Thin-film deposition (CVD/ALD)

Every advanced chip made anywhere on Earth passes through a machine India cannot yet build. As of 2026, over 85% of India's demand for chemical vapour deposition (CVD) equipment is met through imports, primarily from the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands. Indigenous CVD and atomic layer deposition (ALD) capability — the equipment and the process knowledge alike — stands at zero.

Thin-film deposition is where a wafer becomes a device. ALD lays down material atom-by-atom through sequential self-limiting reactions, giving atomic-level thickness control and the conformality needed to coat the complex three-dimensional structures inside modern memory and logic. It is foundational to high-k gate dielectrics, metal interconnects, DRAM, and 3D-stacked chips. Precision at this scale is one of the hardest problems in manufacturing — a reason only a handful of firms worldwide can supply the tools.

That handful is the crux. Global ALD equipment — a market worth USD 3.9 billion in 2023, projected to reach USD 6.2 billion by 2028 — is concentrated among Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, ASM International, and Veeco, based in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands. The precursor chemicals these machines consume, hundreds of kilograms per fab each month, are equally consolidated: Merck alone holds 30%-plus of the global market, with Europe accounting for almost 60% of precursor production.

India's presence is research-stage. IISc Bangalore's Centre for Nano Science and Engineering received Rs 3,000 crore from DRDO in 2017 for a gallium-nitride foundry lab and has been developing modified glancing-angle deposition for sub-10nm materials since 2013. ISRO's Semiconductor Laboratory in Chandigarh, established in the 1980s, does VLSI design. Neither has demonstrated a production-scale indigenous deposition process.

The gap persists because deposition sits atop a stack of capabilities India is still assembling. CVD/ALD systems are complex capital equipment — vacuum chambers, precursor vaporisers, ultra-high-vacuum pumps, real-time diagnostic software — and each layer depends on the next. Wafer-fab infrastructure itself, the Class 1–10 cleanrooms and semiconductor-grade utilities, remains emerging. The India Semiconductor Mission has approved ten projects worth INR 1.60 trillion, and in February 2026 Micron inaugurated an assembly and test facility at Sanand with over 500,000 square feet of cleanroom space — but these are packaging and fabrication investments, not equipment or process indigenisation.

What it would take is visible in the numbers. India's CVD equipment market is projected to grow from USD 180–220 million in 2026 to USD 750–950 million by 2035, with ALD the fastest-growing segment at 18–22% annually as fabs move to sub-28nm nodes. That demand is the foundation any indigenous programme would need to build against the vacuum, vaporiser, and precursor chains beneath it.