Chapter 9 ’Wafers, chips and Indian design skills’ documents the not well understood early attempts by India to ride the hardware wave (electronics, semiconductors, components and systems), the intense power struggle between a socialistic government and entrepreneurs and the shift from hardware manufacturing to design. Even in 1967, TIFR did set up a hardware fabrication facility; many public sector labs (including BEL) did attempt to tame the semiconductor manufacture; it was also the time that many countries (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) were making “big ticket” investments in this space. Thanks to short-sighted policy of multiple sub-critical investments and inward looking (rather than forward looking) approach there were many failures.
Readers today will be amused to know that Robert Noyce, the then President of Fairchild (who later co- founded Intel) visited India and met with officials; he was asked to keep equity at less than 50%, pay royalty of 4% and, most ridiculously, limit production to 0.6 million devices (instead of 10 million devices proposed by Fairchild)! They went to Hong Kong, set up a 50 million-device facility and the rest is history!
After attempts to commercialize TIFR technology failed, BEL started manufacturing first generation devices with Philips collaboration and second-generation device with RCA collaboration. An unusual youngster Manu Zarabi wrote the proposal for a “fab” after his PhD in IISc in 1972. After 11 years the project did become a reality on Oct 2, 1983 in the form of Semiconductor Complex Ltd (SCL) manufacturing 5 micron devices; they even managed to develop expertise for 2 micron and 1.2 micron technology (through the original production was under license from AMI – American Microsystems Inc). Strangely, D0E under KPP Nambiar was scuttling the SCL success by promoting another “fab” under ITI – the strange ways government can operate in India. Unfortunately, a fire (suspected to be a sabotage by many) finished off SCL on February 8, 1989. Though a revamped SCL was inaugurated in 1997 and Zarabi continued till 1997, SCL had lost most people by then.
Prabhu Goel of IIT Kanpur had started GDA (Gateway Design Automation) after his PhD at CMU and GDA products were selling for tens of million of dollars; through a partnership with Philip Moorby, Prabhu created Verilog, a very successful EDA tool. Prabhu conceived the need for creating the labor-intensive libraries for EDA tools and started GDA India in SEEPZ Bombay. Though GDA clocked $ 25 million in revenue, Cadence offer of acquisition was attractive enough and GDA merged with Cadence; GDA India became Cadence India. Following GDA success, many semiconductor companies started betting an India – they include Texas Instruments, ST Micro, Analog Devices, Motorola (new Freescale) as well as other EDA majors Synopsys and Mentor Graphics.
HCL Tech, Wipro and Mindtree started significant work in electronics design engineering services. Other technology products / IP companies that started in 90’s include Sasken, Tejas Networks and Ittiam. The Indian
Semiconductor Association (ISA) was formed to galvanize industry opinion and to influence government policies. Buoyed with the success “mega fab’ dreams were getting close to reality by 2006; the change of guard in Delhi put it in back burner. It will be interesting to watch developments in this space over the next decade.
(My Book Review will be posted over the next 10 days (starting March 28, 2009) – a chapter a day for each of the ten chapters!)
Book Review
Sharma Dinesh, “The Long Revolution”, The birth and growth of India’s IT industry”, Harper Collins (Dec 2008)
Tags: Analog Devices, BEL, Cadence, Fab, Fairchild Semiconductors, GAD, Ittiam, Mentor Graphics, Philip Moorby, Prabhu Goel, Robert Noyce, Sasken, SCL, STMicro, Synopsys, Tejas Networks, TI, TIFR, Verilog, Zarabi
