What India is doing to build chip manufacturing talent

Semiconductor serial entrepreneur Dasaradha Gude recalls that when he set up India’s first chip design company Qualcore in the early 1990s, there was barely any skilled semiconductor talent available in India. “We had to train people,” he says. Today, India has one of the biggest semiconductor design bases in the world.

Semiconductor manufacturing talent in India today is where design talent was in the early 1990s – barely any. Micron is setting up a massive ATMP (assembly, test, marking and packaging) unit in Gujarat. The Tatas, CG Power (part of Murugappa Group) and smaller companies like Kaynes are planning OSATs (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test). The Tatas are planning a multi-billion dollar wafer fab. All of this will require manufacturing talent. And initiatives around it are slowly taking off.

Gude says while the complexity of manufacturing chips required in fabs is very high and not enough talent is available, the country has some talent in the 0-15 years’ experience range for ATMP/ OSAT operations. “The current talent pool that we use for chip design can be reskilled quickly to cater to OSAT operations as the number of jobs that each such unit would require would be in the range of 200-1,000 people,” says Gude.

Much of the requirement for talent will be for diploma holders – from institutions like the ITIs – in areas like electricals, electronics & communication. Industry veteran Satya Gupta believes 90% of the requirement will be for technicians, but Bhanupriya Krishna, MD of training firm Perceptives Solutions, thinks this will be about 60%. The rest of the talent will be BTechs, MTechs and PhDs. Top-level talent will initially need to come from countries with foundry and ATMP experience. For the rest, several efforts are on, including new curriculum, and centres of excellence with world-class training equipment in universities (see adjoining quotes).



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