- Design, fabrication, and packaging of semiconductor chips now exist on Indian soil. The hard part is connecting them — getting Indian fabs to serve Indian designers, Indian packagers to price for Indian volumes, and Indian OEMs to specify Indian chips.
The chip Pratap Narayan Singh, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Vervesemi Microelectronics, picks up off his desk in Greater Noida is roughly the size of a fingernail and weighs less than a grain of rice. “This one is for weighing scales,” he says, dropping it back down. “India needs about five billion of these a year, it can be used in multiple devices. Today, every one of them comes from outside.”
His co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vervesemi, Rakesh Malik leans across the table, pointing to a bigger chip they have made for ISRO, and adds, deadpan: “If you took the weight of this chip and the same weight of gold, the chip would be more expensive than gold.”
The two chips sit at opposite ends of the market. The high-volume chip, sold in billions, must compete on price with global incumbents, and this is precisely the market India is finding hard to crack. The ISRO chip, made in small numbers with no real competitor, commands a premium.
Malik draws a flowchart on a sheet of paper. A box marked DESIGN, with ‘six months’ written underneath. An arrow to a box marked FAB, ‘three months.’ An arrow to TEST AND DESIGN CHANGES, three months. To MASK AND FULL PRODUCTION FAB, three months. To VOLUME TEST, three months. To PACKAGING. Back to the customer. He totals it: roughly two years.
“All of that,” he tells Swarajya, tapping the page, “happens outside India today. The first box is in this office. The last box is in this office. Everything in between is somewhere else.”
