Vaishnaw tours semicon and chip firms in Bengaluru

Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Information Technology, Electronics, Railways, and Information & Broadcasting, had a semiconductor and chip tour in Bengaluru on Saturday, covering some of the upstream and downstream players in the ecosystem.

He met and interacted with leaders and employees Texas Instruments (TI) and at Qualcomm, the upstream players in the semiconductor industry who are engaged in IC (integrated circuit) design and component manufacturing. He also met and interacted with Zetwerk Electronics, a Bengaluru-based downstream player in the semiconductor ecosystem offering electronics manufacturing services (EMS).

According to the Minister, semiconductor and chip design, for India, is a new industry which has scope for a multi-decade journey and investments in the sector may exceed $200 billion in the coming years as AI adoption accelerates and fast chips are redesigning the electronic landscape from traditional processing to intelligence-driven ultra efficiency.

In the City, Mr. Vaishnaw also officially opened Texas Instruments (TI)’s product research and development (R&D) center. This 550,000-square-foot R&D facility features a collaborative workspace dedicated to developing world-class chip designs. The center also houses an end-to-end reliability lab equipped with advanced testing capabilities for various environmental conditions, along with many other integrated circuit design labs.

Texas Instruments, a Texas-based semiconductor and chip design firm, entered India over 40 years ago by setting up its development centre in Bengaluru in 1985, when tech was mostly an unfamiliar word for most people and India and Karnataka were nowhere in the global technology map.

Santhosh Kumar, president & managing director, TI India, said, “TI India’s product development and design teams drive research and breakthrough innovations for customers worldwide.”

Later in the day, Mr. Vaishnaw inaugurated Zetwerk Electronics’s advanced manufacturing facility at the KIADB Hi-Tech Hardware Park at Kodigehalli in Bengaluru.

2-nanometre Qualcomm chip unveiled

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw unveiled a 2-nanometre semiconductor chip designed and developed by Qualcomm, a California-based semiconductor company, at its Bengaluru facility. This marks a significant needle movement in advanced semiconductor design in the country and a demonstration of the key role India has been playing in the industry-specific and AI-ready chip design activities.

According to the company, this reflects the strength of Qualcomm’s Global engineering capabilities collaboratively with engineering development centers in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad, representing one of the company’s most advanced and skilled development footprints globally, as well as its largest engineering workforce outside the United States.