About VLSI EXPERT®
"This isn't a business. It's a gap we decided to fix."
17 years. One mission. A founder's journey from a free blog in 2008 to a training network whose alumni now work at Synopsys, Intel and Qualcomm.
17 years. One mission. A founder's journey from a free blog in 2008 to a training network whose alumni now work at Synopsys, Intel and Qualcomm.
It's easy to say "colleges lack industry tools." That's too generic, and not entirely true. The real picture is layered. Tier-1 colleges often build strong fundamentals but offer little real industry exposure — students graduate knowing the theory of CMOS but have never opened an EDA tool. Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges frequently lack both — fundamentals AND exposure — leaving genuinely capable students with no path into the industry at all, not because they lack talent, but because no one ever showed them what the industry actually expects.
Mentorship, across every tier, is almost nonexistent. A student stuck on a concept at midnight has nowhere to turn — not a senior, not a professor, not a forum that actually answers. Puneet experienced this gap from both sides: as a working engineer who saw what companies actually needed, and as someone who remembered exactly how lost he felt as a student with no one to ask.
That is the gap VLSI EXPERT was built to close. Not a curriculum gap. A guidance gap. The technical training came later — what came first was simply being the person who picked up the phone.
From 2018, students trained on real Synopsys tools — but access was limited and token-based, shared across a batch, requested in advance. It worked, technically. But students were frustrated. They wanted to practice at midnight, on weekends, whenever the idea struck — and they couldn't.
We never sat down and asked "is this profitable?" We asked "does this help the student?" The answer was obvious, so in 2022 we gave every student unlimited, individual, 24×7 access to the same tools used inside Synopsys, Intel and Qualcomm — at no extra cost, no premium tier, no fine print. We didn't think twice about what it would cost us. We thought about what it would mean for someone trying to build a career.
Some learners need something different — self-paced, asynchronous, accessible on their own schedule. So we built it as its own thing. ChipGrad was founded by Puneet Mittal along with co-founder Niti Gupta — same mission, different format.
We split it out deliberately. Too many institutes blur the line — they call a recorded video library "training" and let students assume it's instructor-led. We don't want that confusion. When you join VLSI EXPERT, every class is live, every session is instructor-led, every doubt gets answered by a real person in real time. If what you need is self-paced, structured content instead — that's ChipGrad, clearly labelled, clearly separate. No one should ever wonder which one they signed up for.
Not features. Philosophy — the thinking behind why VLSI EXPERT works the way it does.
