Nearly 35 years after a mysterious fire destroyed its facilities at the 51-acre campus at Mohali in Punjab, Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) is fighting back to extinguish old memories and earn its place in the sun. That’s courtesy a generous Rs 10,000 crore modernisation plan drawn up by the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity), which wants India’s original semiconductor fabrication unit to not only continue its operations in the 180 nanometer (nm) technology fab, but upgrade to 28 nm.
It’s an irony that SCL first started manufacturing in 1984, three years before Taiwan’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which eventually became a global chip leader, set up shop. But the fire and slow decision-making, typical of a government-owned company, stopped SCL in its tracks as it took nearly a decade to resume operations in 1995.
Manoj Wadhwa, group head at VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) and MEMS (micro-electromechanical system) fabrication group, says the whole team went to AMS, Austria for two years. “We were at 2 micron at that time. There we developed 1.2 micron, which we ported in 1995,” he adds.
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All that seems like a distant memory now. When the US-based Micron rolls out the first chip from its assembly, test, marking, and packaging (ATMP) facility at Sanand, Gujarat, part of the credit will go to SCL, which has not only provided the first-level training to the professionals working on Micron’s project, but is busy doing the same for other such projects in the pipeline.
SCL has two fabrication lines — for 6 inch and 8 inch wafers — an ATMP unit, and a compound semiconductor unit. For building the new fab unit, SCL is scouting for land near it existing facility. “The government has a clear vision to modernise SCL that will be at par with global standards,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, communications and IT minister says, “We want SCL to support startups and industry for R&D and prototyping, as well as increase its capacity and strength for chip exports,” Vaishnaw adds.
So far, SCL has been serving strategic sectors like space and satellites, railways, and telecom, among others by supplying them 180 nm chips. Once it starts manufacturing 28 nm technology, the target is to increase its capacity to 24,000 wafers per month. Currently, it rolls out 700 wafers per month — 180 nm. Wafer acts as the foundation for creating chips. Chip manufacturing starts with wafer preparation.
“We will have an upgraded technology for SCL to diversify beyond 180 nm and for that we are looking at proposals from semiconductor companies who will help us modernise the organisation,” Vaishnaw says.
Kamaljeet Singh, director general at SCL, shares the minister’s optimism. “No other fab in the world can boast of so many technologies at one place,” Singh says, sitting at his office at the sprawling SCL campus. “It is very rare to find fabs which can open up for academia, startups, which can give you this type of accessibility and where you can do, not only research but limited volume production also,” Singh says.
On the diminishing market for 180 nm chips, Singh explains that 180 nm is meeting a lot of requirements in critical sectors such as strategic and automotive industries. “This technology node provides reliable devices with better yield. SCL has developed expertise of porting process of 1.2 micron to 180 nm successfully,” he says, highlighting that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Indian Railways, GSI Germany, CG Power, among others, are its marquee customers.
For the 180 nm technology, SCL has Israel-based Tower Semiconductor as its technology partner. At the SCL campus, a team of Tower also takes care of the maintenance work for the 8 inch fab line.Among recent successes of SCL is the Chandrayaan-3 mission, for which it fabricated Vikram Processor (1601 PE01) that helped with the navigation of the launch vehicle and camera configurator for the Vikram lander imager camera. The organisation is currently making charge-coupled devices (CCDs) as well as image sensors for ISRO.
“We have got clarity from the government that we are progressing towards 12 inch wafer fab with 28 nm technology node with low volume production. We will be supporting the industry needs for R&D as well,” says Sudhir Thakur, group head, Project Planning Group at SCL. The modernisation and upgradation would need augmentation of the existing fabrication unit, which means replacing the decades-old equipment; finding a technology partner for 28 nm fab, and getting crucial raw materials for the fabrication locally to reduce the import costs and improve the yield for customers. Currently, limited fab capacity is also one of the reasons which restrains SCL from fulfilling any large orders.
For modernisation of SCL, “we are looking for companies which will install the fab, run it, and then handover over to us. These firms will have to clearly specify their technology partners. Whatever support they require in terms of people, we will provide,” Thakur says.
Getting the 28 nm technology or any other tech for semiconductors, is not an easy task as global companies are reluctant to share their technologies, industry experts say. Wadhwa, for example, says, “There are very few fabs which have 28 nm technology and mostly they are not willing to share it. Tata Group is very lucky to get it from PSMC”.
However, there is a ray of hope as officials say IBM and IMEC Belgium, have expressed interest in partnering for developing the 28 nm technology for R&D purpose. The process to finalise the technology partner is in progress.
