Bangladesh does not make chips, but a small number of Bangladeshi engineers design parts of them for companies abroad, and Ulkasemi — one of the few local firms in that business — has decided the bottleneck is training. Its new Ulkasemi VLSI Training Institute (UVTI) has opened in its own Humaira Building in Niketan, Dhaka, with roughly 50 students across two specialised courses. The company calls it the largest semiconductor training centre in the country.
What is taught
The curriculum is organised the way a chip-design company is: separate tracks for RTL (writing the logic), design verification (proving it works), physical design (placing and routing it on silicon), layout (digital and analogue) and design for testability. The two courses running now are IC mask design and IC physical design; analogue design and design verification are planned next. Each course is built to resemble a real working environment so that graduates are usable on a project from the first week.
How the courses run
- Around 80–90 per cent hands-on, using industry-standard EDA (electronic design automation) tools rather than academic substitutes.
- Typically three months, five days a week — 240 hours of training, up to 480 for some tracks.
- Taught by working engineers from the industry; an internationally recognised certificate at the end.
- Capacity to train 150 students at a time.
Why the tool time matters
The single biggest gap between a Bangladeshi EEE graduate and an employable chip designer is not theory — universities teach digital logic well enough — but hours on the professional tools that companies actually use, which cost tens of thousands of dollars per seat and are almost never available on campus. A course whose main asset is licensed tool access and engineers who use those tools daily is filling exactly that hole.
Who should apply
The natural candidates are final-year and recent EEE, CSE and ECE graduates who want to work in design services rather than software, and mid-career embedded or FPGA engineers looking to move into ASIC work. Ulkasemi itself hires designers, and Bangladesh has a handful of other firms serving foreign fabless companies, so the first cohort has a plausible destination. The realistic caution is that the domestic job pool is still small; the larger prize is remote and overseas work, where certified, tool-fluent designers from Dhaka can compete on cost with Bengaluru and Hanoi.
