Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday inaugurated the start of commercial production at CDIL Semiconductor’s facility in Mohali, Punjab, and Suchi Semicon’s unit in Palsana, Gujarat, taking the number of semiconductor projects in India that have entered commercial production to five.
CDIL has established an assembly, testing, marking and packaging (ATMP) facility in Mohali, while Suchi Semicon has set up an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) facility in Palsana.
At present, three semiconductor companies — Micron, Kaynes and CG Semi — have commenced production in India, all at Sanand in Gujarat.
Speaking at the fifth edition of SEMICON India in New Delhi, Modi said India had moved rapidly in building capabilities across the semiconductor value chain, from chip design and manufacturing to equipment, materials and testing.
“For any country, reaching here in such a short time is not easy. This is not a sector where you set up a factory and the work is done. It takes decades to build technological capabilities,” Modi said.
He said India had worked simultaneously on different parts of the semiconductor ecosystem and credited industry leaders for being major stakeholders in the country’s progress.
Modi also announced the second phase of the Semiconductor Mission, saying its size had been increased to $13.5 billion from about $8 billion in the first phase. Under the new phase, the government is also making changes to enable international companies to collaborate with Indian startups, design companies and overseas citizen-owned companies.
“In the semiconductor industry, there is a word — ‘tape-out’. This is the day when a chip, after design completion, goes into production. But work does not stop after tape-out. On that very day, work begins on the next version. And India is doing the same,” Modi said.
He said the rapid growth of artificial intelligence was creating new challenges for the semiconductor industry. While transistor size remains important, AI applications are increasing demand for closer integration between processors and memory, faster movement of large volumes of data, and better management of heat and power.
“In the past two years, the global semiconductor market has grown by more than 20 percent. And a very big part of this growth is due to demand created by AI,” Modi said.
He said the world now needed new and reliable locations for semiconductor manufacturing and said India was preparing itself for this opportunity.
Modi also underlined the importance of energy security as AI-driven data centres consume large amounts of electricity. Thousands of high-performance processors operate in these centres, and rising computing demand will lead to higher power requirements, he said.
He said India’s installed solar power capacity had risen from around 2 GW a decade ago to more than 160 GW. He also highlighted the expansion of nuclear power, including the opening up of the sector to private players and work on small modular reactors, besides the expansion of the country’s power transmission network.
Modi also referred to India’s 7.8% GDP growth in the latest quarter while speaking about the country’s economic expansion and the growing confidence of global investors.
A day before SEMICON India opened, Modi had also chaired a roundtable with semiconductor industry executives. The meeting was attended by representatives of companies including Micron, Intel, AMD, ASML, Applied Materials, Infineon, Tokyo Electron and Tata Electronics.