NASSCOM Data Confirms India at 35,000 Chip Engineers and Growing Fast

NASSCOM has published its annual semiconductor engineering workforce survey, reporting that India's chip engineering headcount reached 35,000 professionals as of mid-2026, representing 12 percent year-on-year growth from the approximately 31,000 reported in the prior year survey. The 35,000 figure covers engineers employed in chip design, verification, physical implementation, embedded firmware, and applications engineering roles at captive design centres of global semiconductor companies in India and at Indian semiconductor design services companies providing contract services to overseas clients. The survey confirms India's position as the world's second-largest concentration of chip design engineers by headcount after the United States, ahead of Taiwan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Israel, all of which have smaller absolute chip engineering workforces despite longer semiconductor industry histories than India.

Discipline-Level Demand-Supply Imbalance

The NASSCOM survey's most actionable finding for companies and policymakers is the discipline-level breakdown of hiring demand and available talent supply. At the aggregate level, the 12 percent growth rate reflects the balance across all chip engineering disciplines, but within this aggregate there are severe imbalances in specific areas. Physical design engineers, who perform the place-and-route, timing closure, and sign-off work that translates a chip's logic description into a mask-ready layout, are in acute shortage, with the number of open positions in this discipline exceeding qualified available candidates by a factor of approximately three. Analogue circuit design engineers, who design the op-amps, ADCs, DACs, and power management circuits that connect the digital chip world to the analogue physical world, face a similarly severe shortage, with average salaries for experienced analog designers up 22 percent year-on-year, the highest salary inflation of any chip engineering discipline. These shortages are a direct consequence of the limited number of Indian universities that offer high-quality training in physical design and analogue circuit design, a gap that the Semcon 2.0 Phase Two curriculum additions are designed to address.

Geographic Distribution and City Profiles

Bengaluru accounts for the largest share of India's chip engineering workforce at approximately 55 percent of the total, reflecting the city's decades-long accumulation of semiconductor company design centres and the depth of its engineering talent pool. Hyderabad is the second-largest semiconductor engineering city, contributing approximately 20 percent of the workforce and growing faster than Bengaluru on a percentage basis as companies including Intel, Broadcom, and Qualcomm expand their Hyderabad operations. Noida and Chennai each contribute approximately 8 percent, with Chennai growing particularly strongly driven by AMD, Ford's semiconductor engineering team, and Siemens EDA. Pune contributes the remaining balance and is growing rapidly in power semiconductor and automotive chip engineering driven by Infineon, ON Semiconductor, and Aptiv's India engineering presence. This geographic diversity reduces the concentration risk that once made Bengaluru's talent market the sole bottleneck for semiconductor hiring in India.

Workforce Quality and Retention

Beyond headcount, the NASSCOM survey addresses workforce quality metrics that are increasingly important as India's semiconductor companies move from supporting to leading roles. The survey found that the proportion of India's chip engineers with more than ten years of semiconductor-specific experience has grown to 28 percent of the total workforce, up from 21 percent three years ago, reflecting the maturation of the cohorts who entered the semiconductor industry in India's earlier growth phase. This growing experienced cohort is critical for the programme leadership and mentoring roles that sustain quality as the workforce expands. Retention metrics are improving as well, with annual engineer attrition rates declining from 18 percent to 14 percent over the survey period, a positive trend that reduces the recruitment burden on semiconductor companies and improves the continuity of design programme knowledge within teams.