Silicon wafer manufacturing

Every silicon chip begins as a wafer, and as of 2024 India imports 100% of the semiconductor-grade silicon wafers it uses. As more than a dozen fabs prepare to come online between 2027 and 2029, each needing tens of thousands of wafer starts a month, the substrate beneath all of them still arrives entirely from abroad.

The wafer is deceptively humble. A single crystal of silicon must be pulled from molten polysilicon by the Czochralski process, sliced, and polished to a surface flat and clean to parts-per-trillion tolerances. Contamination is measured against Class 1 cleanroom standards. It is exacting work: wafer manufacturing captures only about 3% of semiconductor industry revenue, yet nothing downstream exists without it. Global production sits in few hands — Japan's Shin-Etsu and SUMCO, Taiwan's GlobalWafers, and South Korea dominate a roughly $20 billion market.

India's position is emerging, not absent. Raana Semiconductors, founded in 2015, has spent over a decade developing indigenous Czochralski crystal growth, demonstrating 4-to-6-inch ingots and holding ₹12 crore in confirmed orders from MeitY and the Department of Atomic Energy for FY2025-26. A $3 million seed round in January 2026 funds its push toward commercially viable 12-inch ingots, targeted roughly four years out. In the solar segment, the Premier Energies–Sino-American Silicon joint venture in Naidupeta, Andhra Pradesh, targets 2 GW of wafer slicing capacity from June 2026, scaling to 8 GW by FY2028. In compound semiconductors, Indichip Semiconductors and Japan's Yitoa Micro Technology signed a ₹14,000 crore deal in January 2025 for India's first private silicon carbide wafer fab in Kurnool, starting at 10,000 wafers a month. L&T Semiconductor Technologies partnered with Foxconn's Hon Young Semiconductor in October 2025 to develop high-voltage wafers. Beyond these, DRDO's STARC facility in Bangalore processes 150 mm wafers at a 1-micron node, and GAETEC in Hyderabad makes gallium arsenide devices for defence — low-volume, military-grade lines, not commercial-scale silicon wafer manufacturing.

The gap persists because the wafer sits atop a stack of capabilities India is only now building: polysilicon feedstock, Czochralski crystal growth equipment, slicing and polishing machinery, ultra-pure water and specialty gases, and the cleanrooms to hold it all. Each is itself emerging.

Closing it means maturing every layer beneath in parallel — moving Raana's demonstrated small ingots to 12-inch semiconductor grade, and turning the solar and SiC ventures now beginning production into reliable commercial supply. The climb is early, but for the first time it has visible steps.