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Semiconductors, 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

Power Usage Effectiveness: Total electricity a data centre uses divided by the electricity its IT equipment uses; a value closer to 1 means greater efficiency.

Harmonised List: The Finance Ministry's list of sectors that count as infrastructure, which opens them to cheaper and longer term lending.

Fabless: A company that designs and sells chips but outsources their manufacture to a foundry.

ATMP/OSAT: Assembly, testing, marking and packaging (ATMP), or outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT): the stage that turns fabricated wafers into finished chips.

Compound semiconductor: A semiconductor made of two or more elements, such as gallium nitride, used in power, radio frequency and optical devices.

CoWoS: Chip on wafer on substrate, TSMC's advanced packaging technology.

Interposer: A silicon layer holding several chips side by side and carrying signals between them.

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.