Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre to be announced soon

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology announced that the Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre, a global standard academia-Government-private sector-start-up partnered institution, will be announced very soon. The institution will be created initially with the Semiconductor Complex Limited as an institution and will later spun off into an independent semiconductor research organization.

The minister announced it while virtually addressing the All India Research Scholars Summit – 2024 which was organized by IIT Madras.   

The organization will compete and cooperate with IMEC, MIT Microelectronics, US, ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), Taiwan. In the coming years it will establish itself as one of the principal poles of semiconductor research in the coming decade.

An ecosystem of top universities and collages of India will work and collaborate on research in a diverse set of areas under the new research centre.

“Two years on from January 2022, from when we started Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Transforming India and making India a semiconductor nation, to here, we are today with a semiconductor ecosystem that is vibrant, growing fast. We have design innovation going on with chips and devices that are going to come out in the coming months. There is a product ecosystem that is developing in automotive, industrial, telecom, computer and in many other areas that are essentially leveraging off what we are doing in design innovation and design,” he said.

“You are seeing proposals from Tower Semiconductor, Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation of Taiwan, Micron and companies like that setting up characterisation testing and manufacturing units in India. In a lot of ways, we have made up for 75 years of lost opportunities in the last two years,” he said.

The Government of India allocated Rs 1 lakh crore in the Budget 2024-25 for the ‘Research and Innovation Fund’, which is a 50-year interest-free grant to catalyse innovation and research and doing so in an industry-academia partnership model, he said.