A decade-old, fully bootstrapped company is trying to close one of the most overlooked gaps in India's semiconductor and solar ambitions, the crystal growth technology that turns raw silicon into usable wafers.
India's semiconductor strategy has largely centered on fabrication plants and chip packaging, but one critical layer of the supply chain has gone largely unaddressed: the single-crystal materials, silicon ingots and wafers that form the starting point for every chip. Today, India imports virtually all of this material.
Dr. Avinash Kumar, Vice President of Technology at Ranaa Semiconductors, laid out the scale of this gap and his company's plan to close it in a conversation with Srinivasa Reddy N, Editor-in-Chief of EEHerald.
A Missing Layer in India's Chip Strategy
According to Dr. Kumar, the reason India has never developed a domestic substrate layer — for either solar or semiconductor applications — comes down to a lack of homegrown intellectual property in equipment and process technology, coupled with minimal continuous R&D. Ranaa, now about a decade old, has spent that time working on Czochralski (CZ) technology, the industry-standard method for growing the monocrystalline silicon ingots used in both solar cells and semiconductor wafers.
The global picture underscores India's dependence: Japan's Shin-Etsu and Sumco alone supply roughly 70% of the world's semiconductor wafer needs, with Taiwan's GlobalWafers and several Korean firms rounding out most of the rest. Solar-grade wafer equipment and materials, meanwhile, are dominated by Chinese suppliers riding significant overcapacity. Semiconductor-grade wafers demand far tighter quality tolerances than solar-grade material, Dr. Kumar noted, which is part of why the two markets have evolved so differently.
He also pointed to a slower-than-expected trajectory at India's most prominent fab effort: Tata Electronics initially targeted the 28-nanometer node but has since shifted toward 90 nanometers, which Dr. Kumar attributed to reluctance among established chipmaking nations — and companies such as Taiwan's PSMC — to transfer competitive, cutting-edge process technology to a potential low-cost rival.
How Crystal Growth Actually Works
Dr. Kumar walked through the Czochralski process in detail. Polysilicon — refined to 6–9N purity for solar use — is melted at around 1,450°C inside a quartz crucible, then cooled slightly to a crystallization point near 1,414°C. A seed crystal with a specific atomic orientation is dipped into the stabilized melt and slowly withdrawn, first forming a thin neck and then a widening body, pulled at roughly 110 mm per hour. The resulting cylindrical ingots run about five meters long for solar applications and one to two meters for semiconductor-grade material. From there, wafers are sliced — pseudo-square for solar cells, circular for chips — with semiconductor wafers requiring additional lapping, polishing, and etching before reaching a fab.
Ranaa's pulling equipment stands about 15 meters tall and contains more than 700 individual components, of which the company says it has indigenized roughly 70% through a network of over 40 vendors based in Hosur. The equipment includes a CMOS camera-based closed-loop control system that continuously monitors ingot diameter and automatically adjusts pull rate and power to maintain uniformity — part of what Dr. Kumar described as a broader push toward fully automated, "one-click" crystal growth.
The company holds two patents: one covering its growth equipment — including an "absolute melt gap control" system accurate to 0.02 mm — and one covering its process, including a control algorithm aimed at reducing structural defects during the earliest, most failure-prone stages of ingot growth. Ranaa claims these innovations lift ingot yield to roughly 30%, a 10 to 20 percentage-point improvement over imported equipment.
Scaling Up: From 6-Inch to 12-Inch
Ranaa has already deployed 4-inch equipment (used for quantum materials such as lithium niobate) and 6-inch equipment (for semiconductor-grade silicon) across Indian research institutions, including IGCAR, BARC, and CSIR-CEMET labs. The company is now working to scale up to 12-inch systems — the industry's real workhorse for volume solar and semiconductor manufacturing.
That jump requires redesigning the hot zone from 16 inches to 36 inches and reworking the mechanical receiving chamber, work Ranaa is modeling using crystal-growth simulation software to study heat and mass transfer. Design work for the 12-inch system is complete, and the company is now building a pilot plant in Shoolagiri, near Hosur, where it plans to deploy four indigenous 12-inch machines. Dr. Kumar said the company expects to demonstrate its first 12-inch solar-grade ingot within 8 to 12 months.
Not everything is sourced locally yet. PLC controls still come from Germany, and India currently lacks manufacturing (as opposed to machining) capability for certain high-purity graphite components used in the furnace hot zone.
A Fragile Global Supply Chain
Dr. Kumar was candid about the vulnerabilities in the broader supply chain. Polysilicon is largely imported from China, though Ranaa has secured a long-term contract with Germany's Hemlock and identified alternative sources in Oman, Australia, and Malaysia (OCI), alongside emerging domestic capacity from Reliance and a South Indian firm, Indosol.
A more acute bottleneck lies in quartz crucibles. While an Indian industry consortium is now working to manufacture CZ equipment and crucibles domestically, the ultra-high-purity quartz needed for a crucible's inner lining comes from essentially one place in the world: Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
Compounding the challenge, China has imposed export restrictions on both germanium and the high-purity isostatic graphite used in furnace heating elements — materials central to crystal growth. In response, Ranaa says it is pursuing a "China plus one" sourcing strategy across crucibles, polysilicon, graphite hot-zone parts, and critical metals such as molybdenum and tungsten, in order to protect continuity of supply for future large-scale customers. Meanwhile, the United States is pursuing its own reshoring push, partnering with TSMC and GlobalWafers to rebuild domestic wafer and chip capacity.
Policy Tailwinds
India's policy environment has shifted meaningfully in recent years. The ALMM1 and ALMM2 mandates already require domestic manufacturing of solar modules and cells, respectively, and a newer policy targets 15 gigawatts of cumulative domestic ingot-and-wafer manufacturing capacity by June 2028 — against more than 80 gigawatts of currently announced solar manufacturing capacity nationally. On the semiconductor side, the government's "Semicon 2.0" policy includes a dedicated pillar for "machines and materials," which Dr. Kumar sees as directly relevant to Ranaa's work.
The scale of the opportunity — and the gap — is stark: India's installed solar capacity stands at roughly 200 gigawatts, but only about 2 gigawatts of that is supported by domestic ingot-and-wafer manufacturing. In semiconductors, that figure is effectively zero, with India importing 100% of its wafer needs.
A Bootstrapped Beginning
Ranaa's origins trace back to work at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), where the founders were initially brought in to fix a translation mechanism on imported crystal-growth equipment that had no local service or spare-parts support. That early project evolved into a deeper equipment expertise, eventually leading to a technology transfer from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) for germanium crystal growth — and, from there, two patents and the company's first deployed machines.
Dr. Kumar's own path to the company runs through Anna University, where he completed his PhD focused on silicon manufacturing, and Bharathidasan University in Trichy, where he earned an MSc in Physics — notably, not an engineering degree from an IIT. After his PhD, he joined Adani Group, where he grew the company's first 12-inch silicon ingot, before consulting for multiple gigawatt-scale solar manufacturers through the German consulting firm RCT and later joining Ranaa.
Pic: Dr. Avinash Kumar
The Talent Gap
Skilled crystal-growth talent remains scarce in India, Dr. Kumar said, noting that companies in the space have often hired workers from unrelated industries, such as automotive manufacturing, rather than engineers with more directly relevant chemical or mechanical backgrounds. He pointed to a handful of existing pockets of expertise , a two-decade-old Crystal Growth Centre at Anna University in Chennai, an early 4-inch silicon ingot grown roughly two decades ago by Sanmar Chemplast in Mettur, and ongoing work at BARC, as evidence that India has long had pockets of capability, just without the market demand to sustain them until now.
His advice to engineering students: pursue mechanical, chemical, or metallurgical engineering with a grounding in solid-state physics and crystal growth, as institutions such as BARC and TIFR begin building out dedicated crystal-growth research centers. He noted that Ranaa itself sells starter equipment, from 6-inch systems upward, to universities and research labs looking to build training and IP-generation capability.
Materials Beyond Silicon
Using the Czochralski method, Dr. Kumar said Ranaa is capable of growing more than 40 different single-crystal materials, though the company's near-term focus is on four: silicon (solar and semiconductor), germanium (infrared optics and thermal imaging, via a BARC technology transfer), lithium niobate (photonics, quantum, and telecom applications, developed in partnership with the Quantum Materials Division of India's National Quantum Mission), and gallium oxide. Silicon carbide and gallium nitride, both used widely in power electronics, fall outside Ranaa's current scope, since they rely on a different growth method (physical vapor transport) rather than Czochralski.
Domestic germanium feedstock remains an unresolved challenge; Dr. Kumar said the material can theoretically be extracted from fly ash and discarded fiber-optic cable, but only at lab scale and higher cost, so Ranaa is also exploring purifying and reselling end-of-life germanium.
Business Model: Equipment First, Then Wafers
Ranaa's go-to-market strategy differs by sector. In solar, the company sells equipment rather than finished ingots, and is currently in discussions with three gigawatt-scale solar manufacturers who will be trained on its pilot line and are expected to become equipment customers once the 12-inch system is demonstrated. Selling equipment for just 10 gigawatts of ingot capacity, at roughly ₹3 crore per unit, would represent about ₹1,500 crore in potential revenue, Dr. Kumar said.
In semiconductors, by contrast, Ranaa plans to sell finished wafers rather than equipment, targeting a market that is expected to grow as more Indian fabs come online over the next two to three years — Tata's fab currently requires about 50,000 wafers a month. Beyond India, Dr. Kumar sees export potential in the Middle East, South America, the US, and Europe, arguing that Western manufacturers cannot match Ranaa's equipment costs, which he estimated run at half to a third of comparable Western capex.
Ranaa is currently raising a seed round, with roughly half of the proceeds earmarked for its pilot line, a portion for R&D, and the remainder for building out its vendor ecosystem — training component suppliers to manufacture parts such as steel chambers domestically.
The Bigger Picture
For Dr. Kumar, the effort goes beyond one company's roadmap. "It's a national problem," he said of India's absence from the crystal-growth layer of the supply chain — the layer that ultimately determines whether the country's solar and semiconductor ambitions can be self-sufficient. Building that domestic IP base, he argued, is what will eventually deliver India's "technology sovereignty" and "energy sovereignty."
