The next challenge for growing electronics manufacturing in India is to increase the value addition in manufacturing by making mechanicals, connectors, cables etc. and then move on to passive components, submodules and semiconductor chips for these products , says Dr Satya Gupta, President, VLSI Society of India in conversation with Rakesh Rao.

VLSI Society of India is 40 years old Society created to promote VLSI Design and Semiconductor technology in India. It was started by visionaries from Industry and Academia including Prof Vishwani Agrawal, Auburn University, Dr Prabhakaran, ITI, Prof Jacob Abraham, University of Texas at Austin, Prof H N Mahabala, IIT Madras and many others. Today it is the largest body in India promoting education, research, start-ups, product development and skilling in the area of VLSI design, semiconductor technology and embedded electronics system from K12 to PhD students and professionals. Some of the flagship programs of VSI are International Conference on VLSI Design, VDAT Conference, VSI Regional Chapters in 5 states which are aimed to build VLSI Design and semiconductor communities of students, researchers, faculty, entrepreneurs, institutes, industry and government at the regional and national level. The goal of VLSI society of India is taking semiconductor education to more than 500 colleges and create semiconductor ecosystem involving each of 800 districts in India towards fulfilling the mission of making India a strong electronics and semiconductor nation.

The theme of the conference was ‘Silicon Meet AI: Sustainable Innovations in Accelerated Computing, Secure Connectivity and Intelligent mobility’. As the theme suggests the focus was on computing, connectivity and mobility and also covered topics like advanced packaging for the AI era, risc-v design, quantum computing and semiconductor manufacturing. Since VLSID is a technical conference there was a lot of focus on research and connecting students and young engineering to latest technology advances in industry thus bridging the gaps between Industry and academia. The conference was attended by almost 3,000 people with 450 Student fellows and featured 32 tutorials, 68 high quality papers, 20 posters, 20+ keynotes and panel discussions and several high-powered fire-side chats. The conference highlight was fire-side chat between Chris Miller the Author of CHIP War book and Dr Satya gupta and the Life-time Achievement award to Prof Arogyaswami Paulraj, Stanford University for his pioneering work on Sonar for Indian Navy and MIMO technology which is one of the key technology for wireless communications. VLSI Society also gave 1,500 CHIP War books to the participants and announced the 1-TOPS program, 1 Tape-out per student. 

Electronics manufacturing has taken off in a big way in India over the last 10-15 years. Most mobile phones for domestic use are currently being manufactured in India, and the export of phones made in India has also taken off. Most of it is at manufacturing level and part of it is at assembly level and it is being done as contract manufacturing for global brands like Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, One-plus etc. The PLI incentives and selective application of tariffs has helped in growing this ecosystem tremendously. The next challenge for growing electronics manufacturing in India is to increase the value addition in manufacturing by making mechanicals, connectors, cables etc. and then move on to passive components, submodules and semiconductor chips for these products.   

Semiconductors are at the heart of every electronics device today and most advanced gadgets and products for digital infrastructure worldwide would not be possible with the advances in semiconductors. For example, generative AI, which the hottest area would not be possible without fabulous advances in computing and storage both of which are primarily semiconductor products. The same is the case for mobile phone industry which is almost $40 billion market in India where the semiconductors are the main engine of every phone.

India announced the Semiconductor policy and formed India Semiconductor Mission in the beginning of 2022. In three years, phenomenal progress has been made in semiconductor manufacturing. Today’s India has the best incentives in the world for semiconductor manufacturing which totals-up to 70-75% of the project cost between government of India and various states. This has helped in getting investments of more than 1.5 trillion from domestic and global companies, namely Micron Technology, Tata Electronics, CG Power and Kaynes Technologies with 1 ATMP Plant, 3 OSAT plants and 1 Wafer manufacturing plant. Most of these facilities have started building they facilities and the chip production should start as early as second half of 2025 by Micron, with others following up in next few years.

India started late in semiconductor manufacturing primarily because the earlier efforts in last 2 decade did not take-off for many reasons. Now we have made a solid start. The challenges like talent, raw materials, technology integration are part of every business and once the investment, incentives and technology partnerships are in place these are very solvable problems with right focus and efforts. For example, the raw materials like chemical and gasses, the vendors for these have already started coming to India when they sensed business opportunity with upcoming fabs and packaging units and obviously aided with right facilitation and support from the government. Technology integration is a technical problem and with right support from technology partner is very achievable task. Regarding the talent, some of the initial senior people have to be brought in from outside the country with right experience and the rest can be developed both at engineering level and technician level. The way, I see this is that they and challenging but very solvable problems. 

Electronics products depend on supply of semiconductor chips and semiconductor chips are primarily developed by the fabless companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, AMD etc. These fabless companies manufacture these chips in a contract manufacturing model at various fabs across the world like TSMC, Global Foundry, UMC, PSMC etc. but the product is owned by the fabless company and not the semiconductor manufacturing company. Today if you look at the semiconductor companies, the fabless chip products companies like Nvidia are the largest semiconductor companies and has more than $3.5 trillion market cap and while TSMC, the largest semiconductor manufacturing company has the market cap of $1.2 trillion. When we talk a robust ecosystem for supply of chips, it is important to develop both Fabless chip product companies and semiconductor manufacturing companies. In last 3 years after Indian semiconductor Mission was launched, more than 95% of the investments and incentives have gone rightfully for the manufacturing. As we move forward, in the next phase the incentives for semiconductors have to be more balanced, like 80% for the manufacturing and 20% for the fabless semiconductor product companies.  

As the semiconductor technology and transistor scaling is reaching its physical limits there are several new trends have opened up. The most important one is true 3D packaging which is going to be critical for building more powerful chips for AI, data-centres and high-performance computing. The others significant trends are wireless capability into every product, heavy use of sensors in many products like automobiles & mobile phones such as Lidar, Radar, Imaging sensors, touch sensors etc., and display technology which is required in almost every product we use.  India has a huge opportunity in investing in these critical technologies of the future and create a leadership position with abundant talent available in India. I see a bright future for semiconductor technology, products and manufacturing in India and we are on the right path to make India a strong electronics and semiconductor product nation.