The three chip manufacturing and assembly facilities will help in making India a global semiconductor hub and will also raise the country’s profile in the global semiconductor value chain,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said.
Modi on Wednesday laid the foundation stone for India’s first pure-play commercial semiconductor chip manufacturing foundry by the Tata Group at Dholera in Gujarat.
He also laid the foundation stone for two outsourced semiconductor and assembly testing (OSAT) units at Sanand in Gujarat and Jagiroad in Assam.
“Today, we are creating history as well as taking a big step towards a bright future,” Modi said in a virtual address.
The foundation stone for the Tata-Powerchip Semiconductor Corp’s semiconductor fabrication unit at Dholera, the Tata group’s OSAT unit in Assam and the CG Power-Renesas Group combine’s OSAT unit at Sanand has been laid in a record time of 15 days, union minister for electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said.
“Since 1962, attempts have been made by various governments to bring semiconductor manufacturing to India. It has been made possible only in 2024. The semiconductor chips manufactured here in Dholera and those produced from Sanand and Assam will be used in cars, mobile phones and other electronic equipment, globally” Vaishnaw said.
The Dholera unit will be powered by a 30,000 MW hybrid power project, which will be the largest continuous renewable plant at one place in the world, he said.
On February 29, the cabinet approved Tata-PSMC’s INR 91,000 crore commercial foundry, INR 27,000 crore- Tata OSAT unit and INR 7,600 crore CG Power-Renesas joint venture OSAT unit. In total, India now has three OSAT units and one pure-play commercial foundry, with a combined capacity of 80 million chips from the three OSAT units and a capacity of 50,000 wafer starts per month from the Dholera foundry.
“It is definitely a pivotal moment and a very important day for us. It is very important for India to become a semiconductor nation. We will start commercial production from Dholera and Assam in late 2025 or early 2026. These plants will cater to a variety of sectors… automotive, power, electronics, consumer, and medical. There is a whole range of sectors which need chips,” Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran said on the sidelines of the event.
The groundbreaking of the three projects on Wednesday is a defining moment in the evolution of India’s digital economy and expansion of technology capabilities and the surrounding ecosystem, union minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.
“The fabs and the OSAT units will bring along with themselves their own supply chains. When you create these big investments, what you also do is bring ecosystem players such as water treatment, gases and very precision industries,” Chandrasekhar said in a telephonic conversation.
The foundation laying of the three projects will pave the way for India’s entry into commercial chip fabrication units, a long-standing ambition of the country. India made the first effort towards building a semiconductor ecosystem when it approved a INR 76,000 incentive scheme in December 2021 to attract global players to set shop in the country.
The finer details of the scheme were notified in January 2022. The first major success was achieved nearly 18 months later when US-based Micron announced in June 2023 it would set up an OSAT unit at Sanand in Gujarat. Of the total USD 2.75 billion investment planned in the factory, Micron had said it would invest USD 825 million while the rest will come from a combination of central and state government incentives.
