The union government cleared proposals for three semiconductor manufacturing units worth £13 billion, including the country’s first fab manufacturing plant by Tata Group and Taiwanese Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (PSMC) in Gujarat.
This will be a big push to India’s electronics manufacturing set-up as the chips will be made within the country for the first time. The Cabinet nod, which also includes a project involving Japanese Renesas Electronics, follows £2.2 billion testing and packaging unit project of US company Micron, that was approved in June last year (production is expected to happen by close of this year).
“India has taken a giant leap today in gaining a foothold in the coveted chip manufacturing eco-system. With these units, semiconductor manufacturing and its ecosystem will get established in India,” communications minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said.
Tata Electronics will set up a £9.1 billion semiconductor fab project with PSMC at Dholera in Gujarat. The plant will have a capacity to produce 50,000 wafers per month. PSMC is renowned for its expertise in logic and memory foundry segments.
Minister of state for IT & electronics Rajeev Chandrasekhar said a slew of new proposals are in the pipeline and added that govt expects a total investment outlook of nearly £22 billion. Cabinet has also approved semiconductor unit of Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test (TSAT) in Assam at an investment of £2.7 billion. Renesas Electronics and Thailand’s Stars Microelectronics’s project in Sanand in Gujarat at an investment of £760 million has also got green signal. Govt is close to approving a £9 billion proposal of Israel’s chipmaker Tower Semiconductors.
Vaishnaw said all the units will create nearly 26,000 direct jobs and another 100,000 indirect ones.