Govt to launch Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre soon: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Chennai: The government is soon expected to launch the coveted Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre, which will be a global standard academia-government-private sector-start-up partnered institution, said Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on Monday.

He said this while making a virtual address at the inaugural session of the All India Research Scholars’ Summit (AIRSS) 2024 at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT).

The research facility, which will be in collaboration with industry experts and academia, will be created in public-private partnership (PPP) mode.

“The crowning development, in the context of this research summit is going to be the soon-to-be-announced Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre, which will be a really a global standard academia-government-private sector-start-up partnered institution that will be created initially co-located with the Semiconductor Complex Limited as an institution,” said the minister.

He noted that later the Centre “will be spun off into an independent semiconductor research organisation that will compete with and cooperate with IMEC, MIT Microelectronics, USA, ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), Taiwan, and establish itself in the coming years as one of the principle poles of semiconductor research”.

Further Chandrasekhar said that the research centre will have “a vibrant ecosystem of top notch universities and colleges of India working and collaborating on research in a diverse set of areas from materials to physics to science to transistors to devices to packaging to system innovation, among other areas.”

The minister noted that the semiconductor ecosystem in India, which was started just two years ago, is “vibrant and growing fast”.

“In January 2022, from the prism of the semiconductor ecosystem, we had limited or non-existent footprint in what was turning out to be one of the most critical and crucial sectors in terms of the overall resilience of the global economy. Two years on, from when we started Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s vision of transforming India and making India a semiconductor nation, here we are today with a semiconductor ecosystem that is vibrant, growing fast,” Chandrasekhar said.

With significant growth in design innovation on chips and devices, India has “made up for 75 years of lost opportunities,” he said.

“There is a product ecosystem that is developing in automotive, industrial, telecom, computer and in many other areas that are essentially leveraging off what we are doing in design innovation and design.

"The holy grail of semiconductors, the process, the manufacturing know-how and technologies are finally beginning to come to India. You are seeing proposals from Tower Semiconductor, Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation of Taiwan, Micron and companies like that setting up characterisation testing and manufacturing units in India,” the minister said.