India must build capabilities to become a global chip power: Minister

New Delhi, Nov 30 (IANS) India must build capabilities of such scale and strength that, within the next few years, the nation establishes itself as a major global semiconductor power, according to Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

He mentioned that the aim is to ensure that we do not depend on anyone else for our strategic needs and become self-reliant in our strategic sectors and to use indigenous chips.

He handed over 28 chips fabricated at Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL) Mohali (including 600 bare dies and 600 packaged chips) by students from 17 academic institutions under the Chips to Start-up (C2S) Programme.

The minister stated that India is rapidly emerging as a distinctive leader in the global semiconductor landscape.

“Today, institutions across the country have access to some of the world’s most advanced design technologies, creating a large-scale semiconductor development ecosystem that is unique to India,” Vaishnaw noted.

ChipIN Centre, one of the largest facilities established at C-DAC Bangalore, offers an extensive range of semiconductor design workflows and solutions, striving to bring national chip design infrastructure directly to the semiconductor design community across the country.

It is a centralised facility which hosts the most advanced tools for the entire chip design cycle.

It also offers compute and hardware infrastructure, IP cores, and mentorship to provide comprehensive services for design fabrication at the SCL foundry and packaging to academic institutions under C2S (Chips to Start-up) Programme of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The ChipIN Centre collects chip designs created by students from C2S Programme institutions.

Every three months, these designs are grouped together and sent to SCL Mohali for fabrication using 180 nm technology.

Once approved, the designs are combined onto a single mask (MPW reticle) by ChipIN Centre, which saves both time and cost by manufacturing multiple designs in a single run.

SCL Mohali then fabricates, packages, and delivers the chips back to the students.

In the past year, ChipIN Centre organised 5 such MPW shuttle runs for fabrication of designs at SCL under the C2S programme.

A total of 122 designs were submitted by 46 institutions across India. Out of these, SCL has successfully fabricated 56 student-designed chips and delivered them to the respective institutions, according to the ministry.

—IANS

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