The way forward in semiconductors

tech.hindustantimes.com:

By Dr. Ajai Chowdhry, Founder of HCL and Chairman of the Epic Foundation

I have been following news articles on the status of semiconductors fabs to be set up in India. Soon enough, the government could be deciding on the first few fabs.

Way back in 1999, when I was part of the PM's Task Force for hardware, I started talking about setting up a semiconductor fab in India. Come 2005, I again wrote a paper for the government on bringing a semiconductor and component ecosystem (SIPS) into India. Both these recommendations floundered. In the 2009 Task Force, which was co-chaired by me and Kiran Karnik, we recommended setting up of semiconductor fabs and predicted that the electronics import bill will gallop to exceed the oil bill. But this also never took off beyond some key areas that did get implemented. But the Fab area remain unaddressed.

Many naysayers said, we should be a fabless country, due to our VLSI design capability. But I have always been a great supporter of creating fabs. And the shortage of semiconductors that affected 250+ industries has now proven that we should have been in semiconductors long ago.

Sometimes, a lot of the commentary around this subject forgets that this is our first step and that we will learn from this experience. We must remember that we can't jump to the leading edge right away. This is a highly complex industry, which only a handful of countries have mastered. And it has taken each of them years, even decades to catch up with those in front.

When a country is starting from scratch, like India is, it isn't always realistic to suggest that an entity with great experience in semiconductors should lead the foray. No Indian company has any experience by definition. And there aren't that many