Cabinet approves three new semiconductor facilities, including fab unit

The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the establishment of three new semiconductor units. To be built at a cumulative investment of ₹1.26 lakh crore (or over $15 billion), all the three units are slated to start construction in the next 100 days. Two of these units will be in Gujurat and one in Assam.

These three units are expected to generate direct employment of 20,000 advanced technology jobs along with 60,000 indirect jobs — benefitting automotive, electronics manufacturing, telecom manufacturing, industrial manufacturing, and other semiconductor consuming industries.

India’s first commercial semiconductor fab will be built by Tata Electronics in partnership with Taiwan-based Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. It will be located in Dholera, Gujarat, covering segments of high performance compute chips with 28nm technology, and power management chips for sectors like telecom, defence, automotive, consumer electronics, display, power electronics. The Dholera unit will be built using an investment of ₹91,000 crore, with capacity of 50,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM).

The Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test (TSAT) will set up a chip assembly unit (also called ATMP) in Morigaon, Assam. The unit will be set up with an investment of ₹27,000 crore and have a capacity of 48 million chips a day to service sectors such as automotive, electric vehicle, consumer electronics, and telecom.  

CG Power and Japan’s Renesas will set up a semiconductor plant in Gujarat’s Sanand at a cost of ₹7,600 crore, with a capacity of 15 million chips a day. To be sure, US-based Micron Technologies has already began construction of a semiconductor ATMP plant in Sanand at overall investment of $2.75 billion. In September 2023, the company carried out the groundbreaking ceremony of the plant and now plans to roll out the first made-in-India chip by December 2024.