Investments in chip ecosystem good start for India’s Semiconductor Mission: Satya Gupta of VLSI Society

Dreamt of becoming a semiconductor nation for decades, in December 2021, the government of India announced an extensive Rs 76,000 crore financial outlay for semiconductor ecosystem. While a major part of the outlay was focused towards setting up silicon and display fabs, it also covers ATMP or assembly, testing, marking, and packaging, among others. While only a handful of companies have applied for silicon and display fab, there is a lot of interest for setting up ATMP in India with the couple of companies already announcing their plans. Satya Gupta, President - VLSI Society of India, in an exclusive conversation with Business Today, talks about the role ATMPs play in the semiconductor ecosystem and how it can play a critical role in India’s semiconductor mission.

BT: What is the status of ATMPs in India?

SG: The ATMP or OSAT (Out Sourced Assembly & Test) is key part of semiconductor ecosystem. While wafer fabs make wafers, these ATMP units slice the wafers into chips, package and test them, so that they can be used in electronics products. Currently, India has very limited capabilities in this domain. One of the facilities is SPEL which can do some (select) types of packages in small volumes.

BT: How many companies have announced their plans for ATMP and how many more are in the pipeline?

SG: More than half a dozen companies have shown interest in putting up the ATMP units in India. Some of the notable ones include Tate Electronics, Sahasra Electronics and ASIP. There is a good possibility that some of the large memory manufacturing companies also may consider packaging their memory chips in India.

BT: Is ATMP a good start for the semiconductor scheme?

SG: ATMP is excellent way to kick start the semiconductor manufacturing in India. It is relatively low investment compared to wafer fabs and the time to put-up the factory is shorter. Depending on complexity of the package type the investments can range from $30-40 million to $300-400 million dollars. Most the global experts have suggested that India should first build ATMP units, while the larger wafer manufacturing plants come up. Also, unlike the wafers, the output of ATMP units can be directly consumed by the electronics product companies.

BT: How can ATMPs contribute to India’s Semiconductor Mission?

SG: ATMP is critical for the India’s Semiconductor Mission and overall semiconductor ecosystem. As mentioned earlier, no chip can be used in a product without going through packaging and testing process. Also, for some of the very advanced products, packaging provides a way for integrating multiple chips done is different technologies into a simple package using the technologies like SIP, MCM, Chiplets, Interposer, TSV, etc. This helps in a significant way to extend the Moore’s law as more transistors get integrated into a single product in a cost-efficient way. There is an opportunity for India to catch up with rest of the world by investing in advanced packaging technologies.