by Dr M J Zarabi
Recommendations for start-ups and entrepreneurs from Jammu and Kashmir to enter semiconductor product design which is nearly half of the semiconductor value chain.
Semiconductors, omnipresent in various applications, control an OEM market of approximately US $3 trillion. We all recognise their importance in our present-day tech-enabled lifestyle where we are layered by intelligent and smart electronic gadgets and devices that have semiconductors at the core. However, their significance extends beyond technology – they drive economies and determine the relative positioning of countries in the future.
In 2022, the global semiconductor market reached US $600 billion and is on its path to exceed US $1 trillion by 2030. The rise of Gen AI could further propel this growth achieving this USD 1 trillion milestone earlier than expected. We are already witnessing the fact that NVIDIA, supplying chips for AI, has become the most valued company in the world surpassing the GDP of several leading economies. So, the role of Semiconductors is only scaling up.
The Semiconductor value chain is still controlled and closed. While there are reasons like it being capital intensive, and the availability of technology skills being confined to a few countries, there are also geopolitical reasons that have kept it confined so far. Currently, 60 per cent of semiconductor manufacturing takes place in Taiwan where TSMC fabricated chips for all leading fabless chip companies like Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, etc. South Korea follows with another 15 per cent approximately. However, a need is being strongly felt to democratise the semiconductor manufacturing value chain and many countries including India are driving this thought.
India Semiconductor Mission (ISM)
India’s semiconductor market was US $ 26 billion in 2022, slightly above 4 per cent of the global semiconductor market. This is expected to rise to over US $ 80 billion by 2030, doubling the global contribution to about 8 per cent. So, while the global semiconductor industry continues to grow, the growth in India will be steeper opening up immense potential for many companies and entrepreneurs to contribute and play a significant role.
After the clarion call for Make in India and Vocal4Local, India aims to become a global hub in Semiconductors fostering self-reliance and technological advancement in this sector as well. To pursue this vision with serious intent, the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) was launched in 2022 to give a major push to the semiconductor industry. Under this Mission, several projects for semiconductor manufacturing, Fab as well as Assembly and Test, have since been approved with Government support and are under various stages of implementation. More such projects are in the pipeline that are expected to be approved under ISM 2.0 budgetary support.
Semiconductor Product Design
While awaiting the establishment of approved/to-be-approved wafer fabrication facilities in India, there is a crucial need to accelerate efforts in designing semiconductor IPs and products. Promoting product designs based on India’s indigenous RISC-V processors such as Vega of CDAC and Shakti of IIT M, as far as possible, would further contribute to the country’s semiconductor ambitions. It may be noted that Design accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the semiconductor value chain.
Despite a promising start, India allowed itself to be left out of the semiconductor revolution of the 1980s while Taiwan and China raced ahead, thanks mainly to Government apathy and lack of vision at the highest level of planning.
Since the mid-1980s and over the years the country did, however, settle down into the role of becoming the semiconductor design backroom of most of the international semiconductor companies. The credit for growing the semiconductor design activity in the country goes to those international companies starting with Texas Instruments of USA who recognised this potential given the existence of abundant availability of talented engineering manpower in the country. Today, India is home to nearly 20 per cent of the world’s semiconductor design engineers.
While the competence of Indian engineers is well recognised, most of them have so far been employed only in parts of the design process such as verification and layout. A number of local design companies that were set up also depended on the outsourced business from those international companies.
The trend has begun to change with a few of those companies now engaged in the design of their IPs and products. Some of the traditional IT companies of the country like TCS and Infosys as well as some new companies with big plans and budgets, such as L&T Semiconductor Technologies, are taking up semiconductor product design for the international market thereby attempting to join the bandwagon of international Fabless Semiconductor Companies. This does augur well with the need to make India a Semiconductor Product Nation. Surely, in the wake of daunting challenges when we make it through, we will start to believe that we can do anything. That mindset helps build great nations, businesses and human beings.
Recommended Action
To set up a Design Centre equipped with the:
– Workstations/laptops and server
– Power supplies and Test and Measuring Equipment
– Arduino Microcontroller Development kit with a complete ecosystem for embedded design.
– VEGA RISC-V Microprocessor Development Board integrated with Multi-level Caches and coherent interconnect.
– The complete ecosystem for embedded design with VEGA processor comprising
Board Support Package, SDK with integrated toolchain, IDE plug-ins and Debugger for the Development, testing and Debugging as well as Documentation on the Development Board including Tutorial and Training material.
– On a required basis, access to hard and soft Systems and Peripheral IPs of CDAC for a SOC implementation.
– Shakti RISC-V Microprocessor Development Board with a complete ecosystem for embedded design.
To gather a nucleus Design Engineering Team comprising a mix of experienced and fresh engineers.
* To register for the DLI scheme of Meity, GOI and to access thereunder the ChipIN- the National EDA tool grid.
* To identify and draw up a list of IPs and products that can be taken up for design say for the following market segments:
– wearables, industrial, IOT and home appliances.
– Tablets/Phablets, smartphones
– Automotive, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and Data Centres.
– Defence and Aerospace SOCs based on Vega/Shakti processors for truly Indigenous Phablet (calling Tablet), Smart Electronic Energy Meters, Multi-protocol wireless connectivity chips for IoT and feature-rich Digital Hearing Aid are some of the examples.
* To explore the possibilities of strategic alliances with potential partners and customers to improve chances of success.
Semiconductors in AI
Semiconductor chips are also the foundation for critical technologies like Artificial Intelligence. AI is driving customised silicon topologies such as Vision Processing Units (VPU), Tensor Processing Units (TPU), Neural Processing Units (NPU), and Data Processing Units (DPU) that can be used on edge devices such as self-driving cars, automated departmental stores, automated manufacturing, smart homes, automated agriculture and even for Supply Chain Management (SCM) and other applications by Defence forces. Taking this further, imagine small RISC-V chips embedded in various consumer goods and places/gadgets in your house enabling many new possibilities.
Having open-source ISA can not only lower the hardware costs but also enable scalability by allowing the community to include custom instructions that can simplify software. While RISC-V brings huge potential, it can be only realized through community participation and contributions.
A revolutionary breakthrough is on the horizon. X-Silicon has unveiled a RISC–V-chip that merges CPU, GPU, and AI capabilities into a single core. This chip, dubbed the X-Silicon C-GPU, leverages the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) to create a hybrid out of a CPU and GPU. This unified core, unlike traditional processors with separate CPU, GPU, and AI cores, merges everything into a single core. This could lead to improved efficiency by eliminating the need for separate cores and data transfer between them and lower power consumption owing to the simplicity of design.
Needless to say, as mentioned earlier, AI is also offering immense potential for the growth of semiconductor design activity.
(The Author is the former Chairman cum Managing Director of SCL, Mohali and is currently an Independent Director on the Boards of the Dixon Group of companies. He has also been Chairman, of the Board of Governors of NIT Srinagar. He is also a Patron of the Jammu and Kashmir Digital Advocacy Forum (JKDAF. Ideas are personal.)
