Govt to infuse ₹4.5K-cr in SCL Mohali

The government will pour in ₹4,500 crore over the next three years to modernise the Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali and scale up its production a hundredfold, minister for IT and electronics Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on Friday, making it clear the facility will remain in government hands.

- Sejal Sharma

The investment, earmarked from ₹76,000 crore allocated to India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) L0 in 2021, will transform SCL into a national tape-out facility where students, researchers and startups can send their chip designs for manufacturing—a service commercial foundries are unlikely to provide. “Very few universities in the world have semiconductor design capabilities with industry-grade modern tools. In India, students across 298 universities, including undergrads, master’s students, PhD scholars and research fellows, are using the world’s latest Electronic Design Automation tools to design chips,” Vaishnaw said in Mohali.

SCL is described by the government as the only facility in India that can handle the complete chip-making process—from designing and fabricating to assembling, packaging, testing and reliability checks. It currently produces custom chips, optical components and micro-mechanical devices on two fabrication lines.

One of the lines, called the 6-inch MEMS line, operational for 30 years, will be removed as part of the modernisation, said Manoj Wadhwa, group head of the project planning group at SCL. The facility will be upgraded to build capabilities from 28nm to 180 nm, focusing on mature-node technologies for robotics and electronics.