Mudit Juneja

India is about to face a MAJOR semiconductor bottleneck. The Government of India has approved ~13 semiconductor projects under the India Semiconductor Mission, across 7 states. Three of these are full/compound fabs. Things are ramping up FAST, with ISM supported by an incentive framework of ₹76,000 crore. But one massive question mark remains: where is the talent going to come from? The money is there. The fabs are going to be there soon. But what about the many thousands of skilled technicians required to run these semiconductor fabrication plants? Much of the knowledge in this industry is tightly-guarded trade secrets kept under lock and key by the nations that lead global semiconductor production. One way India can quickly close this knowledge gap is by ensuring that young people across the country are learning how to fabricate semiconductors from first principles. Ideally at the university level if not earlier. But because this is an entirely new industry segment in India, most of the country’s top colleges haven't caught up. Semiconductor fabrication is not accessible to Indian students. Until the Graduate or PhD level, most students never even get to touch a silicon wafer. A group of 15 students at IIT Bombay wants to change this. 10 months ago they launched the HackerFab at IIT Bombay. So far, they’ve raised ₹30 lakh to built DIY machines like a DLP-based lithography machine, a tube furnace to oxidise silicon, and a DC plasma sputter. They realised that existing institutions weren’t going to give them the early education they needed to develop REAL chip fabrication experience, so they took up the challenge themselves and created everything from scratch. HackerFab IITB is one of the most important developments in India’s semiconductor story, not just because the students passing through this programme will become leaders in India’s future semiconductor industry, but because they’re open-sourcing the India-specific recipes they’ve developed to build their machines and processes. They’re doing this so that other Indian colleges can replicate their work. No more gatekeeping. This movement started at IIT Bombay, but it will spread to other Indian colleges soon. As a result, India will see young people graduating from college with practical semiconductor fabrication experience first the very first time.