In a bid to make India a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing, design and technology, PM Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for three key projects – two in Gujarat and one in Assam.
India currently employs 2 million people in the electronics manufacturing sector. That’s a number the government wants to push up to 4.5 million jobs
Speaking at the event, PM Modi said, “The decisions and policies of today will give us a strategic advantage in future. We are creating history while taking a leap towards a bright future. We have inaugurated three major projects for semiconductor manufacturing in India worth around Rs.1.25 lakh crore.”
The first semiconductor fabrication plant is being set up in the Dholera Special Investment Region. This will be the first commercial semiconductor fabrication unit in India and will be set up by Tata Electronics Private with a Rs 91,000 crore investment. Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp is the technology partner for this project which has a capacity of 50,000 wafer starts per month.
In an earlier cabinet briefing, India’s telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw explained that each wafer has roughly 5,000 chips in it. So the Dholera plant will be looking at producing 300 crore chips annually.
The first semiconductor assembly and testing facility in the North East will come up in Morigaon in Assam. Again Tata Electronics Private will be setting it up at an investment of Rs 27,000 crore. It will have a capacity of 48 million per day.
An assembly, testing, marking and packaging (ATMP) unit will come up in Sanand in Gujarat with an outlay of Rs 7,600 crore by CG Power and Industrial Solutions. Technical partners for this unit are Renesas Electronics Corporation from Japan and Stars Microelectronics from Thailand. This facility will have a capacity of 15 million per day.
These chips will be used across sectors like High power compute, EVs, telecom, consumer electronics, automobiles, power electronics and defence.
“Semiconductors are a foundational industry,” said minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. “There are many downstream uses of semiconductors. It is used in switches, cars, metros, even the Vande Bharat also uses about 3,000 chips. An airplane uses about 8,000-10,000. Anything that you switch on and off uses chips.”
The government has said that construction of all these 3 semiconductor units will start within the next 100 days.
