India’s looking to attract semiconductor fab companies

India has a vision to position itself as a global hub for electronics system design and manufacturing and to create an enabling environment for the industry to compete globally. To reach this goal the country set up its National Policy on Electronics 2019 (NPE 2019). One of the main strategies of the NPE 2019 is to facilitate the set up of semiconductor fab facilities along side an ecosystem for design and fabrication of chips and chip components in India. Government of India is as stated keen to incentivise and attract investment in setting up semiconductor fabs in India. This leans on the fact that India is poised to increase its share in global manufacturing of mobile phones, IT hardware, automotive electronics, industrial electronics, medical electronics, IoT and other devices in the near future as the country aspires to have its local electronics manufacturing industry reach a value of USD 400 billion by the year 2025. To help bring this vision into reality, The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India (MeitY), has issued Expression of Interest (EoI) for setting up (or expanding existing) semiconductor wafer / device fabrication facilities in the country; or the potential acquisition of fabs outside of India. Electronics manufacturing in India has increased substantially over the last few years and is steadily moving up the value chain. However, as MeitY writes in the EoI, domestic value addition is estimated to be in the range of 15% - 20% only, and growth in manufacturing so far has primarily been on account of final assembly / Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) using imported components / sub-assemblies and parts. The reason for this is due to the lack of a robust electronic components and semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in the country. To remedy this, the MeitY is encouraging companies and consortia that are interested in either setting up or expanding semiconductor wafer or device fabrication facilities in India. In the EoI, the MeitY lists a set of criteria’s of eligibility for the incentives. There’s seems to be a particular interest in companies with companies with access to mainstream CMOS technology nodes for fabricating processors, memories, analog / digital / mixed signal IC’s. The ministry is looking for companies that are eager to set up fabs with a node size of 28nm or lower, wafer size of 300mm and capacity of 30,000 WSPM or more. Besides that the ministry is looking for compound semiconductor based emerging technologies for the fabricating high frequency / high power / optoelectronics devices. Here the MeitY is looking for production on a wafer size of 200mm or more.