India badly needs a semicon fab: ISRO ex-chief

LONDON: The government of India should help private enterprise invest in a semiconductor wafer fab, G Madhavan Nair, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has said.

Madhavan Nair was delivering the keynote address at the annual event of the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) held in Bangalore, India, on February 1 and 2, 2010.

According to him, India badly needs a semiconductor fab, and, compared to other countries, India has not so far invested in this area.

Considering the volume of the business that India has got in terms of communication and computers equipment, the country must have a fab and the industry should come together and the government needs to support the initiative, G Madhavan Nair said in his speech.

Two manufacturing operations were floated in India in the middle of the last decade – the Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (with support from Infineon Technologies AG), and SemIndia (supported by Advanced Micro Devices Incorporated).

According to reports, a government-supported ‘fab city’ in Hyderabad in the stat of Andhra Pradesh in India, shifted its focus away from making semiconductors for information and communications technology and instead concentrated on manufacturing silicon for solar power.

After the plans of SemIndia to set up the first major semiconductor making facility in India got delayed in 2007, the company was compelled to consider producing home-computer networking equipment and wireless routers.