Compound semiconductor wafer fab

As of 2026, India imports about 90 per cent of the wide-bandgap semiconductor chips — the gallium nitride and silicon carbide devices that power electric vehicles, defence radar and telecom base stations. Domestic fabrication covers less than 15 per cent of total component demand.

A compound semiconductor is not silicon. It is built from elements like gallium, nitrogen, arsenic and carbon, layered into crystals that tolerate what silicon cannot: GaN devices can operate at temperatures up to 1,000°C, switch faster and run more efficiently. That capability is bought at a steep manufacturing cost. One fabrication and test cycle takes roughly 80 days and involves hundreds of individual process steps, each of which must be executed to its finest detail. The feedstocks are unforgiving — precursor gases refined to 99.99999 per cent purity, grown into ingots in specialised furnaces, deposited by chemical vapour deposition.

India stands at the beginning of the commercial climb, but not the beginning of the capability. The DRDO's Solid State Physics Laboratory demonstrated indigenous 4-inch SiC wafers and GaN HEMTs up to 150W in November 2024, using a 1,300 m² Class 1000 cleanroom. At GAETEC in Hyderabad, GaAs and GaN chips are already made at limited scale — 5,760 GaAs MMICs went into three RISAT radar satellites, each carrying over 7,000 chips. These achievements place India among a small group of nations, alongside the United States, France, Russia, Germany, South Korea and China, able to produce GaN indigenously.

Commercial-scale is a different mountain. In August 2025 the India Semiconductor Mission approved the country's first commercial SiC wafer fab, SiCSem, in Bhubaneswar — a joint venture with the UK's Clas-SiC Wafer Fab Ltd, with a ₹2,067 crore investment and a groundbreaking held on 1 November 2025. It targets 60,000 wafers and 96 million devices a year. A second SiC fab by RIR Power Electronics was announced in the same Bhubaneswar location in November 2025, and in May 2026 the Cabinet approved Crystal Matrix Limited's compound semiconductor and packaging facility in Dholera.

The gap persists beneath the fabs. The ultra-pure precursor gases and MOCVD reactors are imported from the US and Europe. Crystal growth and epitaxy tools exist only at lab scale. Trained process engineers are in short supply. And the fabs themselves need uninterrupted power — a fractional flicker can ruin a batch — and millions of gallons of ultra-pure water daily, infrastructure that Dholera and Bhubaneswar are still building.

Moving from limited to commercial production means closing each of those foundational layers in step, before operations begin in 2028.