The government plans to upgrade the Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali, Punjab, with a ₹4,500-crore fiscal support that would be invested over a period of three years.
While requesting the Punjab government to allot 25 acres of land for the lab’s expansion, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Railways, Information and Broadcasting, and Information Technology, clarified on Friday that there is no question of privatising the state-owned chip-making company.
“SCL will be modernised with an investment of ₹4,500 crore over a period of the next three years,” Vaishnaw said at the device handling ceremony, adding that it will play a significant role in realising the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for India to be self-reliant in semiconductors.
“We need to expand SCL Mohali. We have requested the Punjab government to allocate 25 acres of land. The faster you allocate the land, the faster it will help in the expansion of SCL Mohali,” the minister said.
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SCL is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and the only integrated device-manufacturing facility in the country providing end-to-end solutions for the development of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), opto-electronics devices, and Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) devices.
For production at SCL to be increased “100 times”, Vaishnaw said there’s a need to upgrade technology so that the lab can provide a ‘tape out facility’ for startups.
A ‘tape-out facility’ refers to a semiconductor fabrication plant wherein a final chip design is sent to the manufacturing unit after completion of the design phase by students, undergraduate, research fellows.
“We need to take a big jump over decades-old technology that we have here. Almost 300 university students, undergraduate, research fellows are using the world’s latest EDA tools for chip design in the country and SCL will play a significant role in the production of those chips,” he said.
EDA tools, or Electronic Design Automation tools, are software used to design electronic systems such as integrated circuits (ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs).
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