With the approval of three chip projects on Thursday, India is now present across the semiconductor value chain. Communications & IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw spoke to Jatin Grover & Rishi Raj on how the country is set to become a global hub in this area. Excerpts:
Q. Including the Micron which was approved last year, four projects have been approved. What kind of capacity will all these projects have?
A. Our combined capacity will be 80 million chips per day, which is quite significant. More importantly, we will now be present across the value chain – design, packaging, and fabrication. You can see that we have moved up the value chain and our learning curve have moved up. With these four, electronics manufacturing will jump from $105 billion to $300 billion in the coming years.
Q. What nodes of technology will the fabrication project by Tata Group manufacture?
A. The fab project will manufacture chips with 28 nm, 50 nm, 55 nm, and 90 nm technology. If you look at the semiconductor universe, about 60% market is 45 nm plus. This is a rapidly growing market.
Q. The first domestic chip will get rolled out by Micron’s plant by December this year. What about these three projects?
A. Like Micron, these three will also be required to start the construction work in the next 100 days, so I would say that they will follow Micron.
Q. How many more projects likely to come up and by when?
A. We are on way to emerge as a major global hub for semiconductor. Global players have developed confidence in India and the government’s incentive scheme. In the next five years, a minimum of 4-5 more such projects will come up. As you can see, earlier technology intensive projects did not come up in the north-east, but now we have a chip projects coming up in Assam.
Q. First it was global players like Apple setting up manufacturing base of smartphones in the country. Now we have semiconductor units. What next?
A. Electronics manufacturing has gathered pace in the country. Going ahead we will see many global players set up mega manufacturing campuses in the country. These will be 100-plus acre campuses which will house several units.