Process integration and yield engineering expertise

In 1987, India was just two years behind the latest chip manufacturing technology. Today it is twelve generations behind global leaders. That single gap is the clearest measure of a capability India never accumulated: the ability to take a process from first silicon to mature, profitable yield.

Process integration and yield engineering are where a fab succeeds or fails. Reaching mature yield requires incorporating thousands of individual process control steps, each tuned against contamination, variability, and defect. The difficulty is not theoretical. At the leading edge, TSMC's 2nm process runs at roughly 65 per cent yield (targeting 75), Intel's 18A at 55 per cent, Samsung's SF2 at 40 per cent — the world's best builders, still fighting for every point. Only Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States hold world-class expertise at advanced nodes.

India's honest position is early. It has no operational commercial fab demonstrating indigenous process integration. Its first is under construction: Tata Electronics, in Dholera, Gujarat, built on a September 2024 technology-transfer agreement with Taiwan's PSMC covering design, construction, and engineering support, with first silicon targeted for December 2026 and ASML lithography equipment contracted in May 2026. As of May 2026, twelve semiconductor projects worth ₹1.64 lakh crore have been approved.

Strategic capability exists but is narrow. The DRDO Semiconductor Laboratory in Chandigarh runs a 180nm CMOS fab for defence and space only — it fabricated ISRO's VIKRAM3201 microprocessor — while DRDO's GAETEC produces GaAs devices, and in October 2025 demonstrated indigenous 4-inch silicon carbide wafers and gallium nitride HEMTs at R&D scale. None of this builds commercial process integration know-how.

The gap persists in the workforce. India's roughly 120,000 semiconductor professionals are over 85 per cent concentrated in design — a genuine strength — but manufacturing demands different competencies. Process engineering proficiency takes five to ten years of hands-on experience to develop, and the acute shortages are precisely there: process engineers with sub-7nm experience, yield optimisation engineers, EUV lithography specialists. Beneath the fabs sit foundational dependencies India does not yet own — a domestic equipment ecosystem for deposition, etch, and lithography; contamination-control discipline; and characterisation and failure-analysis capacity, which must sit close to the line, since relying on foreign imaging pushes troubleshooting from hours to weeks.

What it would take is time on the line. Technology transfer supplies recipes; it cannot supply tacit knowledge. That is earned by running a fab, ramping yield, and retaining the engineers who learn from every defect. India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 targets 70–75 per cent of domestic chip needs by 2029 and 3nm–2nm capability by 2035 — milestones that rest entirely on whether that experience accumulates.