2026-10-01 VDE dialog

INVENT a CHIP: A competition that sparks passion

For 25 years, INVENT a CHIP has inspired young people to get excited about electrical engineering. For participant Shreyas Darbhe Ganesha, taking part proved to be a pivotal experience for his future.

By Julian Hörndlein

“It’s as if I had moved up from a local amateur league to the Champions League,” says Shreyas Darbhe Ganesha. The 17-year-old student at Ehrenbürg-Gymnasium in Forchheim, Upper Franconia, is by no means talking about playing soccer, as one might assume, but about his participation in this year’s anniversary edition of the VDE microchip competition INVENT a CHIP. The aim is to solve challenging electrical engineering problems, delve deeply into a topic, and ultimately develop your own chip step by step. For 25 years, the competition has provided a very practical demonstration of just how diverse and varied work in the industry is and the different paths that students of electrical engineering can take.

For Darbhe Ganesha, taking part was a stroke of luck. He has always been interested in the natural sciences, is a real “tinkerer,” and has already achieved success several times in the Jugend forscht competition. At INVENT a CHIP, he was able to take his knowledge to the next level, as he puts it. In April, he was one of 25 young people who took part in the INVENT a CHIP Camp at Leibniz University Hannover and was thrilled by the depth of the content and the discussions with experts on site. “It was fantastic to get such insights into the everyday professional lives of chip developers,” says the student, who has since devoted almost every spare minute to various scientific projects.

Shreyas Darbhe Ganesha zeigt auf ein Tablet

Julian Hördnlein

The story of the 11th grader is quite typical for the competition, as Anja Rottke also knows. She has been running the program for nearly 20 years and says openly: “This is my dream job.” For her, it is the encounters that remain memorable even many years later. Around 77,000 students have participated over the course of the quarter-century, and more than 600 young people have designed their own chips. “Every year, we have very different groups at the camp,” explains Rottke. The 2015 cohort left a particularly lasting impression, when many girls also participated. That year’s participant Karolin Lohre even had the opportunity to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Chancellery. “That was definitely a highlight,” says Anja Rottke.

For Lohre, winning the competition was the starting point for her engineering career – she later studied electrical and information engineering in Hamburg and Karlsruhe. Many of the participants from the past 25 years have since earned doctorates, founded companies, or become respected researchers.

This year’s edition will conclude on October 5, when the anniversary celebration and awards ceremony will take place in Augsburg ahead of the BMT 2026 annual conference. Many alumni will be there, sharing their stories and showing participants just how exciting a career in electrical engineering can be. And even if they ultimately do not quite make it to the top, participating in INVENT a CHIP will remain a memory that will stay with and shape these young talents throughout their lives. Just as it has for Shreyas Darbhe Ganesha: “Electrical engineering has become one of my main options for the future,” he says.

What happens to participants after the competition? Project manager Anja Rottke has compiled the career paths of INVENT a CHIP participants from the past 25 years:

https://www.vde.com/iac-stories (in German)