Govt reconstitutes panel for promoting semiconductor wafer fabrication

The union cabinet on Wednesday approved the reconstitution of the empowered committee to promote semiconductor wafer fabrication (FAB) projects, with Dr VK Saraswat, former director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation and chief scientific advisor to the defence minister and a member of recently-constituted NITI Aayog, as its chairman.

MJ Zarabi, former CMD of Semiconductor Complex Ltd and Prof Narendra Krishna Karmarkar, distinguished visiting professor at IIT-Bombay will form the technical experts in the team while secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, will be member convener.

Other members of the reconstituted board include former IRO chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan and secretaries of the departments of expenditure and industrial policy and promotion.

The empowered committee may co-opt any other experts.

The government had, in 2011, constituted an empowered committee to identify technology and investors and to recommend incentives to be provided for setting up two FAB facilities in the country and the committee had submitted its recommendations to the government.

Based on the recommendations of the committee, the union cabinet accorded approval for establishing two FAB manufacturing facilities by two consortia - one led by Jaiprakash Associates Ltd along with IBM (USA) and Tower Jazz (Israel) and the other led by HSMC Technologies India Pvt Ltd along with ST Microelectronics (France/Italy) and Silterra (Malaysia).

The empowered committee is authorised to take all decisions to implement the FAB projects in furtherance of the decision of the cabinet to issue letters of intent to the two consortia on 19 March 2014 for setting up FAB facilities in India.

The setting up of semiconductor wafer fabrication units is a critical pillar required to promote electronics system design and manufacturing in India, which will stimulate the flow of capital and technology, create employment opportunities, help higher value addition in the electronic products manufactured in India, reduce dependence on imports, and lead to innovation.