IIT Hyderabad is one of the fastest-growing new IITs that has almost reached the level of older IITs in no time. Its location of being in one of the biggest industrial cities of India plays a big role in its fast-paced development. My sister was a student of the CSP branch (MTech RA) and enlightened me about the placement scenario there. However, she passed out in 2016 so the placement stats are for that year only.
The CSP department of IIT Hyderabad has extremely learned and experienced faculty with a decent placement scenario even better than VLSI.
Considering the improved trend, the placement scenario of CSP at IIT Hyderabad is currently expected to be even better.
The M.Tech in signal processing offered by IIT Mandi was launched in 2017 and thus is a relatively new branch. This program has been taught in the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering (SCEE) since August 2017.
The program is designed to give importance to theory and exposure to industry needs.
It consists of two parts
The course work is structured to give solid theoretical foundations and practical, hands-on experience which would enable the student to tackle problems in signal processing, communications, and machine learning holistically.
In order to prepare the students for product development by the end of the first year, courses like Advanced Programming Practicum, Embedded Systems, IoT Systems, and Systems Design are included in the curriculum. In addition to the post-graduate project, these courses familiarize the students with the system design aspects relevant to signal processing, communications, and machine learning. The majority of the faculty is in image processing so the maximum course work is from image processing and very little from communication.
The hostel facilities, however, are quite a disappointment with students getting extremely small double occupancy rooms double in single occupancy rooms. The hostel rooms lack basic amenities like tables, chairs, LAN ports, etc. The first-year students are made to stay on the North campus while most labs and classes are on the South campus. Students have to travel a hilly terrain of 3 km just for attending lab sessions. With all honesty, the placement scenario of this particular specialization is poor. The only advantage of IIT Mandi you will have is the amazing climate and surroundings. Thus, make IIT Mandi your last choice and try to target NITs instead.