Indian Electronics and Semiconductor manufacturing industry

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India based memory semiconductor fab is more essential
There is a big and fast-growing market for flash memory storage in India which is directly proportional to number of PCs and smart phones sold in India and also driven by huge data back up market. India need a semiconductor fab exclusively for making DRAM and NAND flash. Toshiba has recently announced that its interested in building a offshore semiconductor production facility. India offers great opportunity for any such investor. Since two/three semiconductor fabs are going to come up in India sooner, Toshiba will have less infrastructure worries for it semiconductor fab in India. Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh are having all the infrastructure support for semiconductor fab industry such as 24/7 power, water, and the eco.
China is building huge manufacturing capability in semiconductor memory chips production. China is expected have a complete chain of supply locally including Flash memory wafer production as well as packaging.
Let India not become a dumping ground for low capacity cheap flash memory cards (in the form of USB thumbdrive/microSD) from China. US levies anti-dumping duties on China made cheap solar panels. Like US which practices best import policies in the world, India should also levy anti-dumping charges for low priced Flash memory products from China. Though initially local customers may have to pay little higher price, but they're going to be benefited in long-term if they have globally competitive local supplier for flash memory chips. Japan, US, South Korea and Taiwan are the other alternate high-quality Flash memory regions who can offer higher quality Flash memory chips.
Security also another important factor to be considered for manufacturing Flash memory chips locally in India. Thumb drives or such flash memory storage devices can be the carriers of rogue-code from outside India.
In every aspect of thinking, India's 4th semiconductor fab need to be a memory chip maker. If not DRAM atleast for manufacturing flash memory.
 

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ARAI-ISRO team up for using space tech for surface transport
A Lithium Ion Battery indigenously developed by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for space applications was successfully put to use in an electric two-wheeler by the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) here.
ARAI and ISRO are jointly working on a project to explore the applications of Lithium Ion Battery technology used in space for surface transport vehicles and this success may come as a big boost to electric mobility in the country, said a release today.
A prototype (two-wheeler) developed using Lithium Ion Battery of ISRO was unveiled at the hands of Sanjay Mitra, secretary, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, during the inauguration function of the Symposium on International Automotive Technology (SIAT 2017) at ARAI Campus, it said.
The Symposium underway at ARAI Campus at Vetal Hill, Kothrud till January 21. Many organisations from India and abroad that are working in the field of automotive technology are participating in the exhibition, which has been organised at the same venue under SIAT 2017.
"This is a landmark development under the joint research project of ISRO and ARAI, where Lithium Ion Battery technology developed for space applications was successfully adapted for the automotive segment.
"We at ARAI have worked upon on various factors like Battery Management System, Lab Testing, Road Testing, Automotive Duty Cycle at different temperatures, charge and discharge," said Anand Deshpande, Convener of SIAT 2017.
He said that in space applications, reliability is of paramount importance, whereas, in automotive segment affordability is equally important.
"Thus, our teams are now working in this direction. The prototype that was unveiled today is loaded with 48 Volt 50 ampere-hour battery and successfully runs up to 90 kilometres once charged for 2 hours.
"We are working on reducing the charging time and have set the target to bring it down to 1 hour initially. It does not use much electricity for charging and the running cost per kilometre could be as less as 20-30 paise per kilometre. The vehicle can attain the speed of 40-50 kilometres per hour," he added.
To commemorate ARAI’s Golden Jubilee celebration, a special short film competition on road safety was organised. Winners of the competition including Venkatasubramanian R (Bengaluru), Bhushan Popatrao Manjule (Pune) and Nachiket Khasnis (Pune) were given prizes on the occasion.
A special booklet having a compilation of cartoons of Mangesh Tendulkar on Road Safety was released on the occasion.
 

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Panasonic to increase local manufacturing and research in India
Panasonic to start the local production of refrigerators and strengthen its R&D functions in India by localizing R&D, production and sales activities to develop products to the local market needs.
Panasonic has already started local production with rice cookers from 1990, TVs from 1996 and air conditioners from 2013 to address the growing demand in the market. The new factory is set up at Technopark in Jhajjar, Haryana. It will have an annual production capacity of approx. 500,000 units of refrigerators and will be operational starting November 2017. The refrigerators made in India with unique features such as energy-saving, long-lasting freshness and design. Sales for the same will commence from April 2018 in India.
Panasonic to also establish the design division in Bangalore in April 2017 in partnership with Tata Elxsi. Through this division it will develop technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics applicable to appliance products not only for India but also for Japan and global markets.
 

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IESA opens offices in Chennai and Hyderabad
Sensing the huge presence of electronics and semiconductor industry in two South Indian cities Chennai and Hyderabad, India electronics and semiconductor Association (IESA) has opened offices in Chennai and Hyderabad.
MosChip Semiconductor has joined hands with IESA. Speaking at the launch of the IESA Hyderabad chapter, Ram Reddy, CEO & Chairman, Moschip Semiconductor, said “We are delighted to be a member company of IESA Hyderabad. We strongly believe that this collaboration will be an impetus to start-ups and engineering/ research students to promote the country’s top design engineers and buyers with the best degree of technical knowhow and help bring the Government and ecosystem together on the same platform.”
IESA has selected Hyderabad as host city for DEFTRONICS 2017, the fourth edition of the annual Aerospace, Defence and Internal security focused event.
Similarly by sensing the automotive electronics market concentration in Chennai and surroundings, IESA has also opened an office in Chennai, another important city for electronics industry.
 

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IESA Vision Summit 2017: The perfect storm is forming
At this year's India electronics and semiconductor Association vision Summit 2017 event held in Bangalore, India, the speakers as usual highlighted the Indian electronics and semiconductor product market size, trade imbalance due to increasing electronics import, semiconductor fab delays and its role, emerging market opportunities, and praises for Indian electronics, embedded systems and semiconductor design talent.
It all started with Ravi Gururaj, President of TiE Bangalore, who had a successful stint with NASSCOM very recently. He started his keynote sharing experience of getting his Apple iPhone repaired at a cost of few hundred US$ by a repair-service provider in India, for whom it only costed a few tens of dollars for the faulty component, the repair expert replaced in the Gururaj's iPhone. This example was about India's entrepreneur talent and unique business model. In this case, repair services business model was to create bill of material component kit for Apple iPhone by disassembling a newly purchased iPhone and making high profit by using them as spares. This was also about huge service support problems for repairing laptops, smart phones and such highly integrated electronics powered systems in India.
According to him, all these years, it was a chicken and egg situation in the ESDM sector. He quoted "if we truly had a thriving ESDM Eco-system, ESDM includes component manufacturing, semiconductor fab, reasonably sized domestic market, right policies, capital , and for whatever reason, the perfect storm has not formed in the last 30 years, when the opportunity was there". "but I think the time is ripe now, I think the perfect storm is forming"
He gave the examples of US$ 400 billion electronic product market by 2020, improving infrastructure, supporting policies by both Central and State governments, and GST which make a perfect storm.
He emphasised in his talk, how IOT throws out huge opportunities to Indian start-ups , where software and embedded systems skill sets available in India can be leveraged to address the growing market and it's already happening.

Pic above: Ravi Gururaj delivering the keynote
 

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Chinese tend to be enamored by 'Production' only. Semiconductor industry is a lot bigger than factories churning out chips. Actually, most of innovation is not in fabrication but in design and intellectual property. India has many good design houses. These companies are called 'fabless'. Big names in this business are likes of ARM, Xilinx etc. Here are some of Indian Fabless semiconductor companies.

1. Ineda systems : They make SoC design for IoT and automotive domain.
2. Infineon Technologies : Security chips, smart cards, SoC products, Wireless based on ARM uPs.
3. Saankhaya Labs : Software Defined Radio chipsets, DTV, Wireless ISP products.

Oh when it comes to fabrication, No Chinese company is in top 20 list in Fabs. Interestingly, Taiwan has quite a few fabs.

http://anysilicon.com/top-20-semiconductor-companies-2016/

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Chip design centre in IIT-H
Equipped with hardware, storage facilities, it will benefit both start-ups, students.
A national-level chip design centre to primarily support projects of start-ups will come up at the Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad by end of 2017.
It will be first of the two or possibly three such facilities India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA), a trade body representing electronics system design and manufacturing industry in the country, proposes to establish.
The centre at IIT-H will offer required hardware as well as storage facilities and is to be established by IESA in association with the premier institution and the Central and State governments.
A special purpose vehicle will be created for the purpose, IESA chairman K. Krishnamoorthy said, adding the second facility would be set up in north India. Each of the facilities would entail an investment of Rs.35 crore. While the emphasis is on supporting start-ups, the chip design centre is also to be integrated into the curriculum for the benefits of the students too, he said.
Mr. Krishnamoorthy was interacting with presspersons on Thursday after announcing launch of IESA’s Hyderabad chapter with the support of Moschip Semiconductor Technology.
The chapter would boost electronics, hardware and semiconductor start-ups and firms in the State with the required support and information. There will a thrust on the aerospace and defence manufacturing too, a release said. Headquartered in Bengaluru, IESA has an office in Delhi and opened a chapter in Chennai. There are plans to open a chapter in Pune too. The association also run a incubation facility in Delhi for entrepreneurs in the field of electronics.
Citing non-availability of adequate capital and talent among challenges the country faced as it sought to reduce electronic imports, he said IESA had also initiated the process of setting up National ESDM Technology and Research Academy in 12 States, including Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. In December, the first in the series of such Academy was opened in Hubli, Karnataka.
Conceived on a hub and spoke model, each State would have five campuses with an estimated investment of Rs.10 crore each. The Academy, to be set up in engineering colleges, would serve as as an incubation centre for the projects of students. On the imports, he said 70-75 per cent of the electronics consumption in the country valued at $100 billion, in the current fiscal, were imported. Moschip CEO K. Ramachandra Reddy said the company would contribute to the growth of the eco-system in the region.
 

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Atomic level semiconductor chip making at <7 nm, Indian engineers are playing
"Raw talent is exist no matter what you do with that person" quotes Krishnan Srinivasan, Managing Director of the fast growing semiconductor fab-rication equipment maker Lam Research India, when this writer asked about India engineering is not only about IITs.

Lets talk about 6 nm width transistor, it has just 30 silicon atoms. So if you are a semiconductor equipment designer, you need to design your equipment to alter the silicon or some other semiconductor material using some atomic level altering material processing machines.


Pic above: Atomic scale structure of FinFETs and the etching

Lam Research success in India speaks about availability of semiconductor equipment talent for deep node chip equipment development.

In an exclusive interaction at Lam Research India office in Bengaluru, K. Srinivasan explained to this writer, the technology and business connections driving the high end semiconductor fab-rication technology.

K. Srinivasan: The most fundamental macro-economic trend what we call knowledge economy, which to me represents development of generation of knowledge. If you look at that- then you can narrow down, that drives our system integrators to develop products and today the main thrust is on enterprise computing. With that you also have mobility revolution, the third element of this is interconnectedness of different things wearables. These are all the macroeconomic trends. Lam Research is driven along Moore's Law progress, another element is to propagate/ democratise technology, to put it in as many hands as possible. There's a huge opportunity in this subcontinent ( India). This will also lead to other underserved areas in the world such as Africa. All these places can leapfrog in development, that is a mobility revolution.

Not just 7nm..
K. Srinivasan:
There is also Internet connected wearables, Internet of things, smart machines, driverless cars. Devices (semiconductor) require for some of these application need not be 7 nm, they can be 65 nm 90 nm made chips.

Latest progress in deep node:
K. Srinivasan:
When it comes to high-performance computing, 10 nm getting into production and is followed by 7 nm, and 5 nm is emerging driven by Moore's law. At 7 nm node, there is enormous opportunities in what we call multiple patterning, where Lam Research supplies atomic layer deposition equipment for etching. Lam Research is a preferred vendor in this area.

Interconnect challenges:
K. Srinivasan:
The traditional copper interconnect technology has electromigration problems, there are opportunities looking for alternatives, and there are variety of other metals to replace copper, something like cobalt and many other alternatives can be used. The problem with the copper is the high current density in the extremely small sized copper interconnect make it to dislocate physically, causing defect to chip. And all noble metals such as gold and silver are poison to the device, even copper usage carefully managed.

Memory semiconductor fab equipment trends:
Going back to the mobility revolution, one of the important thing is memory capacity, Lam Research is a leader in depositing silicon oxide and nitride layers to form three-dimensional stacking of memory cells. They also supply equipment to deposit metal on each layer such as tungsten deposition equipment, where Lam Research equipment address challenges of placing metal in narrow and deep structures. Here they use atomic deposition instead of CVD. 3-D NAND flash memory is a product made out of using advanced semiconductor equipment made from Lam Research. Lam Research is also collaborating in developing advanced memory technologies such as a MRAM, phase change memory, and RRAM.

On India chip fab:
K. Srinivasan
: India doesn't have a very large semiconductor manufacturing facilities. We are hoping that some semiconductor fab will come up in India, but unfortunately things are not progressing that well.

On Indian operations:
K. Srinivasan:
In India Lam has 560 employees, about 340 of those are employed in hardware engineering, about 120 employed in software engineering, about 50-60 employed in manufacturing team. In this 2/3 of is mechanical engineering, and the balance is electrical engineering and little bit of chemical engineering. Lam Research has both direct employees, contract employees from services companies. Lam Research collaborate with Indian Institute of Science, Lam Research hires talent not only from IITs but also from regional engineering colleges, wherever good talent is available.

Semiconductor fab is not really electronics:
K. Srinivasan:
Semiconductor manufacturing is essentially machine tool (mechanical engineering) company but of high-tech, a lot of work they do is mechanical and electrical engineering, which actually have reactors. I need to have automation to bring work piece into the reactor, once it is inside the chamber, we have to heat it and cool it, flow gases, flow liquids, these are all mechanical engineering. We also use chemical engineering, because of chemical processes involved. It also requires electrical engineering to control motors, flows, instruments and temperature controllers, valve controllers. The software is required to control all these processes in computerised environment.

Since majority of the semiconductor fabs are in Asia, Lam Research' semiconductor fab support team in India can easily fly to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and China, where world's top semiconductor foundries Such as TSMC, Globalfoundries, and Samsung and many more have their semiconductor IC chip manufacturing Plants.

By considering all these, India's Lam Research team plays vital role.
 

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NXP, Mobis India deploy DRM chips and receivers designed in India
NEW DELHI: NXP Semiconductors and Hyundai Mobis have announced the successful completion of field trials of MOBIS DRM receivers and NXP chips designed in India.
The chips and DRM receivers are now deployed in DRM-fitted car infotainment receivers in a newly launched vehicle in India by a leading carmaker.
“DRM is digital radio standard that has been deployed in emerging markets such as India. DRM provides FM-comparable, or better audio quality on the AM radio band. Since AM radio covers more than 98 percent of the population in India, and only 37 percent of listeners can currently receive the FM signal, DRM significantly improves radio coverage and quality. This technology is affordable and provides additional data services such as traffic updates, natural disaster warnings and news,” a statement said.
The development and deployment, showcased at a DRM Round Table conference on January 31, was made possible by a regional collaboration between All India Radio, NXP Semiconductors, Hyundai Mobis, and the DRM Consortium. At the event, the NXP’s SATURN + HERO Chipset demo and DRM receiver fitted vehicle generated huge interest and was experienced by Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Venkaiah Naidu, and delegates from the public, government and the automotive and consumer industries.
Bob Paul Raj, head of multimedia division, Mobis Technical Center India, said, “The two firms have cooperated on comprehensive field trials from design stage to final product to ensure the solution meets the requirements of the Indian market. Hyundai Mobis’ demonstration of live DRM reception in a car at a DRM round table ahead of the BES event in New Delhi confirmed the company’s leadership image by innovating ahead of the curve and offering the latest technological solutions to its consumers. The work and tests which have been carried out highlight that DRM in India is a reality and that the auto industry is at the forefront of the Indian digital radio roll-out.”
Ashok Chandak , senior director, NXP Semiconductors South Asia Pacific, commented, “With this launch, NXP is one of the world’s first semiconductor companies to demonstrate digital audio across all three global standards from the same car radio co-processor — a real milestone for NXP. We’re also proud that our R&D center in India has played such a pivotal role in developing the chip (SATURN – SAF360X) and software for this technology. Field trials and testing receivers that will enhance the consumer experience in the car.”
Welcoming this achievement, Ruxandra Obreja, chairman DRM Consortium added, “Many millions of people in India who haven’t had a chance to receive and experience FM radio quality before will soon be able to enjoy digital radio, so it’s great to be playing a role in making this happen. All India Radio is about to complete the nationwide installations of the DRM transmitters, and the availability of DRM receivers in automobile vehicles will pave the way for more companies to roll out DRM receivers there by enabling digital music and value added services such as news, alerts, sports, etc., to the citizens of the country. This will also give All India Radio reasons to increase the transmission power of the DRM transmitters and provide world-class content to the listeners.”
 

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India Electronics and Semiconductor Association signs four MoUs to bridge talent gap
India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA), the trade body representing the Indian ESDM (Electronic System Design and Manufacturing) industry today said it has signed four MoUs aimed at bridging talent gap.
The MoU’s have been announced with ESSCI (Electronics Sector Skills Council of India), SID (Society for Information Display), IIT Kharagpur (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur) and Infineon to build a robust talent pipeline in the ESDM space, by strengthening industry-academia relations, IESA said in a release.
The MoUs have been announced at IESA’s annual flagship event ‘Vision Summit’ here. While IESA is collaborating with Electronics Sector Skills Council of India (ESSCI) to create ESDM entrepreneurial ecosystem in campuses by launching NETRA – National ESDM Technology Research Academy; it is partnering with IIT Kharagpur to foster a collaborative, research and development initiative aimed at creating a comprehensive platform for pursuing advanced research works jointly.
Through an agreement with Infineon Technologies India, IESA aims to support Electropreneur Park, giving a major boost to ‘Make in India’ and Start-up India initiatives; and the MoU with Society for Information Display will collaboratively focus on creation of a display industry ecosystem in India and open up new global business opportunities in adjacent fields that leverage competencies of the organisations here. “We see the year ahead as a year where the ESDM industry will scale up in value addition and value proposition.”
“With the ongoing digital revolution in the country and the thrust from the government to use technology to improve governance delivery to the people, the requirement for developing new and better innovative products and solutions are growing by the day,” IESA Chairman K Krishna Moorthy said. “This has opened up a number of opportunities to promote both product and solutions development and manufacturing them in our country,” he said.
PTI
 

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India is too slow in building the semiconductor ecosystem: Cadence
Cadence Design Systems CEO Lip-Bu Tan and India MD Jaswinder Ahuja talk about emerging opportunities & challenges in India.
Lip-Bu Tan is CEO of Cadence Design Systems, one of the world's biggest companies providing software and hardware for designing integrated circuits, systems on chips and printed circuit boards.

He is also chairman of Walden International, a venture capital firm he founded in 1987 and which has been active in investing in Indian semiconductor startups.

On a visit to Bengaluru, where Cadence has a large R&D centre, Tan and India MD Jaswinder Ahuja spoke to TOI. Excerpts:

Give us a sense of the emerging opportunities and challenges in the semiconductor industry.

Tan: Semiconductors are the foundation of all the killer apps. There is a lot of innovation required for some of the emerging areas of opportunity. Machine learning, deep learning are very big areas. Self-driving is machine learning.

Today, people are trying to see if a device can look at your eye ball and understand what you are looking at, so that you don't have to use a keyboard, mouse or voice (to perform an action).

Where the eye is looking can also be where the target advertising is placed. Some universities are doing even more advanced research, looking at how the brain functions. These kind of deep learning can help in medical applications, predicting heart attacks, and a host of other areas.

There is work happening to reduce the latency in video, given that AR/VR (augmented/virtual reality) is taking off. All these are going to drive a lot of in novation in the semiconductor side, but there are also a lot of challenges in the semiconductor ecosystem.

It is kind of frustrating that most of the venture firms are not interested in investing in semiconductor firms. Most of them try to invest on the next WhatsApp, or other social media apps.

How do you see India in the semiconductor space?

Tan: India is very important for us. About 25% of our manpower is in India, our R&D side is very big here. But it can become much more effective for the country if, like China, India becomes self-sufficient in terms of providing the silicon for the country's growth.

The Chinese government decided semiconductor is very important for them. They didn't want to depend on US companies to provide their semicon requirements. If you depend on them, you don't get the attention or the service you need, because of the distance, and because of the dominance of a few players.

Their standard products may not suit local requirements. Besides, getting attention is very important especially if you have a unique idea and have customized requirements.

So China poured $100-plus billion to build and acquire companies like infrastructure business H3C and phone image sensor company OmniVision to create the capacity. The Indian government has been talking, and I have just encouraged the government to do it quickly, because you shouldn't miss the whole boat.

What should the government do?

Ahuja: The government put together the National Policy on Electronics back in 2011, it's a very comprehensive roadmap. It acknowledges that we need to have homegrown Indian fabless semiconductor companies, that we need to set up incubation facilities. But the implementation is extremely slow.

Where are the incubation centres? Where is the Electronic Development Fund, which was to be the fund of funds (EDF was to participate in professionally managed 'daughter funds' which in turn would provide risk capital to companies developing new technologies in the area of electronics)?

These were things that were called out five years ago.

Can't private industry take the lead? Like the way it's happening in software.

Tan: Significant investment is required, and that's where things like VC funding supported by the government becomes absolutely critical. And VCs are more interested in consumer apps, like you said, and not in semicon...

Ahuja: Well, other than Lip-Bu, who else is there? Also, incubators in the semicon space are different from other incubators because it's not just about space. They need big investments in tools, test equipment.

How are your investments in India through Walden doing, like Ineda? Are you expanding that initiative?

Tan: Ineda is doing well. We have invested in Aura (Bengaluru-based Aura Semiconductor). Aura is a great team. So we are excited to continue to fund more of this. Very good two or three investments are in the pipeline. We now have a local industrial group joining us.

We would like to see more of industry participating with us, and then the government participating with us, so that we kind of build the necessary ecosystem.

You are saying Ineda, Aura and others could do much better with more funds?

Tan: Yes, they have got more opportunities. We love them dearly. There are not too many companies in India that have their own product. If you have your own product, I think that is the next stage of development for the country .

You have been investing significantly into R&D in India...

Tan: Yes, it's exciting. And we have everything under one roof now in Bengaluru.This is the third largest site for Cadence after San Jose and Noida. We have five sites in India, and together we have over 1,700 of our global strength of 7,000 here.

Ahuja: We have been growing very, very rapidly. Two years ago in Bengaluru we were 500 people. Today we are 750. I expect that in the next few years, we will continue to grow like this. This new facility here can hold 1,000 people.
 

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By ET
Government to play active role in making India a global semiconductor hub
The electronic chipset accounts for a major cost of mobile phones and other electronic devices.
NEW DELHI: The ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) is revising its policy framework towards making India a global semiconductor hub, which will see the government taking a more active role, including initial investment, in a bid to attract private sector players. The existing policy has not worked as it offered little commercial viability for the private sector.

Earlier, a Jaypee-led consortium pulled out midway from a project for setting up of a semiconductor wafer fabrication manufacturing facility.

Recently, another consortium, led byHindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (HSMC) including ST Microelectronics and Silterra Malaysia, which had also received approval to set up a fab unit, has been facing challenges in tying up the funding. The two projects were worth Rs 51,000 crore.

Admitting that the government’s earlier approach of inviting two private parties for the project — in which it was ready to subsidise as much as 40% of the project cost — had not worked, Meity Secretary Aruna Sundarajan told ET that the new approach will be more broad and have the government taking “a strategic and central role”.

“Instead of just inviting the private sector, we are looking very closely at an approach where government makes a strategic investment (complete initial funding), and then at a suitable point in time, dilutes equity to bring in private sector partners,” Sundararajan said.

While allowing alterations to make the policy more compelling to investors, the government may also “look at overseas acquisition of assets”, she added, without specifying.

Chip-level manufacturing is core to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Make in India programme that may attract big-ticket investment with the entire ecosystem including design and research & development, and potential job opportunities. Research firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that India’s semiconductor demand would bring economic opportunity worth $50 billion by 2020 across segments that include $30.3 billion from telecom products and equipment alone.

The electronic chipset accounts for a major cost of mobile phones and other electronic devices. But there has been little commercial viability for multinational firms to set up units in India, dditional secretary Ajay Kumar said.

He added that the department is closely working with the sole consortium led by HSMC, which is still trying hard.

The government has given all the requisite clearances to the HSMC-led consortium and the group is now mobilising its resources and getting investors. In 2016, the consortium was given more time to submit documents for setting up the facility. Since the government believes that having its own ecosystem is important enough, it is looking at building the local capabilities in some areas like gallium nitrate-based fabs.

The government is also considering promoting some of the more promising approaches that have come from Indian Institute of Science, along with a consortia. In January 2015, the government reconstituted an empowered committee (EC) under the chairmanship of NITI Aayog member VK Saraswat to set up fab projects.

The EC is working towards stimulating the fab segment, which is capital intensive with niche technology expertise, available with only a limited number of players worldwide. “An incubator has been set up with financial support from the MeitY at IIT Hyderabad to promote fabless chip design industry in the country,” Kumar said.
********


Will 100% succeed if reddened part is true.
@Chinmoy @ezsasa @Bornubus

@Neo may be interested in such a thread. May be, he will be introducing me about Pakistani semiconductor capabilities and plans.
 

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I know that there are many chip design companies in Bangalore and maybe even in Hyderabad and chennai, and electronic manufacturing seems to be coming up noida and Gurgaon.

Are chip design companies coming up in north?
 

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pakis can only make Cotton Textiles

Towels and Bedsheets
That is also in danger. Porkies were crying that china is setting up textile industries in south china and funding their companies with interest free loans and that will hurt pakistan very badly.
 

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IoT radio by Aura uses Bluetooth IP from Mindtree
Bengaluru, India based semiconductor company Aura semiconductor has launched a IOT radio solution supporting Bluetooth low energy/82.1 5.4 radio targeting the growing market of Internet of things. The specialty of IOT radio block from Aura is, it offers transceiver performance of 96dBm RX sensitivity, 0dBm TX output power with an option of +6dBm output and also the best RX blocker performance on all channels of BTLE, all this in a tiny 0.5 mm2 silicon area, as per data-specs shared by Aura. To expand the specs further, Aura’s Bluetooth IOT radio features receiver-peak- current of 5 mA and a transmitter-peak-current of 5.4 mA from a 1.1V rail in TSMC 40nm fab node.
Aura has partnered with another Bengaluru-based leading semiconductor design services company Mindtree to use its latest Bluetooth IP for Aura’s IOT radio. Bluetooth IP expert Mindtree is a long-time leader in Bluetooth IP and has actively participated in creation of new version of Bluetooth specifications. Mindtree says it is the first company in the world to qualify its Bluetooth 4.2 IP. Mindtree's Bluetooth IP Product Portfolio covers Bluetooth low energy 5 and 4.2 Bluetooth Controller and Digital PHY, Bluetooth 5 and 4.2 Dual Mode Stack and Profiles, Mesh over Bluetooth low energy, IPv6 Stack over Bluetooth low energy or 802.15.4, IEEE-11073 Personal Health Device IP over Bluetooth low energy and USB.
Aura has also partnered with ARM suggesting SOC chip designers a combined solution of ARM Cordio radio IP and Aura’s RF transceiver gives a better choice in process nodes and foundry support.
Srinath Sridharan, the CEO of Aura claims the RF transceiver by Aura is the best in the market offering the lowest power consumption but takes only one third of the silicon area compared to its competitors. This combined solution is already licensed by some of the leading semiconductor companies.
The other semiconductor IP/products from Aura includes Low Noise Fractional-N PLL Technology, speakerphone amplifier, and headphone amplifiers.
Aura's board of directors include semiconductor industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan, founder and chairman of Walden International, a leading venture capital firm for semiconductor startup companies. Lip-Bu Tan is also CEO of leading EDA vendor Cadence Design Systems. Ganapathy Subramaniam, the founder of analog IP vendor Cosmic Circuits which was sold to cadence in 2013, is also a member of board of directors of Aura. The other three members in the board of directors are Srinath Sridharan, Kishore Ganti, and Shyam Somayajula, who are all senior VLSI experts earlier worked at NXP and ST Ericsson.
 

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