India semiconductor fab business challenges; from the horse’s mouth

There are variety of opinions on India's capability in having a locally owned semiconductor fab. To give you more authentic opinion, we are happy to provide you the experience/opinions from a brave semiconductor entrepreneur Mr. Deepak Loomba, Founder, De Core Nano-semicondutors Limited, who risked his career and money in establishing a LED and compound semiconductor fab in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. Though the fab, De Core established is not a CMOS fab, but the infrastructure requirements are nearly similar. Below is full email interview (unedited) with Mr. Deepak. Q1: Semiconductor is a tough area, What are the challenges (in terms of investment, infrastructure, support, and any other) Indian semiconductor manufacturers come across while building semiconductor fabs in India? I suppose the question asked is what should be the bottlenecks. Investment is certainly a bottleneck because semiconductor is an area which is very capital intensive and hence establishing a global size fab is a very big challenge. Concurrently semiconductor is also volume game, so there are only very few companies who are able to play the niche player role. In most of the cases, the time from niche to mass in case of material science is pretty short. Being a volume game means that by making a few niche products, one cannot make hay. One has to go for volume, which requires a lot of ca...