When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and United States President Joe Biden announced establishing a semiconductor fabrication plant in India focused on meeting defence and national security needs, two names stood out: Bharat Semi and 3rdiTech.
From being incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi to securing a place at a prestigious accelerator at the University of California in Berkeley just four years ago, Bharat Semi, and its holding entity 3rdiTech, is an Indian start-up focused on designing chips, especially for military and defence purposes.
Now, the firm, started by Vrinda Kapoor a biologist, Vinayak Dalmia, an economist and Mukul Sarkar, an academic, is going to be at the heart of designing chips and getting them manufactured at the country’s first fabrication plant focused on national security, of course with help from technology and equipment provided by the United States.
Kapoor, the firm’s co-founder and chief executive, told The Indian Express over a phone call that they were first introduced to the US armed forces by the Indian government as part of the old Defence Trade and Technology Initiative (DTTI) in 2019. A year later, the firm got selected for an accelerator programme hosted at the University of California, Berkeley, which further opened doors to working with the United States’ armed forces.
“Berkeley has a very unique program (Skydeck), which is meant for semiconductor startups. They accept two companies a year, and we joined this program in 2020… it is very useful with the mentors, advisors… the semiconductor space is a very tightly knit ecosystem… and of course the US is one of the biggest stakeholders in the sector,” Kapoor said. Getting into the programme opened doors for them to work with the military in the United States.
However, she said that the goal for their firm was clear from the beginning – they wanted to create products and work on research and development for new products that were also specific to India. Domestically, the firm won its first contract from the Indian Air Force back in 2019, and since then has also worked with the Indian Army, the Indian Navy and several PSUs.
One key reason behind the idea was India’s heavy reliance on imports for defence-related products in core technology areas, especially semiconductors.
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“The defence sector requires very niche, specific products. One shouldn’t look at them from a 28 nanometer or a 45 nanometer process point of view. For example, every missile seeker that is made in India today requires an imported semiconductor. The seekers themselves cannot be manufactured if tomorrow a country puts their hands up, which is why we need to have indigenous capabilities,” Kapoor said.
“The Indian Army is blind at night. We also have conditions of huge amounts of fog. The Indian Army buys almost 30,000 night vision scopes a year… those are critical supply chain vulnerabilities… we wanted to plug those dependencies,” she added.
Apart from designing chips, there is a second part to semiconductor independence – the actual fabrication itself. Kapoor said that the deal between India and US to set up a fab focused on national security is a crucial step forward given the nature of chip businesses and their priorities.
“When you look at compound semiconductors, they are a very different beast. There is no pure play foundry model… no TSMC equivalent, where I can just send a design of my chips to get them manufactured. And I can send my chips to one, they’ll manufacture it and send it back. Especially on the military side, typically those that own the fab are the ones that do the designing and sell the product. So it’s much more close-knit than the other model,” Kapoor said. Compound semiconductors are essentially semiconductors that are made from two or more elements, unlike silicon chip that are made from a single element. While they are expensive, compound semiconductors can do things that simply are not possible with silicon on account of their fundamental material and special properties of the crystals that make up these chips.
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“With the latest deal with the US, we will get manufacturing technology to India, so that we can design and manufacture chips for our military right here in India. We have committed to the government that any Indian company that wants to work in this space, we will give them capacity (at the fab),” Kapoor said.
The plant will be set up with support from the India Semiconductor Mission, which offers a 50 per cent capex subsidy to chip related projects – although, some details about the plant are currently unknown, for instance, its location in India.