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हिन्दी — Read in HindiSemiconductors, computing hardware and data centres
Semiconductors and computing hardware: India's chip plants and design schemes, the chokepoints in the supply chain, supercomputers and data centres. Prelims has asked where India's semiconductor plants are.
Foundation note: A chip from sand to package: nodes, fabs and the India Semiconductor Mission
The future of India's semiconductor industry
Copy link to The future of India's semiconductor industryPrelims and Mains
LeadIndia's semiconductor strategy: mature nodes and packagingJune 2026
Why in news
NITI Aayog's Frontier Tech Hub has released a report, Future of India's Semiconductor Industry, reported on 3 June 2026. It advises India to put public money into mature chips and packaging, and not into the most advanced chips.
Background
- A semiconductor chip is made in three stages: design, fabrication and packaging and testing.
- Fabrication happens in a fab, which etches circuits on silicon wafers. A fab takes four to five years to start production and needs costly imported equipment.
- A chip's node, measured in nanometres, describes how small its features are. A smaller node means a more advanced chip.
- Mature nodes are older and larger. They run cars, appliances, power equipment and defence systems.
- India is strong in design and has no commercial fab yet; the first is expected at Dholera in Gujarat.
What the report says
- India's ecosystem cannot yet meet demand, but manufacturing must be pursued for national security.
- Do not chase the frontier of 3 to 7 nanometres; build mature and compound semiconductor capacity.
- Treat packaging as a core pillar.
- Work with partners: the United States, Japan, the European Union and South Korea.
- The idea is selective depth: be strong in chosen parts of the chain and not copy all of it.
Why packaging matters now
- Packaging places the bare chip in a protective case with connectors.
- As shrinking transistors gets harder, performance comes from bundling many chips into one module. This is advanced packaging.
- One Taiwanese firm does nearly all of it, and supply is short of demand: a choke point for artificial intelligence chips.
- High bandwidth memory, stacked memory used with these chips, is in such demand that ordinary memory prices have more than tripled, raising the cost of phones and computers.
What it means for India
- Most of India's approved projects are assembly, testing and packaging units, which matches the report's advice.
- Packaging needs less capital than a fab and builds skills that lead upstream.
- Dependence on a few suppliers is a risk for every country, as the memory shortage shows.
The way forward
- Fund mature node fabs for the chips India uses most.
- Build advanced packaging capacity and the skills for it.
- Support design firms, where India already has talent, to own their intellectual property.
- Secure equipment and materials through partnerships.
Prelims facts
- The chip chain: design, fabrication, packaging and testing.
- A smaller node means a more advanced chip.
- India's first fab is expected at Dholera, Gujarat.
- CoWoS, chip on wafer on substrate, is an advanced packaging technology.
A fabrication plant takes four to five years to reach production, needs over 50 kinds of specialised imported equipment, and then several quarters of yield optimisation. India has no fab yet; the first is expected at Dholera, Gujarat, by 2028, with ten projects in development, and the India Semiconductor Mission's ₹76,000 crore corpus is almost fully earmarked. The chain runs from design to fabrication to packaging and testing.
The chip chain
Design
The chip is designed before any plant makes it
Fabrication
India has no fab; the first is expected at Dholera, Gujarat, by 2028, and the report steers public money to mature and compound nodes rather than frontier 3 to 7 nm nodes
Packaging and testing
Treated by the report as a core pillar of production
What changed
See also: Semicon India Programme
Also filed elsewhere
- Photonics · on Satellite and emerging communications
Photonics is the technology of the parts that carry a signal as light rather than as current, where India's chip policy meets its network hardware.