A worker inspects a smartphone circuit board at Dixon Technologies’ Paget Electronics factory in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, Thursday, January 28, 2021. Dixon has a market value of more than $2.5 billion and a production capacity of approximately $2.5 billion. There will be 50 million smartphones this year.Photographer: Anindit Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Qualcomm The company is already designing chips in India, leveraging the country’s talented engineers, the president of Qualcomm India said in an exclusive interview.
“We already have chips that are actually completely end-to-end designed in India and we’re shipping them all over the world,” Savi Soin, president of Qualcomm India, told CNBC.
The American chip giant designs semiconductor and wireless communications products. Qualcomm is best known for his Snapdragon processors, which power some of the top Android smartphones around the world.
Like other chip designers, Qualcomm doesn’t manufacture its own chips.Instead, it is Depends on chip manufacturer like TSMCSamsung Electronics and global foundries.
“India now has more engineers than anywhere else in the world,” Soin said. “We have a lot of engineers here who do end-to-end chip design.”
He said the chip design process is “extremely complex,” requiring “years of research and development, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and thousands of engineers.” Semiconductor Industry Association In the report.
An integral part of the semiconductor manufacturing process, chip design defines the chip’s architecture and system requirements, as well as how the individual circuits are laid out on the chip.
In January, Qualcomm announced it would expand its Chennai operations with a new design center focused on wireless technology.
The Rs 1.77 billion ($21.3 million) investment will also support Qualcomm’s commitment to the Government of India’s visions of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Design in India’.
“Twenty years ago, we saw India as a great center of research and development and a great talent pool. We see India as a great market. [a] It’s a great opportunity,” Soin told CNBC’s Shri Jegaraja.
“We are currently in talks with a number of semiconductor back-end and manufacturing businesses that India is looking to set up. Our CEO said two years ago that if India is going to set up semiconductor manufacturing, we are going to have to make sure that we can actually get it into mass production. “I promised to cooperate with you,” Soin said.
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indian chip push
India’s semiconductor ambitions take a big step forward with approval from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government 3 semiconductor factories More than $15 billion invested in Gujarat and Assam.
According to a February 29 government statement, “India already has deep capabilities in chip design. With these units, our country will develop chip manufacturing capabilities. Advanced packaging technology will be unique in India. “It will be developed in the future.”
India wants to become a major chip hub to compete with the United States, Taiwan and South Korea, and is encouraging foreign chipmakers to set up operations in the country. As the world’s semiconductor manufacturers seek to diversify their operations amid geopolitical uncertainty, countries like India stand to benefit.
To strengthen domestic manufacturing capacity and exports, India has announced: worth billions of dollars Production-linked incentives The aim is to “attract investment” in key sectors and cutting-edge technologies and make India “an integral part of global value chains.”
Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics, Information Technology, Railways and Telecommunications, told CNBC in March that India aims to become one of the world’s top five semiconductor manufacturers in the next five years.
“What we have seen is that, for example, with the benefit of PLI, we are definitely bringing more and more smartphone manufacturing to India,” Soin said.
“So we’ve seen good incentives for IT, telecommunications and telecom equipment that’s being manufactured here. We’re seeing some discussion around design elements. So we’re seeing more, We hope that some elements of the product using our technology will be appreciated, “Designed in India,” Soin said.
apple is one of the companies that has diversified some of its manufacturing operations into India amid geopolitical tensions between the US and China. Apple currently assembles about 14% of its iPhones in India, double the amount it produced locally last year, according to sources. Bloomberg reporting.
Google plans to start producing Pixel smartphones in India by the second quarter. nikkei asia report February.
