MacDermid Alpha Calls for Localisation of Materials and Process Technologies Across Semiconductor Value Chain

At COSEIn 2026 event held in Bengaluru, Ravi Bhatkal, Vice President-Strategy at MacDermid Alpha,  began with a claim about the company's history: 29 years ago, he said, MacDermid Alpha converted the semiconductor industry from aluminium to copper interconnects  and since then, materials at the wafer level have evolved continuously with Moore's law. The company, a $2.5 billion global materials science business operating in more than 50 countries, sits across the full semiconductor value chain from chip to system.
Bhatkal presented a systems-level view of the semiconductor ecosystem that he said he first drew up about 16 years ago and finds equally current today: information flowing from data centres to smart mobile devices and back from sensor networks; energy flowing from generation through transmission, storage, and consumption, now increasingly bidirectional with distributed solar. At every link in that chain, he argued, India needs to localise.
He was specific about what this means. The value chain runs from fab through packaging, board assembly, and systems integration, with physical inputs at each stage — people, materials, components, and equipment. "If you want to localise the ecosystem at every link in the chain, you have to localise these pieces. It doesn't have to be everything, but a substantial amount."
On the technology frontier, Bhatka...