Tata joins hands with PSMC to build India's first 12-inch fab

[cfgauss2718]

Am I the only person who saw this headline and thought WOW, 12 inch transistors!?

[JAlexoid]

Never say never...

I also would love to own a 12" transistor :D

[alephnerd]

Go big or go home!

[detritus]

I'm now wondering how large a ~7-22nm detail-sized chip at 12" would be :)

I'm guessing relativistic restrictions would hamper its clock speed, but presumably still quicker than 'chips in Minecraft'!

[lawlessone]

Maybe they've built a 12 inch fab. For Makers or sometging.

[_a_a_a_]

So 12,000,000 nanometre wires (in imperial)

[alephnerd]

India is following the Chinese model of starting off in Memory Fabrication and Packaging to build up Fab infrastructure.

There's a similarly sized Packaging plant opening in Assam in Northeast India, and India is working with Tower Semiconductors to restart the SCL Fab in Chandigarh, which back in the 1980s used to sell Intel knockoffs to the Soviet and Indian defense industries before it was burned down during the Khalistan insurgency.

It doesn't hurt that the ministers leading India's semiconductor strategy was part of the team that designed and fabricated the Intel i486 in the 1980s-90s [0] and managed GE Transportation and Siemens Transportation in India [1]

At least India already has a very strong Hardware and Chip Design base, as most companies do Semiconductor Design in India already, and have been since TI opened their office in Bangalore in the early 1980s, and most EDA software is coded in the India offices of Synopsys, Cadence, Ansys, Siemens, etc.

Edit:

Cool article from the early 1980s about India's initial attempt at chip fabrication - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/economy/story/19831015-se...

Most Indian and Indian American leadership and middle management in the Electronics and Chips industry are alumni of SCL Mohali.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Chandrasekhar

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashwini_Vaishnaw

[sirtaj]

> SCL Fab in Chandigarh, which back in the 1980s used to sell Intel knockoffs to the Soviet and Indian defense industries before it was burned down during the Khalistan insurgency.

Among other things, they also made a BBC Micro clone called the SCL Unicorn, our school had half a dozen of them and they were always in popular demand with us computer nerds.

[newyankee]

Well it is high time the world's most populated country has some capability in sophisticated industries. I hope the market exists to justify this.

I wonder how long it will take even say China to reach the likes of Intel/AMD forget about NVIDIA for now ? Or have they already ?

[user-]

Can you explain what the khalistan movement has to do with it? I just read multiple articles about the 1989 fire and there's nothing that says that

[mnadkvlb]

where does it say in your links that these people were part of the team that designed chips in the 90s ? Are these wrong links maybe ?

[rjzzleep]

Will this end up like every other Tata collab where Tata eventually just takes full ownership and edges the partners out for a minimal payout?

[alephnerd]

Tata Electronics is organized the same way as TCS - they want to be a middle manager who isn't directly investing in R&D due to margins.

By maintaining the partnership with a foreign partner, they can get fairly advanced manufacturing IP and knowhow without having to R&D from scratch.

Indian companies don't have the need for 100% IP transfers like China because most have had shared IP partnerships with Western countries for generations (all the way back to the British Raj), nor have private sector Indian entities ever faced sanctions similar to China or Russia/USSR in the 20th century.

This also helps adjacent Tata Motors, as they were severely impacted by the chips shortage and the battery shortage (for their EV division), along with Tata Advanced Systems (the defense contractor) who need commodity chips for a number of it's armament SKUs.

[akmittal]

PSMC is not an investor. They are just there to provide technology/help in setting up Fab. PSMC will get paid for this. PSMC already know all the terms, they didn't even wanted to become investors.

[akmittal]

Intel planned to start fab in 2007, but Indian bureaucracy lost it to Vietnam. Atleast finally its happening again.

https://www.forbes.com/2007/09/06/intel-india-china-markets-...

[alephnerd]

Yep, but the Intel Saigon plant wasn't successful either, and they've been downsizing their VN presence [0]

The exact same problems with precision manufacturing in India exist in Vietnam as well.

"Intel had raised concerns about the stability of power supplies and excessive bureaucracy ... Intel is also expanding its investment in chip packaging in Malaysia, one of Vietnam's main Southeast Asian rivals"

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-shelves-planned-chi...

[seo-speedwagon]

Doesn’t chip fabrication require enormous amounts of water? How’s that going to play out when India is expected to start facing serious water availability issues?

[alephnerd]

India has an area of 1,269,219 square miles.

Water Availability is a local issue largely isolated to the Deccan Plateau (Telangana, interior Andhra Pradesh/Rayalseema, interior Karnataka, interior Tamil Nadu, interior Maharashtra, southern Madhya Pradesh) and northern Rajasthan.

Also, fabs tend to reuse water (as there are purity requirements so you'd be stupid from a margins standpoint to not recycle water used in a fab)

[thisislife2]

Oh, it is going to be a huge issue in the future. Look at Bangalore. Once farmers too start facing water shortage, the shit will hit the fan.

The Modi government is not known for its long-term thinking - in fact, they are very bad planners as they don't have the requisite experience. Their whole approach to running a government is to treat it like a corporate business - "hey, this thing will make us money and create good PR for us, let's do it!". They have no vision for capacity building. Look at the whole electoral bond scam the Modi government ran and used to enrich themselves - it was legalised corruption worse than the corporate lobbying that exists in America. They even combined it by giving lower ranking IT official (who tend to be more corrupt) extra-ordinary powers of investigation, and draconian powers to the Enforcement Directorate to seize property and used both to extort money from questionable and / or corrupt businesses.

The last 10 years of Modi rule has seen the largest transfer of wealth from the public to the rich, with Modi personally acting as the middle-man and raking money from it too.

[bee_rider]

I think it doesn’t need a ton of water in general, if you do it right. At least, IIRC, Intel’s big cutting edge fab in Arizona has been justified by pointing out that the water is mostly reusable.

[nabla9]

Nowadays you can design closed-loop system if there is not enough water. It's more expensive, of course.

[axoltl]

This is the first time I’ve heard of 12 inch wafers. Are they actually 12”, or just 300mm wafers like everyone else uses?

[alephnerd]

65nm process - https://inc42.com/buzz/tata-seeks-for-taiwanese-collaboratio...

This fab is for memory chips (eg. RAM)

[b3orn]

It's most likely 300mm, otherwise they'd have to make their own wafers.

[sharadov]

They've been talking about this for the last 20 years - will see when it really happens. Lack of water, stable electricity and not to say inept Indian bureaucracy and corruption are to blame.

[ramesh31]

Article doesn't mention node size. Any ideas?