India building commercial silicon fab with 50,000 per month wafer production capacity: Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

India is building a commercial-scale silicon-based fabrication facility (fab) that will churn out 50,000 wafer starts per month, even as such fabs usually operate at 20,000-40,000 wafer starts per month, electronics and information technology (IT) minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday.

The minister was referring to the Rs 91,000 crore fab being built by Tata Electronics in Gujarat’s Dholera, which was approved in February last year.

In semiconductor manufacturing, a wafer is a thin, circular slice of a crystalline semiconductor material, most commonly silicon, upon which integrated circuits are fabricated.

“Six semiconductor units, one fab and five Assembly, Testing, Marking, and Packaging units, are at different stages of planning, construction and execution. Four more (one silicon carbide fab and three ATMP including the most advanced packaging unit) were approved last week. The entire ecosystem – design, fabrication, packaging, equipment, chemicals, gases – taking shape in Bharat,” Vaishnaw said in a post on social media platform X.

Two of the largest equipment manufacturers—Applied Materials and Lam Research—are setting up their design, production, and validation facilities in the country, he added.

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Vaishnaw’s comments came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his Independence Day speech that while the first proposal to set up a semiconductor factory in India got killed 60 years back, the country will finally get semiconductor chips that are ‘Made in India’ and ‘Made by Indians’ before the year is over.

Elaborating on the PM’s statement, Vaishnaw said semiconductor industry pioneer Robert Noyce had come to India to set up a plant in 1964, but the erstwhile Permit Raj implemented by the ruling Congress Party back then did not allow him to. Royce then moved to Hong Kong and founded global tech major Intel Corporation, Vaishnaw claimed in his post.

Nicknamed “the Mayor of Silicon Valley,” Robert Noyce was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. Fairchild Semiconductor was a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of integrated circuits, while Intel created the world’s first commercial microprocessor chip—the Intel 4004—in 1971. Both companies were founded and incorporated in California.

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The minister also pointed out that Intel had once again tried to set up a semiconductor unit in India in 2005-06. “Once again, it was not allowed because of the policy paralysis of the UPA regime,” Vaishnaw said, questioning Congress General Secretary and Member of Parliament Jairam Ramesh on it. Earlier in the day, Ramesh had posted on X that the Semiconductors Complex Ltd (SCL) was established in Chandigarh during the Congress regime, starting operations in 1983.

However, Vaishnaw argued that despite being established so many years back, SCL, Mohali, continues to work at just a lab scale.

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