India Doesn't Need Its Own Fab

Meenakshi Vashist, EET India (March 23, 2020)

Observations from a technologist that transitioned into India’s IC design industry during the 90s.

As a technologist who transitioned from telecom-system R&D to IC design in the mid-1990s, I have witnessed nearly the entire evolution of the IC design industry in India from its beginning to its present form. So what are my main observations?

The industry started off in the mid-1980s with a strong talent pool of engineers from top schools who had many opportunities to work on exciting projects in India and overseas. Some took jobs in the United States. Others worked at homegrown, largely state-funded electronic system and product companies as part of vertically designed organizations; in these, an engineer would be involved in the project starting with development of the product specs and take the product through architecture, implementation, validation, field trials, and industrial qualification.

These were engineers who were passionate about their work and performed it at significantly lower labor costs than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

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