India will showcase its potential of being a semiconductor manufacturing destination at the SemiCon West, an annual event to be held in San Francisco between July 8 and 10. The move is part of Government’s efforts to attract investments from global firms .
“Our theme will be ‘connect with India’. We will showcase roadmaps and how attractive it would be for investors to invest in India for semiconductor fabs manufacturing. Since we are developing a new industry, more people around the world should know about it,” a senior official at Department of information technology told BusinessLine .
SemiCon West is regarded as one of the noteworthy events on business, electronics and microelectronics and therefore, the Government is hoping that participation would bring India on limelight for such industry.
Apart from the Government officials, there will be executives from two consortiums — formed by Jaiprakash Associates along with IBM and Tower Jazz of Israel — and Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation along with ST Microelectronics (France/Italy) and Silterra (Malaysia).
The Cabinet in September had approved proposals by these two consortiums for setting up semiconductor fabrication units which will receive tax breaks and subsidies.
The outlay of the proposed fab is around ₹26,300 crore to establish a facility of 40,000 wafer a month by the first consortium (Jaiprakash Associates and partner) at Greater Noida.
The second consortium’s proposed fab is around ₹25,250 crore for a facility of 40,000 wafer a month to be located at Prantij, near Gandhinagar.
“The Government will pick 11 per cent equity in the said projects,” former Communications and IT Minister, Kapil Sibal had said.
The Government had in 2011 constituted an Empowered Committee to identify technology and investors and to recommend incentives to be provided to set up two fab facilities in the country.
It had sent invitations to 32 global companies, out of which 16 responded and ultimately the two consortia showed interest to invest in India.
However, recently, Communications and IT Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad has said incentives would be given to companies that set up greenfield factories in eight new cities including Ghaziabad, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Nashik.