India Semiconductor Association members elect Bobby Mitra as Chairman

India Semiconductor Association (ISA)'s members have elected Dr. Biswadip (Bobby) Mitra, President & Managing Director, Texas Instruments India as the new Chairman and Dr. Pradip K Dutta, Corporate VP & Managing Director, Synopsis India as the Vice Chairman of ISA for the year 2010-11.

India being number one destination for outsourcing electronics engineering design services is nearly chip-less (no visibility of any India based chip vendors neither fables or fab-owned) and is a IP-poor (semiconductor related) region in the world which hardly seen great success in electronic manufacturing in recent years. But now there is a new hope of Indian companies getting into hardware manufacturing.

SMEs are very centric to the success of Indian electronics manufacturing industry. The associations like ISA can help Indian SMEs in reducing the import bill of electronic goods and create jobs for skilled technicians. For ISA members it also helps to extend their market, since majority of the members of ISA are chipmakers and EDA vendor from all over the world. Though India still hopes for its own chip making company, but that looks to be less important then promoting hardware manufacturing. For both semiconductor vendors and also for the Indian SMEs, growth of Indian manufacturing is a win-win solution. Solar is clearly the best area to prioritize for associations like ISA because it's fully supported by the Government and has more potential for SMEs to grow.

ISA has announced the release of report on the 'Solar PV Industry 2010: Contemporary Scenario and Emerging Trends'. As per the report, the capacity of solar PV cells and modules in India is estimated to cross 750 MW and 1250 MW by the end of year 2010. The production in India for year 2008-09 is estimated at 175 MW of cells and 240 MW of modules. A large proportion of the production was exported.

Another important highlight of the report is there is no manufacturing base in India for the basic raw material silicon wafers. The industry hence relies on international markets to source the raw material.