“The entire semiconductor ecosystem of fabs, ATMP units, chemicals, gases, substrate, consumables and equipment for semiconductor manufacturing will be made in India,” he said. He was speaking at the inauguration of American chip equipment supplier Applied Materials’ India Validation Centre in Bengaluru which was set up at a cost of $20 million.
Such labs are present in the US, Singapore, China and Korea. The India Validation Centre will have a workforce of 500 people.
The company last year announced that it will set up an engineering centre in Bengaluru with a total investment of $400 million over four years to develop and commercialise technologies for semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Vaishnaw said that the components that were earlier imported from Japan, Korea and Taiwan, are being made by the company here now.
“Today, all the four agreements made during the Prime Minister’s state visit to the US have been materialised,” Vaishnaw said.
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The construction of Micron’s ATMP has commenced. In addition, LAM Research’s proposal to deliver a virtual nano fabrication environment through its Semiverse Solutions to train semiconductor engineers in India has also started.“The first training course in the Indian Institute of Science has started with 35 students,” the minister said.
The third agreement was in relation to a centre of Applied Materials to be set up in India, he said. “This has also fructified with a centre of the company being set up here,” he said.
A design centre of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was also to be set up in India. “A few months back, I inaugurated the design centre of AMD in Bengaluru,” Vaishnaw said.
A first for 300 mm wafer processing
Sonny Kunnakkat, managing director, Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Worldwide Operations, Applied Materials, told ET that this is the first private facility in India that will process 300 mm wafers.
So far, 200 mm wafers have been processed in India.
“We used to have a 300 mm processing facility in the Indian Institute of Technology but that was academic. This is a commercial one. We will do our own development work. The wafers that we make are not sold as we are an equipment company and not a chip company. Our equipment here will go to our customers to make their chips,” Kunnakkat said.
The change rate of the equipment is very fast, he said. Equipment and components must be continuously developed with evolving customer challenges. “That is the kind of development that will be done here,” he said.
“In the semiconductor hardware ecosystem, India is not there yet,” Kunnakkat said.
A support ecosystem comprising supply chain, cleaning, handling of materials, logistics, water and power is required for the fab that is proposed to be built in the country, he said.
“All the ecosystem players must come together so that the fab is sustainable and operational for a long period of time. This type of facility is necessary at scale. We’re working with the government to scale this,” he said.
On the operationalising of the company’s engineering centre in Bengaluru, Kunnakkat said, “We have a ten-acre parcel of land where we intend to build it. It is a complicated facility which we’re currently designing. We don’t have people who design that in India yet. We’re bringing expertise from different parts of the globe. That is not going to happen in the next six months.”
Process engineering mindset and the installation and commissioning of semiconductor tools have not been there in India, he said, adding that the company flew in people from Singapore and Taiwan who do this work to its India Validation Centre.
