Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden have hailed the watershed arrangement to establish a new semiconductor fabrication plant during their bilateral talks yesterday. External Affairs Ministry said the new semiconductor fabrication plant is focused on advanced sensing, communication, and power electronics for national security, next generation telecommunications, and green energy applications.
A semiconductor fabrication plant, commonly called a fab, is a factory for semiconductor device fabrication. The fab will be established with the objective of manufacturing infrared, gallium nitride and silicon carbide semiconductors. It will be enabled by support from the India Semiconductor Mission as well as a strategic technology partnership between Bharat Semi, 3rdiTech, and the US Space Force. It is the first time ever that the US Military has agreed to do a technology partnership for these highly valued technologies with India.
The Fab becomes not only India’s first, but one of the world’s first Multi material fab for national security. It will focus on three essential pillars for modern war fighting – advanced sensing, advanced communications and high voltage power electronics. These three areas also have huge growing needs for commercial sectors such as Railways, telecom infrastructure and data centres and green energy. This Fab is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for India to become a chip maker from a chip taker. This is a glass ceiling broken in tech diplomacy and many years down the road, this will go down in history books as a watershed moment in India-US relationships.
