Indian government invites bids to revamp state-owned factory
Nine companies including Tata and Texas Instruments are competing for a USD 1 billion contract to modernise a 180nm chip manufacturing plant in India.
Earlier this week, the Indian government earmarked about USD 1 billion to overhaul the 48 year old Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali. The site had previously manufactured 180 nanometre chips for the defence sector.
Reports say Tata, TI and Israel’s Tower Semiconductor are among the nine bidders for the contract. The site itself was founded in 1976 as Semiconductor Complex Limited to make chips of 180 nm node size, which now has very limited use cases. The government is believed to want bidders to convert the facility to the production of 65nm and 40nm nodes. It will continue to serve the defence and space sectors.
The USD 1 billion fund is part of the government’s USD 10 billion semiconductor incentive package to build a domestic semiconductor chip fabrication ecosystem to rival those of Taiwan, Korea, US and emerging South East Asian countries.
