BHUBANESWAR: After unveiling the Rs 76,000 crore fabrication incentive plan, India is all set to roll out its ambitious chip-to-startup (C2S) programme to become a global semiconductor hub. A total of 104 institutions and organisations across the country including IIT Bhubaneswar have been selected for the initiative that aims at producing 85,000 skilled technocrats at BTech, MTech and PhD levels in the next five years.
Speaking to The New Indian Express on the sidelines of the precursor events ahead of the G20 Education Working Group conference here on Sunday, director (technology) of India Semiconductor Mission Nishit Gupta said the Ministry of Electronics and Information (MeitY) will soon announce the list of institutions that have been selected for the programme.
Last year, MeitY sought applications from academia, R&D organisations, start-ups and MSMEs under its C2S programme in a bid to train high-quality and qualified engineers in the area of very large-scale integration and embedded system design.
Once started, the programme would result in the development of 175 application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), working prototypes of 20 system-on-chips (SoC) and IP core repositories over a period of five years. Gupta said the programme will be a step towards leapfrogging in the electronics system design and manufacturing (ESDM) space by way of inculcating the culture of SoC, and system-level design at bachelor, master and research levels and act as a catalyst for the growth of start-ups involved in the fabless design.
“The selection committee has recommended a list of 104 organisations including 13 startups to be a part of the initiative. Final approvals are pending at the ministry level. Hopefully, the list will be approved within the next few days. All the selected institutions will be provided financial support along with chip designing infrastructure and fabrication support,” he said.
Although Union E&IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had earlier announced IIT Bhubaneswar to be one of the institutions to run a project under the C2S programme for chip designing and manufacturing, sources said, a few more institutions are in the tentative list.
Director of IIT-BBS Shreepad Karmalkar said the institute’s research teams are already working on designing low-power integrated circuits (IC) targeting IoT-based sensing, monitoring and wireless devices. The first batch of ICs has been successfully fabricated. The C2S programme would give the much-needed push and help realise the dream of a semiconductor hub, he said.