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Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Communications, Electronics & Information Technology, on India’s plan for semiconductors at WEF

“India has a long term plan to build up the semiconductor business.

Three things. First is, electronics manufacturing, which was practically negligible 10 years back is today a significantly large industry, it is $7 billion. This iPhone 14 that you see is made in India. Its supply chain is shifting to the country.

Sector after sector, we are shifting from import substitution to export-led growth. Three years from now, India will be a large telecom equipment exporter, all the pieces are well set, development is very good. Couple of companies have already started exporting to countries like US.

So, item one, a very large market, which requires semiconductors as the basic raw material is there.

Item two. A very competitive talent pool, about 52,000 semiconductor engineers are working in the country. And almost all of them are working from legacy nodes to the cutting edge, to the SOC, getting absolutely new optimization and power consumption.

Third factor, our university system is producing about 500,000 engineers every year. We have tailored our project, our entire plan to make sure that this university system generates significantly larger talent. And we have committed to develop 85,000 talent over the next 10 years. And within the one year of our announcement of a policy, we announced the policy on January 1, 2022, we have already tied up with 60 universities. We have changed the course curriculum. All these factors together make it very natural that India should be the nation for significant contribution.

How about financing how, how much money is the government putting behind this effort? Government is putting $10 billion. That is just the first tranche. We fully understand that this is not something which can be done in a quarter or two or a year. This is a long haul. This will require a lot of persistence, and lots and lots of effort.

And I thank friends like Pat (Gelsinger, CEO, Intel) who are guiding us in this journey.

We have listened to the industry. When we announced the scheme on Jan 1, 2022, it was with awareness that the demand is for higher nodes. Those that go into electric vehicles and Volvo, in the train sets, in practically all the telecom equipment and in power electronics, all these sectors require higher nodes.

We changed that policy in October, and opened it up further.

So no one in the Indian Government has said that, hey, wait a minute, why are we investing these billions of dollars, in the middle of a glut?

As Pat very clearly said, these kind of ups and downs have been seen in this industry for quite some time. As Volvo, has 4000 semiconductors in a truck in an EV; in a train set, that number is close to 12,000. And in train set, we are right on track to become a major exporter in the coming three years.

So the demand is going to be huge. It took 60 years for the semiconductor industry to grow to USD 550- $600 billion. It’s going to be $1 trillion in the next six years. So that’s the kind of growth which is happening. And there’s enough for everybody.

Another piece would be green manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing will also be affected by the green discourse we have everywhere. We in India are very clear that whatever new plants, new fabs that we set up, will be serviced by green energy. We already have 42% of energy from renewable sources. And we do want to add that advantage to semiconductor manufacturing.

Close to half the total demand is from the mature nodes. In the case of India, our entire policy supports mature nodes as well as advanced ones. We think we’ll start with the mature nodes.

And there is another innovation which is happening, and which is where the design capabilities really come to the fore. For example, in a car, if there are like 200 chips going in, wouldn’t it be more economical to design a system, which has probably three or four chips, which is able to make sure that the class goes up and down on time, and the speed governor is properly in place. That kind of innovation is also going to come back to absolute right.

And that is where new kinds of innovations will come. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if in three years from now, we see a car operating system, an automobile operating system, which basically makes sure that all the chips manufactured by different companies for different functions, are basically able to speak to each other, in a very seamless way.

Trusted long term partnerships would be a very important factor in success going forward, in terms of supply chain resilience, in terms of innovations in products that we bring in, in terms of what to do when things go wrong in some part of the world, In all these aspects, trusted long term agreements would be very, very critical.

I think collaboration is the theme of this year’s Davos. You got it right this time.

For video, https://we.tl/t-9B6bFsqEWr

CT Bureau

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