Indian Semiconductor and Electronics Industry

I agree. There are numerous ways to promote the complete supply chain from raw materials to semiconductor Fabs to EMS contract manufacturing along with all ancillaries around it. It is a massive echo system. How defense related imports are mandated to have offsets as well as are encouraged by Make in India initiatives, we can similarly have several other ways to create such manufacturing parks in the whole end-to-end electronics supply chain.

I worked at Flextronics for almost 10 years, and when they were building their first manufacturing park in 2000 in China, Doumen, close to Zuhai, the site was 30 km from the small town of Zuhai with agricultural farms and no other industry around it. The government built a highway just for Flextronics and if you go today, the whole stretch of 30 km is filled with high rise apartment complexes, miles from the highway. I would easily say the investment in just that stretch in the past 15 years is over few trillion dollars. There are several such zones along the coast line of China. Flex bought few sq km of land close to Chennai sometime in 2003 and they just built one factory, that too they shut it down soon.

I am sure Modi does have a plan to implement the end-to-end chain.

 

Offtopic
Flextronics if I remember correctly is a Singapore based company. They have/had an office in B'lore near Intel's development centre. Regarding the highways, this is one place I feel Indian state governments should do better. I have seen many places, where they have build SEZ in the middle of nowhere serviced by just an single lane road. Most of the time those roads were meant for villages or suburbs and can never support a complex like a SEZ. It is hard to expand them because they are flanked by private properties. The reasons as why this is done in this way is simply because the land was owned by some local politician/MLA and got the clearance easily.

Ontopic
If I remember correctly, China has rules regarding foreign companies expanding in China where they need to take up a local partner for production. This shows that treaties like WTO have enough flexibility to allow countries to enforce local regulations. While you can't discriminate items in terms of duties etc based on the origin of the items, you can certainly delay their arrival in your market by making them satisfy local laws. In fast moving markets like that of a smartphone, time is indeed money. Given an investment of 6-7 billion dollar which could enable them to almost dominate the entire market, likes of Samsung will think hard about making it. Honestly, I would rather do with iPhone 5 right now rather than iPhone SE I am using if it means that in future it would force Apple to think really hard about producing phone and their chipsets locally.

 

Chip design centre in IIT-H
Equipped with hardware, storage facilities, it will benefit both start-ups, students.

 

Atomic level semiconductor chip making at <7 nm, Indian engineers are playing
"Raw talent is exist no matter what you do with that person" quotes Krishnan Srinivasan, Managing Director of the fast growing semiconductor fab-rication equipment maker Lam Research India, when this writer asked about India engineering is not only about IITs.

Lets talk about 6 nm width transistor, it has just 30 silicon atoms. So if you are a semiconductor equipment designer, you need to design your equipment to alter the silicon or some other semiconductor material using some atomic level altering material processing machines.


Pic above: Atomic scale structure of FinFETs and the etching

Lam Research success in India speaks about availability of semiconductor equipment talent for deep node chip equipment development.

In an exclusive interaction at Lam Research India office in Bengaluru, K. Srinivasan explained to this writer, the technology and business connections driving the high end semiconductor fab-rication technology.

K. Srinivasan: The most fundamental macro-economic trend what we call knowledge economy, which to me represents development of generation of knowledge. If you look at that- then you can narrow down, that drives our system integrators to develop products and today the main thrust is on enterprise computing. With that you also have mobility revolution, the third element of this is interconnectedness of different things wearables. These are all the macroeconomic trends. Lam Research is driven along Moore's Law progress, another element is to propagate/ democratise technology, to put it in as many hands as possible. There's a huge opportunity in this subcontinent ( India). This will also lead to other underserved areas in the world such as Africa. All these places can leapfrog in development, that is a mobility revolution.

Not just 7nm..
K. Srinivasan: There is also Internet connected wearables, Internet of things, smart machines, driverless cars. Devices (semiconductor) require for some of these application need not be 7 nm, they can be 65 nm 90 nm made chips.

Latest progress in deep node:
K. Srinivasan: When it comes to high-performance computing, 10 nm getting into production and is followed by 7 nm, and 5 nm is emerging driven by Moore's law. At 7 nm node, there is enormous opportunities in what we call multiple patterning, where Lam Research supplies atomic layer deposition equipment for etching. Lam Research is a preferred vendor in this area.

Interconnect challenges:
K. Srinivasan: The traditional copper interconnect technology has electromigration problems, there are opportunities looking for alternatives, and there are variety of other metals to replace copper, something like cobalt and many other alternatives can be used. The problem with the copper is the high current density in the extremely small sized copper interconnect make it to dislocate physically, causing defect to chip. And all noble metals such as gold and silver are poison to the device, even copper usage carefully managed.

Memory semiconductor fab equipment trends:
Going back to the mobility revolution, one of the important thing is memory capacity, Lam Research is a leader in depositing silicon oxide and nitride layers to form three-dimensional stacking of memory cells. They also supply equipment to deposit metal on each layer such as tungsten deposition equipment, where Lam Research equipment address challenges of placing metal in narrow and deep structures. Here they use atomic deposition instead of CVD. 3-D NAND flash memory is a product made out of using advanced semiconductor equipment made from Lam Research. Lam Research is also collaborating in developing advanced memory technologies such as a MRAM, phase change memory, and RRAM.

On India chip fab:
K. Srinivasan: India doesn't have a very large semiconductor manufacturing facilities. We are hoping that some semiconductor fab will come up in India, but unfortunately things are not progressing that well.

On Indian operations:
K. Srinivasan: In India Lam has 560 employees, about 340 of those are employed in hardware engineering, about 120 employed in software engineering, about 50-60 employed in manufacturing team. In this 2/3 of is mechanical engineering, and the balance is electrical engineering and little bit of chemical engineering. Lam Research has both direct employees, contract employees from services companies. Lam Research collaborate with Indian Institute of Science, Lam Research hires talent not only from IITs but also from regional engineering colleges, wherever good talent is available.

Semiconductor fab is not really electronics:
K. Srinivasan: Semiconductor manufacturing is essentially machine tool (mechanical engineering) company but of high-tech, a lot of work they do is mechanical and electrical engineering, which actually have reactors. I need to have automation to bring work piece into the reactor, once it is inside the chamber, we have to heat it and cool it, flow gases, flow liquids, these are all mechanical engineering. We also use chemical engineering, because of chemical processes involved. It also requires electrical engineering to control motors, flows, instruments and temperature controllers, valve controllers. The software is required to control all these processes in computerised environment.

Since majority of the semiconductor fabs are in Asia, Lam Research' semiconductor fab support team in India can easily fly to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and China, where world's top semiconductor foundries Such as TSMC, Globalfoundries, and Samsung and many more have their semiconductor IC chip manufacturing Plants.

By considering all these, India's Lam Research team plays vital role.

 

NXP, Mobis India deploy DRM chips and receivers designed in India

 

India Electronics and Semiconductor Association signs four MoUs to bridge talent gap

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PTI

 

India is too slow in building the semiconductor ecosystem: Cadence
Cadence Design Systems CEO Lip-Bu Tan and India MD Jaswinder Ahuja talk about emerging opportunities & challenges in India.
Lip-Bu Tan is CEO of Cadence Design Systems, one of the world's biggest companies providing software and hardware for designing integrated circuits, systems on chips and printed circuit boards.

He is also chairman of Walden International, a venture capital firm he founded in 1987 and which has been active in investing in Indian semiconductor startups.

On a visit to Bengaluru, where Cadence has a large R&D centre, Tan and India MD Jaswinder Ahuja spoke to TOI. Excerpts:

Give us a sense of the emerging opportunities and challenges in the semiconductor industry.

Tan: Semiconductors are the foundation of all the killer apps. There is a lot of innovation required for some of the emerging areas of opportunity. Machine learning, deep learning are very big areas. Self-driving is machine learning.

Today, people are trying to see if a device can look at your eye ball and understand what you are looking at, so that you don't have to use a keyboard, mouse or voice (to perform an action).

Where the eye is looking can also be where the target advertising is placed. Some universities are doing even more advanced research, looking at how the brain functions. These kind of deep learning can help in medical applications, predicting heart attacks, and a host of other areas.

There is work happening to reduce the latency in video, given that AR/VR (augmented/virtual reality) is taking off. All these are going to drive a lot of in novation in the semiconductor side, but there are also a lot of challenges in the semiconductor ecosystem.

It is kind of frustrating that most of the venture firms are not interested in investing in semiconductor firms. Most of them try to invest on the next WhatsApp, or other social media apps.

How do you see India in the semiconductor space?

Tan: India is very important for us. About 25% of our manpower is in India, our R&D side is very big here. But it can become much more effective for the country if, like China, India becomes self-sufficient in terms of providing the silicon for the country's growth.

The Chinese government decided semiconductor is very important for them. They didn't want to depend on US companies to provide their semicon requirements. If you depend on them, you don't get the attention or the service you need, because of the distance, and because of the dominance of a few players.

Their standard products may not suit local requirements. Besides, getting attention is very important especially if you have a unique idea and have customized requirements.

So China poured $100-plus billion to build and acquire companies like infrastructure business H3C and phone image sensor company OmniVision to create the capacity. The Indian government has been talking, and I have just encouraged the government to do it quickly, because you shouldn't miss the whole boat.

What should the government do?

Ahuja: The government put together the National Policy on Electronics back in 2011, it's a very comprehensive roadmap. It acknowledges that we need to have homegrown Indian fabless semiconductor companies, that we need to set up incubation facilities. But the implementation is extremely slow.

Where are the incubation centres? Where is the Electronic Development Fund, which was to be the fund of funds (EDF was to participate in professionally managed 'daughter funds' which in turn would provide risk capital to companies developing new technologies in the area of electronics)?

These were things that were called out five years ago.

Can't private industry take the lead? Like the way it's happening in software.

Tan: Significant investment is required, and that's where things like VC funding supported by the government becomes absolutely critical. And VCs are more interested in consumer apps, like you said, and not in semicon...

Ahuja: Well, other than Lip-Bu, who else is there? Also, incubators in the semicon space are different from other incubators because it's not just about space. They need big investments in tools, test equipment.

How are your investments in India through Walden doing, like Ineda? Are you expanding that initiative?

Tan: Ineda is doing well. We have invested in Aura (Bengaluru-based Aura Semiconductor). Aura is a great team. So we are excited to continue to fund more of this. Very good two or three investments are in the pipeline. We now have a local industrial group joining us.

We would like to see more of industry participating with us, and then the government participating with us, so that we kind of build the necessary ecosystem.

You are saying Ineda, Aura and others could do much better with more funds?

Tan: Yes, they have got more opportunities. We love them dearly. There are not too many companies in India that have their own product. If you have your own product, I think that is the next stage of development for the country .

You have been investing significantly into R&D in India...

Tan: Yes, it's exciting. And we have everything under one roof now in Bengaluru.This is the third largest site for Cadence after San Jose and Noida. We have five sites in India, and together we have over 1,700 of our global strength of 7,000 here.

Ahuja: We have been growing very, very rapidly. Two years ago in Bengaluru we were 500 people. Today we are 750. I expect that in the next few years, we will continue to grow like this. This new facility here can hold 1,000 people.

 

By ET
Government to play active role in making India a global semiconductor hubThe electronic chipset accounts for a major cost of mobile phones and other electronic devices.
NEW DELHI: The ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) is revising its policy framework towards making India a global semiconductor hub, which will see the government taking a more active role, including initial investment, in a bid to attract private sector players. The existing policy has not worked as it offered little commercial viability for the private sector.

Earlier, a Jaypee-led consortium pulled out midway from a project for setting up of a semiconductor wafer fabrication manufacturing facility.

Recently, another consortium, led byHindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (HSMC) including ST Microelectronics and Silterra Malaysia, which had also received approval to set up a fab unit, has been facing challenges in tying up the funding. The two projects were worth Rs 51,000 crore.

Admitting that the government’s earlier approach of inviting two private parties for the project — in which it was ready to subsidise as much as 40% of the project cost — had not worked, Meity Secretary Aruna Sundarajan told ET that the new approach will be more broad and have the government taking “a strategic and central role”.

“Instead of just inviting the private sector, we are looking very closely at an approach where government makes a strategic investment (complete initial funding), and then at a suitable point in time, dilutes equity to bring in private sector partners,” Sundararajan said.

While allowing alterations to make the policy more compelling to investors, the government may also “look at overseas acquisition of assets”, she added, without specifying.

Chip-level manufacturing is core to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Make in India programme that may attract big-ticket investment with the entire ecosystem including design and research & development, and potential job opportunities. Research firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that India’s semiconductor demand would bring economic opportunity worth $50 billion by 2020 across segments that include $30.3 billion from telecom products and equipment alone.

The electronic chipset accounts for a major cost of mobile phones and other electronic devices. But there has been little commercial viability for multinational firms to set up units in India, dditional secretary Ajay Kumar said.

He added that the department is closely working with the sole consortium led by HSMC, which is still trying hard.

The government has given all the requisite clearances to the HSMC-led consortium and the group is now mobilising its resources and getting investors. In 2016, the consortium was given more time to submit documents for setting up the facility. Since the government believes that having its own ecosystem is important enough, it is looking at building the local capabilities in some areas like gallium nitrate-based fabs.

The government is also considering promoting some of the more promising approaches that have come from Indian Institute of Science, along with a consortia. In January 2015, the government reconstituted an empowered committee (EC) under the chairmanship of NITI Aayog member VK Saraswat to set up fab projects.

The EC is working towards stimulating the fab segment, which is capital intensive with niche technology expertise, available with only a limited number of players worldwide. “An incubator has been set up with financial support from the MeitY at IIT Hyderabad to promote fabless chip design industry in the country,” Kumar said.

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Will 100% succeed if reddened part is true.
@Nilgiri @GSLV Mk III @Ankit Kumar 001

 

IoT radio by Aura uses Bluetooth IP from Mindtree