Four new semiconductor units worth Rs 4,594 crore to come up in Odisha, AP, Punjab: Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

Time of India

2 days ago

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The Union Cabinet on Tuesday approved four semiconductor projects worth Rs 4,594 crore under the India Semiconductor Mission , taking the total number of approved chip manufacturing facilities in India to ten. The latest approvals push up the projected investments in semiconductor projects to about Rs 1.6 lakh crore across six states.The newly approved proposals are from SiCSem Pvt Ltd , Heterogeneous Integrated Packaging Solutions Pvt Ltd (HIPSPL), Continental Device India Pvt Ltd and Advanced System in Package (ASIP) Technologies. While SiCSem and HIPSPL will set up units at Bhubaneshwar in Odisha, CDIL will expand its existing facility in Punjab's Mohali and ASIP will build a plant in Andhra Pradesh. The proposals are expected to generate 2,034 skilled jobs cumulatively."The complete ecosystem of design, wafer fabrication, packaging, manufacturing of components, assembly, testing, and high-volume final production, is in the works. This will help every sector and dimension of electronics manufacturing," union minister for electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said.The government hopes to give the semiconductor ecosystem a significant boost with the latest approvals, given that it will include the country's first commercial compound fab, as well as a highly advanced glass-based substrate semiconductor packaging unit.The products from these new plants will have applications in missiles, defence equipment, electric vehicles, railway, fast chargers, data centre racks, consumer appliances and solar power inverters, among others, Vaishnaw said. The new plants are expected to be ready for production in 2-3 years given that all government bodies have promised to provide expeditious permissions, he said, while pointing to previous such plants breaking ground in 6 months.In terms of investment figures, the new plants are smaller than each of the six projects that are already coming up. Tata Electronics is investing Rs 91,000 crore in a fab facility in Gujarat's Dholera and Rs 27,000 crore for an semiconductor assembly and test facility at Morigaon, Assam, both announced in February last year. US-based Micron Technology is investing Rs 23,000 crore in an assembly, testing, marking and packaging (ATMP) plant at Sanand in Gujarat, announced in June 2023.Chennai-based SicSem is collaborating with Scotland's Clas-SiC Wafer Fab to establish a Rs 2,066 crore facility for silicon carbide-based compound semiconductors in Bhubaneswar. Set to be the first commercial compound fab in India, it will have an annual capacity of 60,000 wafers and a packaging capacity of 96 million chips."There is a world-wide movement from silicon to silicon carbide. It is a robust material and can sustain high voltage and temperatures. It is used in missiles, space equipment, satellites, rockets, railway engines and telecom tower equipment. Silicon carbide is a strategic necessity for our country,' the minister said. The Bhubaneshwar plant will also do research. 'At IIT-Bhubaneswar, a Rs 45 crore R&D unit has been set up," he said.Bhubaneshwar will also be home to HIPSPL's vertically integrated advanced packaging and embedded glass substrate unit. A subsidiary of Albuquerque, New Mexico-based high-tech manufacturing firm 3D Glass Solutions Inc, HIPSPL will put in Rs 1,943 crore into the unit. It will be the first in the world to provide 3D packaging on a glass substrate on a commercial scale, Vaishnaw said.The plant will have 11-13% equity investments each from US majors Intel, Lockheed Martin and Applied Materials, as well as venture capital funds, an official said.The planned capacity of this unit will be nearly 70,000 glass panel substrates, 50 million assembled units and 13,200 3D heterogeneous integration modules every year.Hyderabad-based ASIP will set up a unit in Andhra Pradesh with an investment of Rs 468 crore, through a technology tie-up with South Korea's APACT, with an annual capacity of 96 million units. The manufactured products will find applications in mobile phones, set-top boxes, automobile applications and other electronic products. Venkata Simhadri, chief executive, ASIP Technologies, told ET: "Our OSAT/ATMP is focused on advanced (2.5D/3.0D) packaging of semiconductors, targeting data centres, high-speed communications and AI applications."New Delhi-based Continental Device will expand its discrete semiconductor manufacturing facility at Mohali with an investment of Rs 117 crore. It will manufacture high-power discrete semiconductor devices such as MOSFETs, IGBTs, schottky bypass diodes and transistors, both in silicon and silicon carbide. The annual capacity of this brownfield expansion will be 158.38 million units.CDIL general manager Prithvideep Singh told ET: "With this investment, we would expand our installed capacity of 600 million units to over 760 million units annually and sharpen our focus on silicon and silicon carbide chips."With a capacity of producing 24 billion chips, the six semiconductor projects that have already got approvals are in various stages of execution.The first-ever made in India chip will become available in the next 2-3 months, with three of the projects competing with each other, Vaishnaw said.As a result of domestic chip production, the government expects the average value addition for electronics in India to rise to 30% in the future from 22% now, he said.