Semicon India 2022 fuels a series of MoUs towards making India global semiconductor hub

BANGALORE, May 1 (The CONNECT) – Indian startups will drive the next wave of innovation, leading India’s digital economy, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship.

Addressing Semicon Inda 2022 in progress here, Chandrasekhar said, the country’s design and innovation ecosystem are robust and thriving and “I am certain our next wave of unicorns will be from this sector”. “Our startup ecosystem is replete with some of the best minds in technology,” he said and observed that there has been an exponential growth in electronics production in India. The sector has grown to fulfil domestic demand and to export globally. This is fuelling demand for microprocessors and chips. The time is ripe for India to rise and take up this challenge head on, he said.

Organised by the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Semicon India 2022 kickstarted on Friday and will conclude today. The event assumes significance in the context of and the recently announced Scheme for Promotion of Semiconductor Eco-System in India with a massive outlay of Rs 76,000 Crores,

SEMI President and CEO Ajit Manocha met India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA) leaders Vivek Tyagi the Chairman and K Krishna Moorthy, the CEO and President of IESA to explore collaboration opportunities for promoting the semiconductor and electronics industry.

The vision is to catalyse the industry in India and support investors by ensuring that the benefits of the semiconductor and other schemes under National Policy on Electronics are delivered to them and targets achieved.

SEMI, headquartered in Milpitas, California, USA, is the leading global industry association comprising companies involved in the semiconductor, electronics design and manufacturing supply chain connecting a vast global community from electronics domain serving more than 2,500 member companies and 1.3 million professionals worldwide.

IESA is the premier trade body committed to the development of a vibrant Indian Semiconductor and Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) ecosystem and evangelizing the dream of establishing Brand India that is recognized worldwide as a go-to destination for electronic products. IESA acts as a trusted knowledge partner to the Central and State Governments helping device policies and incentives for the ESDM industry to help attract investments into India. IESA targets to promote technology solutions to positively impact the lives of 1.3 billion Indians by bridging the gap between academia and industry to bring innovations faster to market. IESA is headed by K Krishna Moorthy who is the President and CEO.                           

The two associations agreed to foster collaboration and identify potential opportunities in upcoming semiconductor and microelectronics sector in the country and work to realise the potential.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of turning India into a thriving semiconductor hub kickstarted with multiple Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) signed between the Government, leading semiconductor industry players and industry associations.

The wheels were set in motion to Catalyze India’s semiconductor ecosystem, today, as design and co-development pacts were announced at SemiconIndia 2022. Recently, India has announced the DIR-V Programme (Digital India RISC-V) to develop Siliconize and create design wins for future around SHAKTI and VEGA RISC-V Processors.For the unitiated, RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles

DIR-V Program with Prof. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras as Chief Architect and Shri Krishna Kumar Rao as Program Manager has been initiated with a vision to make India not only a RISC-V Talent Hub for the World but also supplier of DIR-V solutions for Servers, Mobile devices, Automotive, IoT & Microcontrollers across the globe.

DIR-V has announced Five MoUs for the use of indigenously developed RISC-V Processors -SHAKTI and VEGA between:

• SONY India and DIR-V SHAKTI Processor (IIT Madras) for the Systems/Products developed by SONY.
• ISRO Inertial Systems Unit (IISU), Thiruvananthapuram and DIR-V SHAKTI Processor (IIT Madras) for development of high performance SoCs (System on Chip) and for Fault Tolerant Computer Systems.
• Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), Department of Atomic Energy and DIR-V SHAKTI Processor (IIT Madras) for the Systems/Products developed by IGCAR.
• Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and DIR-V VEGA Processor (C-DAC) for Rudra Server board, Cyber security, and Language Solutions.
• Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) and DIR-V VEGA Processor (C-DAC) for the 4G/5G, Broadband, IOT/ M2M solutions

Additionally, an intent of MoU was announced between IISc Bangalore and SEMI, USA for building core competence of quantum technologies - multi-qubit superconducting quantum processors, photonic processors, diamond-based magnetometers, lab-level quantum-secured communication network etc.

SEMI, USA and IESA also announced an MoU for exploring the potential for growth of Electronics and Semiconductor industry in India and thereby bring global major players in semiconductor to leverage the opportunities for catalyzing the semiconductor ecosystem in India. IESA also released an industry report - India Semiconductor Market Demand.