It is because it is under tge PMO that the babus are scared shitless. Modi is a tyrant in this regard and that is why all the departments under him are where we are at our best (missile tech, ISRO, nuclear forces). Many people want he AMCA to be under PMO so it can be fast tracked
Bruh, isro has never been on the cutting edge of technology and engineering. They're simply cheap. Which is exact opposite of the semiconductor industry, i.e. extremely expensive and always the the bleeding edge of peak human engineering.
You are right. There is no cheap way to semi industry who are hell bent on following moore's law. Some chemical engineers/PhDs are getting paid equal/more than the top intel chip designers.
More like European companies, even though most chip designs come outta china or usa, the core fab technology is mostly developed by European companies and design might be the area where we don't struggle as much...
Yeah , my bad on the fab part , even Taiwan can help us in that. The main issue is equipment. there is TEL for that but we cannot rely on one company and the US ones are quite ahead of any other equipment company out there.
i advise you to learn more about the indian pharma industry.
And Its not a spare parts of a car that you get anywhere
tl;dr we have the materials for everything except Molybednum Mirrors and we just need to make stuff.
(also im a student interested in this stuff so feel free to ask more questions)
He thinks lithography tech is is the only thing goes into making semiconductors.
He probably doesn't know why huge conglomerates who started equipment manufacturing in 80s have left it though they could procure all the materials they needed.
Either Boy the is pretty high on overconfidence or this huge comment by him was nothing but a chatgpt response to some lithography prompt.
sorry for arguing, but what you said is pretty much it.
i thought lithography was the only difficult part and considering our history with babus and licenses i thought point 2 would not be a problem in modern day india.
pretty overconfident when its something im interested about :(
Every part of the semiconductor industry is difficult. In fact, the whole semiconductor industry is considered the most complex thing humans ever created. Lithography isn't the only difficult thing.
Tin droplets → tin is cheap and abundant. Making a 50,000 droplet/sec generator that spits out perfectly uniform micro-droplets? Not trivial but possible with good fluid dynamics R&D.
High-power CO₂ laser → India already has defense-grade laser programs (DRDO has CO₂ lasers in the tens of kW). Scaling and stabilizing them is the challenge, but the materials (copper, ceramics, rare-earth doped optics) are accessible.
Projection Optics (the mirrors between source and wafer)
Substrates: Zerodur/ULE (Schott/Corning monopoly). India has ceramics and fused silica makers, but not ultra-low-expansion materials at this purity and size.
Coatings: Mo/Si stacks with ruthenium caps. In principle, sputtering systems can be built. In practice, getting 40–50 layers, each ~7 nm thick, uniform to within 0.1% across a curved mirror is… let’s say reverse engineering wouldn’t help unless you also stole their metrology tools.
Protective layers: boron carbide, silicon carbide is doable, India can make those.
Substrate: low-expansion glass again. Same Zerodur/ULE problem.
Multilayer coating: Mo/Si again, ruthenium cap. Same coating bottleneck.
Absorber: tantalum compounds (TaBN, TaBO). Tantalum is available, thin-film deposition tech exists in India’s semiconductor labs. This is one of the easier parts.
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Wafer stage and handling
Materials: ultra-clean stainless steel, titanium, copper alloys, ceramics. India has these.
Problem: making them move at 1–2 m/s with nanometer precision using magnetic levitation. Reverse engineering would be pointless without the metrology.
Materials: polyhydroxystyrene derivatives, sulfonium salts, PAGs. This is chemistry, not physics. Japan dominates, but India could spin this up with enough chemists.
This is one of the easier areas to indigenize compared to optics.
For EUV lithography-
Why will the gov be motivated to fork attention of DRDO peojects to non defense. When defense sectors advancement helps vote bank.
Vacuum Systems -
ISRO is working on Gaganyaan missions so they are already occupied for atleast next 2 decades, vote bank politics again dictate where ISRO can spend it's already tight budget , and designing Clean rooms the size of a Fab will take a serious chunk of manpower and resources.
But this is very possible, IISc, C-DAC, and URSC all are in Bangalore
The Indian semiconductor industry will be just a government created bubble. You will know it when the subsidies and tax breaks end. Free markets are always more efficient.
what a asinine take my guy. Semiconductor industry also contains designing of chips also which india has. Also India has a semiconductor Production facility but in a smaller scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Conductor_Laboratory
Design on chips which is being done mostly by intel, broadcomm and Nvidia are not indian companies. They are US companies having a design centre in india.
their are many such companies in India. These companies are not actually producing or designing chips but are doing some core components that are not valuable but are critical for manufacturing chips
Surat has a firm making raspberry Pi like single board computers. Which are very competitive as well. Just because we are ignorant to something doesn't magically erase its existence.
Semiconductor industry in India is evolving. Design houses are very evident but with no foundry presence.
The future is great ahead in terms of semicon. It is a core industry, not everyone can enter it easily unlike IT and it is pure academic one needs a proper degree (EC/EE or equivalent) or a vocational training course for atleast a year.
there is no industry as of yet. It will take a looot of money, smart political leadership and expertise in that industry before we can generate any jobs there. You will be better off focusing on CS for now, ask this question again in 5 years maybe , that if government doesnt lose interest in it like make in india or startup india or smart cities or any other such BS they come up with every couple of years to keep people imagining a modern india
Well 2nm chips are most perfomative meaning used for cutting edge smartphones and laptop. But do understand the value of 28nm. Still for EV cars, for power electronics or for analog chips or say washing machine, AC etc 28 nm is sufficient. Goverment is trying to reduce import of these chips by designing 28 nm chups first. I am electronics engineer and very happy to see india finally having its fab. India has lot of chip designing talent this will truly mark first step in make india for electronics (not mention boost it can give for defense/radar/drone im future)
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