The Indian semiconductor industry has a designing ecosystem, but lacks the manufacturing side of it, says Rabindra Srikantan, Managing Director, ASM Technologies.
“The semiconductor industry is gaining momentum — with investments, attention, incentives, and government support—creating the largest opportunity for the country. All of this will help India catch up with the rest of the world,” Srikantan told BusinessLine.
Over the last few years, the country has gone through, and still is, under the digitisation phase — this has led to a massive demand for semiconductors for manufacturing electronics and other high-tech equipment. He said: “In electronics, especially the mobile phone, which is the big sunrise industry, the past four to five years have seen significant investment right from entry-level smartphones-starting at $150 smartphones to the high-end ones at $1,000.”
Manufacturing
According to Srikantan, the production-linked incentive scheme has helped the semiconductor industry to a great extent. The PLI scheme has made the manufacturing of chips, small business enterprise (sbe) and displays possible, which is otherwise capital intensive. “Furthermore, many large semiconductor equipment manufacturers have design engineering facilities in India and are looking to start manufacturing in to supply in the global market, which will help Indian semiconductor industry reach its full potential.”
Aside from manufacturing, another growing area in the industry is the packaging. “Chip packaging because of increasing amount of investments is generating a lot of interest,” he continued, “I think many states have given a lot of templates along with the PLI, and I’m sure that in the next maybe 18 months—24 months, or even sooner, we will see some of these getting into production.”
The 18th India Innovation Summit is being organised by The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and has been renamed as Innoverge. The theme for this year is Engineering Imagination which will focus on inspiring the audience to collaborate and expose them to high-end innovations in the manufacturing industry.