Will India become the semiconductor chip manufacturing hub of the World?

The government of India has set an ambitious target of manufacturing semiconductor chips in the country. For this, the government has announced a Performance Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme inviting companies to set up design, manufacture, and set up display fabrication units over the next few years.

But, how prepared is India to achieve this target? Will India become the semiconductor chip manufacturing hub of the world? Devesh Singh, Founder of Temspace is talking about the sudden buzz around this chaos, and how prepared is the country to achieve this target.

Edited Excerpts:

Why the sudden buzz about semiconductor chips?

So far semiconductors were imported from China and other countries. The sudden buzz is due to three main reasons,

1. The pandemic did cause a breakdown in the chain semiconductor manufacturing process, due to this break, the supply and demand chain was disturbed causing a huge shortage.
2. Due to Uneven Government policies in China, Taiwan also caused the problem in the manufacturing domain, eg. the Coal shortage.
3. Raw material supply shortage and investments have been pulled out of China due to the Wuhan virus.

Now that the Government of India is supporting this initiative and setting a target, we hear that shortage will still cause chaos to automobile manufacturers and others. What’s your opinion?

First of all, the government’s intervention in this crisis is a welcome step. Very few times, we have seen the government listening to our problems and acting upon them. Even though we are too late to take the initiative but late is better than nothing. Due to the same, the chaos might continue till mid-2023 i.e., until the supply-demand chain gets stable.

Along with automobile and other manufacturing companies, embedded technology service providers too face the wrath of this shortage. Please throw some light on your company and the industry.

Temspace is a leading solution provider in engineering fields. We concentrate on Electrical, Electronics, Software, and Mechanical based solutions. Besides our own products, we also provide professional custom solutions using our enormous experience in hardware and software development. Temspace has the strong technical experience that allows building custom solutions for a wide range of tasks in electronic design solutions.

Fundamentally, an embedded engineer writes software inside these chips, so if the chip is in shortage where are we gonna write? So of course a nightmare for the embedded software industry.

Even though, the government has set an ambitious target do we have the infrastructure to achieve it?

No, we don’t have infrastructure currently, but if we decide we can have the infrastructure, earlier also government tried setting up a foundry in Punjab. Therefore, we have the potential to achieve this ambitious target. Let us wait and see how it transpires.

Let us say, we achieve the target. Will it ensure India becomes the largest semiconductor chip manufacturer in the world?

In Asia, there are already big foundries available in countries like China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, etc. Therefore, it’s very hard to grab the world market. Yet, India being a large country and having more growth potential can catch up with the competition. Now, it is India’s entry into the world’s semiconductor market and the competition is heating up. Now, it is too early to say if India can catch up. Let us wait and watch.

A Long Road with a High Potential Vehicle

Hence, the road to becoming a manufacturing hub is long. But, this is just the beginning for India to push for Made in India semiconductor chips. The country has high growth potential and very soon we will catch up with the global competition.

Learn more about Temspace and keep watching this space for more.