Come what may, India will have a semiconductor chip fab

On Thursday Sept 12, 2013, Union Government has given in-principle approval of setting up two semiconductor chip fabs in India. These fabs may need to be established very quickly to take up the immediate opportunity of millions of Set Top Box ICs, Security id chips for smart cards and other Government ID projects. These are just two examples. India needs billions of chips. Not only as import substitution but also to make customized chips for range of innovative ideas exclusively for Indian market. It is clear now India surely going to have a semiconductor fab. But what is more important is the speed of implementation. Fab approval should have been faster. Now the stake holders have to really work faster and extremely smarter like the most advanced VLSI EDA design tools, which can now predict the bug at the primary stage of the design. Making the fab successful is not easy, but India is blessed with timing advantage, where many things are in favour of India. Teams across the industry (not only electronics) and Government has to work like a single organization which they can name it as "India Semiconductor Inc!". Leading chip makers go aggressive now to design chips better than what Indian Fab can design and sell. India fab efforts need to be very robust to fight all kinds of market forces. Taiwan and China are so well equipped in the semiconductor industry, India fab ne...