Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre will be announced soon: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

A ‘Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre’ will be announced soon, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Electronics and Information Technology, and Jal Shakti, said on Monday.

“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 global standard academia-government-private sector-start-up partnered institution,” he said while virtually addressing at the All India Research Scholars Summit – 2024, organised by IIT Madras.

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The centre will be created initially co-located with Semiconductor Complex Ltd as an institution and, down the road, with the ability to be spun off into an independent semiconductor research organisation. It will compete with and cooperate with IMEC, MIT Microelectronics, US, ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), Taiwan, and establish itself in the coming years as one of the principal poles of semiconductor research in the coming decade, the Minister said.

Vibrant ecosystem

Under the new research centre, there will be 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, he said.

Semiconductors had become the topic of discussion in foreign capitals, all the way from Washington DC to Europe to the Far East and of course in India as well. The reason was clear that the trends of digitisation and the accelerated pace at which our lives, economies, enterprises, consumers and governments were digitising had gone through a step-function jump, post-Covid.

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“Two years on from January 2022, from when we started Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Transforming India and making India a semiconductor nation, to here, we are today with a semiconductor ecosystem that is vibrant, growing fast. We have design innovation going on with chips and devices that are going to come out in the coming months. 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,” he said.

“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. In a lot of ways, we have made up for 75 years of lost opportunities in the last two years,” he said.

In the Budget for 2024-25, government of India allocated ₹1-lakh crore as the ‘Research and Innovation Fund’, which is a 50-year interest-free grant to catalyse innovation and research and doing so in an industry-academia partnership model, he said.