With more than 20 percent of the world’s semiconductor designers working out of India, chip designing is a good starting point for the ecosystem of technology that the government is planning to set up in India, apart from assembly, testing, marking, and packaging (ATMP), said Vivek Tyagi chairperson of IESA. “More than 20 percent of companies have already invested at least $50 million in their R&D facility in India.
The design-led manufacturing incentive (DLI) scheme under the production-linked incentive scheme (PLI) for semiconductors rolled out by the government in December 2021, is an important step. The DLI scheme is more for Indian semiconductor startups that the government hopes to create, Tyagi said.
Tyagi said India's lack of adequate number of patents and IPs is not a big bottleneck for chip design. "We can always find some way of implementing or achieving something already patented. But for that, we require major PhD programs in major universities," he added.