India’s only semiconductor fab is getting a Rs 4,500-crore upgrade. But what this is buying for the Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali is modest compared to the government’s public promises. 

Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of electronics and information technology, has said that this modernisation will increase SCL’s production capacity by 100X, bring in new technology, and create a design and talent-development ecosystem. The actual plan is more prosaic—a modest 3X capacity jump and a few additional tech capabilities that augment current systems but don’t signal a materially advanced tech stack. 

To be fair, that is still a major upgradeHindustan Times for a government-owned facility that has spent decades doing what few other Indian semiconductor facilities could: designing, fabricating, packaging, and testing chips all under one roof. 

The resulting chips have fed government-led space and defence programmes, even as SCL itself has trained nearly 70,000 students and helped startups and academic institutions prototype chips. It already caters to the space agency ISRO and counts the Indian Railways among its marquee customers. 

SCL works on a mature technology node, making chips at 180 nm. In comparison, the world’s largest and most advanced semiconductor foundry, TSMC, makes chips at 3nm and 5nm. For context, the lower the process node, the more advanced the technology. Which is to say, SCL is dated, sure, but it still works for a wide range of less-complex chips, such as those used in industrial and strategic applications and power management. 

The fab has already undergone one attempted revamp after another—starting as a public-sector unit under the department of electronics, briefly becoming an ISRO asset, and even flirting with the possibility of a joint venture with a commercial partner. 

Now finally, there’s an approved plan. And a list of shortlisted bidders who’ll help SCL get where it needs to be. The likes of Tata Semiconductor, Cyient Semiconductors, and Applied Materials. But what this plan will ultimately achieve falls short of the hype. 

Incremental, not revolutionary

SCL does enough heavy-lifting as is. 

For starters, it is the country’s only integrated-device manufacturing unit, not to mention one of the largest suppliers to government agencies such as ISRO and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).