How India is trying to win the semiconductor race, fighting decades of challenges & setbacks
18 July, 2022
New Delhi: The white bull pulled a cart along the busy Miller’s Road and stopped outside Sona Towers in Bangalore. A now classic black-and-white photo shows workers unloading its high-tech cargo: India’s first private satellite dish. It had been brought in to enable communications with the US for Texas Instruments (TI), an American company that had just set up an R&D facility to design electronic chips, or semiconductors.
Since that day in 1985, Bengaluru has become an international tech and entrepreneurial hub. The semiconductor industry, too, has exploded. Chips are now ubiquitous in just about everything electronic — from rice cookers and mobile phones to cars and missile systems.
Yet, for a variety of reasons and despite a promising start, India lost out in the semiconductor revolution of the 1980s, while countries like China and Taiwan raced ahead.
The state-owned semiconductor fabrication foundry in Mohali, Semiconductor Complex Ltd (SCL), literally went up in flames in 1989, and with various government initiatives fizzling out, India over the 1990s and 2000s settled into the role of a semiconductor design backroom rather than the manufacturing powerhouse it once hoped to be.
Over the past 15 years or so, however, a handful of homegrown semiconductor design companies in Bengaluru have been pushing to be recognised for their innovation, rather than as proverbial ‘bullock carts’ on which foreign companies ride.
For instance, Terminus Circuits owns the intellectual property for the chips it designs for its clients — which is a rarity. Then there’s Saankhya Labs, which designed the first consumer electronics chip for Software Defined Radio (SDR) communication systems in 2012. Steradian Semiconductors works at the cutting edge of 4D imaging radar technologies.
Now, more than ever, the importance of such companies is being recognised.
India, which currently imports 100 per cent of its chips, was hit hard by the worldwide chip shortage, exacerbated by Covid and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Like the rest of the world, the country is keen to achieve some chip self-sufficiency.
Last December, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched the ‘India Semiconductor Mission’ to enable the country’s “emergence as a global hub for electronics manufacturing and design”, with a total budget of Rs 76,000 crore (about US$10 billion).
In April, the government also set up a panel to support start-ups and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) in the sector.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario