Somewhere in late 80s or early 90s, India's BEL (Bharath
Electronics Limited) was making quite a few most used semiconductor
devices; some of the devices include telephone speech IC,
audio amplifier, and basic operational amplifiers. Also
this company was making lot of popular discrete components.
There were few more companies too making some of the popular
discrete components at that time. ICs made by BEL were well
utilized in domestic electronics systems market. But as
the technology of chip integration started growing very
fast, Indian companies could not match to the level of change
happening in US, Europe and Japan.
Added to this, many US companies started investing in India
to outsource lot of design related work. Texas Instruments
(TI) is the first company to move design work to India.
Texas Instrument and its employees both got immensely benefited
by this idea of using India as offshore design center to
handle lot of programming and such non-core design work
to India. Following TI, Motorola, Analog Devices, Intel,
Philips, HP, Siemens and many more started investing in
India and reaped significant benefits. More than companies,
the electronics engineers got immensely rich by throwing
away the jobs they held not only in small private Indian
companies but also in public sectors such as ISRO, ITI,
and BEL. In this process many Indian companies keep loosing
trained talent for these multinational companies.
Along with electronic-design-services, the business application
software industry was suddenly rose into such a level, it
started absorbing, engineers from civil and mechanical engineering
stream into so called 'IT', mainly software programming
and IT enabled services. There are many hardware design
engineers who have learned Java, C++, Oracle and such application
programs to take up jobs in this segment.
Though Indian engineers started becoming rich, but not
the Indian electronics manufacturing. Now India is buying
lot of electronic systems, most of them are not made in
India.
Today not only in electronic systems, even in any equipment/product,
there is increasing amount of electronics and mainly the
semiconductor chips. Their role is so important from cars
to cameras, the power of semiconductor provides the selling
edge to these products.
There is no region in the world, which is leading in manufacturing
without focusing on electronics.
Manufacturing is very essential to India to maintain all
round growth. To give jobs to many skilled technicians,
India needs to focus on manufacturing. Thanks to automotive
and electrical industry, they are lifeline to many skilled
labors in India. Electronics was offering plenty of jobs
to skilled workers a decade ago but not now (except for
few EMS companies).
To focus on electronics manufacturing, India desperately
is in need of robust component industry, mainly the semiconductor
chips. Semiconductor field should be more of engineering
than of software design services.
This is the time to quickly build couple of advanced semiconductor
fabs not only for ICs but also for LCD displays and Solar
Photo Voltaic (PV) cells.
The strong reasons are,
India needs millions of various electronic systems at low
cost.
Bridge the digital divide by providing jobs to skilled technicians
Electronics technology availability will make other engineering
fields to compete better in the world market
There is adequate availability of experts in VLSI design
and semiconductor manufacturing. If we flip through IEEE
journal on solid-state circuits, approximately on an average
around 10% of authors are from Indian origin. Not far from
China's share, the factory of the world.
Moore's law (law on semiconductor technology growth) is
going to loose validity. No fear of fast technology change.
Otherwise also let the industry be brave and adopt for changes.
Semiconductor manufacturing is very riskier business but
its essential for a region of India's size and capacity.
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