Read this on Quora. Very interesting! A must read....
Why can't India manufacture mobile phones like China? Is mobile technology that advanced?
Sandip Kumar, Mechanical Engineer
at ASML
Updated August 17, 2019
Since I work for a company whose tech is extensively used rather they are the world leaders in it, I can give a glimpse how advanced mobile tech is and why India is lagging.
Do you recognize this image/machine/company ?
If yes, then you don’t need to read further. If not then please go through the answer to understand the situation.
Now a question : What’s the most important component of a smart phone ?
Yes that’s correct. The CHIP.
This is single most important component in a smart phone and our Indian tech is outdated by at least 25 years.
If I have to roughly outline how chips are made then it would be in following order :
We are yet to make perfect silicon ingot from which wafers are made. Then patterns (actual chip design) are made on wafers using light and tech is known as lithography.
Now ASML (a dutch company) is world leader in this and owns around 85% world share in this. They literally rule the market. The first picture at the start of the answer what you saw is of the same litho machine ASML makes. Intel, Qualcom, TSMC, Samsung and all other chip making company buys machine from them year after year. You can’t make “advanced” chips without this machine. Not possible. Period !
There are more than 90% of chance (actually 100% if Iphone) that your phone’s chip has been made on this machine. Your SD card, pendrive, hard drive contains the memory made on this machine.
How many of these machines are there in India? 10? 20? 50? Naah ZERO!!!
As far as I know there is not a single advanced Litho machine bought by Indian govt. or any Indian company.
Reason ? It’s expensive and crazy expensive. A single DUV/EUV litho machine costs close to $90–100 million. (Not even counting power supply, cleanroom facility and other supplements it needs to run). To give you a perspective : with this amount of money you can buy 2 SU-35 fighter jets and still couple of millions will be left around. We ain’t doing that.
On the other hand China is investing huge amount of money in it. In last couple of years it self they have started 7 such factories. Each with more than 50 of those machines. Imagine how much trouble India has in buying 120 fighter jets and China invested 700 fighter jets worth of money only in buying these machines. (Numbers, I gave is only for perspective. I am not against India’s defense policy).
There is a huge gap in terms of tech and investment between China and India. And we haven’t yet even started properly to bridge that. Brains behind developing these tech are scattered all around the world and many Indians are involved and contributing in it too but not in India. GOI needs to recognize this as soon as possible and get the ball moving.
Until we make progress and some bold moves are taken, we have to bear with “MADE IN CHINA”.