Strategic necessity: India is seeking to become a chip design hub
China, for example, is building a homegrown chip programme, eyeing adoption of local semiconductors in 70% of its products by 2025, up from 16% currently.
- BCCL A proposal to get IISc to build a Galium Nitride fabrication facility, submitted by planning body
- India has been taking quiet but tentative steps towards indigenous chip design capability for a few years now despite the many teething problems, as it looks at homegrown chip development as a strategic necessity.
- Worldwide, semiconductor revenue totaled $476.7 billion in 2018, a 13.4% increase from 2017, according to preliminary results by technology consultancy Gartner, Inc. IESA has taken a few baby steps, setting up an accelerator for fabless semiconductor startups, and is planning to accelerate 50 such startups in five years.
- Earlier in the year, a team from IIT Bombay unveiled a chip designed completely in-house, AJIT, which is being tested for use in GPS receivers developed for India's own satellite navigation system, NAVIC.
- In Pune, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a governmentfunded research body, is designing India's 64-bit quad-core microprocessor as well as exascale computing systems that have the capability of one exaflops, or one billion billion calculations per second.