hand exposure and training sessions.