India will emerge as one of the top five semiconductor ecosystems in world in the coming five years, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in an interview. This will be backed by investments by global majors that are increasingly considering India for setting up fabrication or other units, the minister said.
“In coming five years, India is expected to witness about 4-6 more fabs, 6-10 compound semiconductor fabs, 1-2 display fabs, and 8-10 ATMP units. The entire design, fab and ATMP value chain will get established here in Bharat. In coming five years, Bharat will emerge as one of the top five semiconductor ecosystems in world,” said Vaishnaw, who also holds the portfolios of telecom and railways.
ATMP refers to assembly, testing, monitoring and packaging of semiconductor chips, whereas fabs are fabrication units that make wafers from which integrated circuits or semiconductor chips are produced.
“With the good success in very short time, we will work on India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 in the coming months. Yes; more funds will be required for taking forward the semiconductor programme,” he added. The India Semiconductor Mission is the nodal body implementing India’s $10-billion semiconductor manufacturing programme.
On 1 March, the Union cabinet approved three chip sector projects with expected investments of ₹1.26 trillion, with the Tata group leading two of them. Tata Electronics Pvt. Ltd and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will build a ₹91,000 crore semiconductor fab in Gujarat’s Dholera, while Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test Pvt. Ltd will set up an ATMP unit in Assam’s Morigaon for ₹27,000 crore. Separately, CG Power Pvt. Ltd will build an ATMP unit in Gujarat’s Sanand at an investment of ₹7,600 crore, along with Japan’s Renesas Electronics. Last year, US-based Micron began work on its ATMP unit in Gujarat’s Sanand. All projects taken together entail an investment of around ₹1.48 trillion.
“Our Prime Minister has mandated us to prepare a roadmap for 20 years. Accordingly, India’s semiconductor mission is prepared to methodically develop semicon industry over next 20 years. The focus is to develop the entire ecosystem in India,” he said.
Vaishnaw said approvals for the new units will be done at the same pace as US-based Micron’s plans were approved, which is scheduled to deliver the first packaged chips from its Sanand facility by the year end. Its plans were approved mid-last year and ground-breaking done in September.
“The pace at which Micron got all approvals and started construction gave lot of confidence to the global semiconductor industry. The same pace will be demonstrated in the case of three projects approved now. Global semiconductor companies are now seriously considering India as their next destination for semiconductor investment,” he added.
On the ₹10,372 crore India AI Mission that the Cabinet approved last week, the minister said its compute pillar is aimed at creating AI compute infrastructure of at least 10,000 GPUs or graphics processing units, which will be built through public-private partnerships.
“Nvidia is supporting our AI Mission. Details will be worked out,” Vaishnaw added, when asked about the involvement of large technology firms. GPUs are the bedrock of AI as they provide high speed compute power required for deep learning models that is needed for development of AI.
The government will also set aside a ₹1,900 crore corpus for an AI Startup financing pillar specifically to handhold nearly 1,000 deep-tech and AI startups under the AI Mission, the minister added.
While the mission also provides for an AI marketplace designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models, an AI datasets platform will also be set up, which will create a privacy-protected mechanism enabling collaboration of datasets owners with startups, thus benefiting innovation.
On the regulation of AI and a separate legal framework on malicious deepfakes, the minister said, “We will come up with a comprehensive regulatory framework for AI with focus on user safety and trust. This will require new legal constructs. We will do it in consultation with all stakeholders, as we did in case of Digital Personal Data Protection and Telecommunications 2023 bills.”
Vaishnaw’s views came a day after he unveiled India’s fastest router by Nivetti Systems with 2.4 tbps speed, which he said was one of the innovations which will help India emerge a major telecom technology exporter in the next five years.
“We have focused on developing telecom technology products as well as end-to-end telecom technology stack. The 4G/5G solution rolled out on BSNL network is progressing well. Many designers have developed equipment that make the telecom stack possible,” he added.
He expressed confidence in participation of telecom players in the upcoming spectrum auctions, scheduled for 20 May, where government will put up airwaves worth nearly ₹1 trillion on the block.
“We expect good response because 5G services have been rolled out rapidly. More spectrum will lead to better quality of service,” he said.
