The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is likely to target 2024 for the formal opening of the country’s first semiconductor fabrication unit, senior government officials said.
The ministry plans to approve the application of at least one big global semiconductor fabrication company before March 31 and give the winning bidder 700-750 days to complete the construction of the new unit.
An official said apart from the main factory unit, a plan for on-site housing of all employees may also be approved.
“We have actively engaged with all the leading companies over the last two months. We reached out to Apple and other big companies such as Samsung to understand how they operate their mega-factories across the world. We will be bringing those learnings to India,” one of the officials said, asking not to be named.
Senior officials from the MeitY have, over the last few weeks, also met officials from the Labour Ministry to understand and finalise the change in regulations needed to approve factories where 40,000-1,00,000 people can work and live in the same premises.
“Owing to the safety hazards, so far this has not been allowed where employees live in close proximity to the factories. We have had discussions with the Labour Ministry. The necessary changes are possible with a simple administrative action from them (Labour Ministry). They have assured us that they will look into changing the rules and regulations or even the law if needed,” another official said.
For the housing on campus plan, the MeitY has had meetings with a few states like Karnataka, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. Initially, anyone factory from one of these states will be chosen to run a pilot of the housing on campus plan, one of the ministry officials said.
Last December, the Cabinet had approved a Rs 76,000-crore plan for the semiconductor and display manufacturing ecosystem in the country. As a part of the plan, the Centre has lined up incentive support for companies engaged in silicon semiconductor fabs, display fabs, compound semiconductors, silicon photonics, sensors fabs, semiconductor packaging and semiconductor design.
As a part of the scheme, for setting up of silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, fabrication units that manufacture technology node of 28 nanometer (nm) or lower will get up to 50 per cent of the project cost as an incentive, while for above 28 nm but up to 45 nm, the Centre will provide 40 per cent of the unit cost.
The government’s move to incentivise the setting up of semiconductor fabrication units assumes significance at a time when there is a global shortage of semiconductor products and large chipmakers like Intel, TSMC, Texas Instruments, etc are looking to add capacity. In India, the Tata group has expressed plans to foray into semiconductor manufacturing.
As per government estimates, electronic chips worth Rs 1.1 lakh crore were consumed in the country during 2020. All of this demand was met through imports since the country does not have, at present, have any electronic chip manufacturing units.
