The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved three semiconductor proposals totalling ₹1,25,600 crore, and to be located at Dholera and Sanand in Gujarat, and Morigaon in Assam.
The Dholera and Morigaon facilities will be built by Tata Electronics Pvt. Ltd. and Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test Pvt. Ltd. The former will be India’s first full-fledged fabrication unit producing 50,000 ‘wafer starts,’ the initial form of silicon chips, per month.
The announcement marks a milestone in India’s efforts to kickstart a semiconductor ecosystem because while most of the current investments through government subsidies and Productivity-Linked Incentive schemes have only yielded less sophisticated packaging plants that rely on raw and intermediate material from other sources, fabrication is a more fundamental, expensive and technologically expensive domain. The announcement also reflects growing pressures on global electronics supply chains to diversify away from China, into markets like India and Vietnam.
