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

https://www.powerchip.com/en-global/insights/press-releases/content/20240229

by RetroTechie • 2 years ago

93 64 2 years ago

rjzzleep2• 2 years ago

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?

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

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.

mayama2• 2 years ago

India is on various blacklists of various western govt for military or advanced tech thoroughout cold war and even until recently. Pentium chips were denied even as late as 90s. Sanctions on Indian started to ease after 123 agreement, but India is still on US entity list restriction.

There is difference though, as most major Indian companies hardly invest in R&D and are happy to just keep using licensed IP from west. Indian companies, and general public, have very little risk appetite.

ganeshkrishnan• 2 years ago

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

Not true at all. Even the indian space agency was sanctioned till few years back.

akmittal2• 2 years ago

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.

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

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

mnadkvlb• 2 years ago

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 ?

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

Here's Rajeev Chandrashekar's interview with IIT/IllinoisTech which he is an alum of - https://magazine.iit.edu/fall-2012/ahead-curve

Vaishnaw wasn't on the chips side. He's Engineering Management (GE and Siemens and a Wharton grad)

capybara_2020• 2 years ago

"He was handpicked by Vinod Dham to join Intel and worked there from 1988 to 1991. At Intel he was part of the architectural team that designed the i486 processor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Chandrasekhar

newyankee• 2 years ago

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 ?

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

Or have they already ?

On the Fabrication front, domestic fabrication capacity by Chinese firms like SMIC is comparable to Intel in the late 2000s-mid 2010s (aka good enough for most usecases - an Nvidia Maxwell GPU or Intel Sandy Bridge CPU can hypothetically be fabricated using purely Chinese tooling).

The Chinese government did a massive subsidy dump like India is doing today in the late 2000s to try and build this kind of capacity.

Design is not there yet though (but changing rapidly), as EDAs are hard and margins low, so that entire industry got outsourced to India in the 1990s.

world's most populated country has some capability in sophisticated industries

India does very well in High Precision High Margins sectors such as Pharmaceuticals or purely R&D focused functions like Chip Design or Software Development.

High Precision Low Margins manufacturing was always a shitshow in India due to regulations - you didn't need to deal with headaches like paying of local or state Labor Commissions for breaking labor laws in China in the 1990s or 2000s, as you can work directly with the local CCP apparatus to smooth the way

AdamH12113• 2 years ago

AMD and NVIDIA are fabless semiconductor companies. In manufacturing, TSMC and SMIC would be more relevant competition.

rjzzleep2• 2 years ago

"The Ascend 910B is widely considered the most competitive non-Nvidia AI chip available in China."

Those chips are produced by SMIC. So they have a competitor not only to Nvidia, but also to TSMC. The biggest break on SMIC growth seems to have been the EUV export emergency break by Pompeo. But it may in the end turn out to be a blessing in disguise for China. The jury is still out on this one.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-chip-demand-forces-hua...

sirtaj3• 2 years ago

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.

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

I'll let the team know. I know the uncles who worked on that!

The entire old school SCL and DRDO Chandigarh community emigrated to the US in the 1990s.

user-2• 2 years ago

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

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

The villages and areas outside of Chandigarh had active guerilla conflicts in the 1987-1995 time period.

When my parents were growing up in Chandigarh back then, there were soldiers at checkpoints at every block and the law and order situation outside of the city was horrible, and bus massacres were very common, for example at this village in the outskirts of Mohali [0][1] (there are way too many to count so I won't even try on here)

There was no point rebuilding after the fire when guerilla warfare was happening 1-2 miles away.

It was dark times and my parents are definetly messed up from that experience.

I recommend watching the art film "Chauthi Koot" to get a feel of those times [2]

[0] https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/1987073...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/04/world/44-slain-in-sikh-hi...

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CBqMc-Kbw

seo-speedwagon• 2 years ago

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?

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

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)

JumpCrisscross4• 2 years ago

Would also note that one of India's greatest geopolitical weaknesses is its blockade potential. You don't want to find yourself limited to unguided munitions a few months into a shooting match.

selimthegrim2• 2 years ago

Is there not a groundwater issue in Punjab?

thisislife22• 2 years ago

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.

huytersd• 2 years ago

I don’t know about their long term thinking when it comes to policy but politically the BJP has meticulously planned and successfully carried out a takeover of the Indian political system in a strategy that spanned atleast 4 decades.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

cfgauss2718• 2 years ago

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

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

Go big or go home!

lawlessone• 2 years ago

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

JAlexoid• 2 years ago

Never say never...

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

detritus3• 2 years ago

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'!

detritus3• 2 years ago

If I've got this right, according to chatGPT, an early-to-mid-year i7 would be in the ballpark of 800m in length, hahah.

KRAKRISMOTT• 2 years ago

Cerebras is calling and they want their dinner plates back.

_a_a_a_• 2 years ago

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

akmittal2• 2 years ago

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-...

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

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...

ramesh31• 2 years ago

Article doesn't mention node size. Any ideas?

axoltl• 2 years ago

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

alephnerd20• 2 years ago

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

This fab is for memory chips (eg. RAM)

b3orn• 2 years ago

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

sharadov• 2 years ago

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.

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

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