Recently, India's Minister of Electronics and Information Vishnau made a speech at the groundbreaking ceremony of Micron Technology's semiconductor factory, which attracted global attention.
Vishnau said that the construction of Micron's India plant will be completed soon, and the first indigenous microchips in India are expected to be launched by December 2024, and India is ready to become a major global semiconductor hub.
This is another important layout for India after seizing the mobile phone market. This layout will greatly enhance India's scientific and technological content, which is expected to transform the Indian economy and even take off again.
Careful netizens found a problem, and that is time.
Huawei released the Mate 60Pro in early September, equipped with the Kirin 9000S processor, which marks the entry of domestic chips into the 7nm advanced field, but at this time India suddenly announced to increase chip manufacturing, saying that it has nothing to do with China, do you believe it?
So the question is, will Indian chips become competitors of China? What impact does it have on the industry chain?
"Made in India" has been widely criticized, low-end, cottage, and even "ganges, curry, cow dung" are used to describe Indian products, as if Indian products will never be on the table.
Taking smartphones as an example, global smartphones are mainly concentrated in the United States, China and South Korea, and Apple, Huawei, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo almost dominate the world's smartphones.
The hot sales of smartphones have made Indian companies red-eyed.
In September 2015, India's Bell Ring Company was established, which announced the launch of a "world's cheapest smartphone" Freedom 251, priced at about 500 rupees, equivalent to 50 yuan.
A smartphone of 50 yuan is absolutely second to Xiaomi's 1999 yuan in price. It seems that Indian mobile phone manufacturers will also adopt Xiaomi's strategy, occupy the market through low prices, and then enter the high-end.
At that time, the Indian media attached great importance to this mobile phone, directly equating the Freedom 251 with Xiaomi, and some media even began to compare with Apple mobile phone parameters.
The comparison method of Indians is also very strange, their own mobile phone pixels are 5 million, the price is 50 yuan, then you sell 500 yuan of mobile phone, the pixel must reach 50 million, otherwise the Indian mobile phone wins.
This way of comparison, even the iPhone lost. However, in fact, India's own brands simply cannot get the market, and under the attack of Xiaomi, OPPO and Samsung, India's four major brands have lost.
Xiaomi unexpectedly became the number one mobile phone manufacturer in the Indian market.
It can be said that India has lost the competition for smartphones. But India doesn't think so, so Modi has taken some unacceptable actions.
In April 2022, India made a black hand on Xiaomi, freezing Xiaomi's deposits of more than 50 billion rupees, equivalent to 4.8 billion yuan, which are deposits of real money in India.
4.8 billion is definitely a huge amount of money for Xiaomi, because Xiaomi relies on cost-effectiveness, relying on volume to win enterprises, the profit margin is very low.
Despite Lei Jun's repeated explanations, India was unmoved and directly seized the money on the charge of money laundering. It really responds to the saying "India makes money Indianization, and I want to take it home."
In fact, speaking of which, Xiaomi is also responsible. Knowing that the Indians do not talk about martial virtue, they still have to build factories in India, build them, and build 7 in one go.
You have pressed your whole net worth into India, will India still be polite to you?
Don't say what solves 20,000 jobs, even if you solve 200,000 or 2 million jobs, India will not be polite to you, because this is the Indian style.
Many netizens said that the disaster is divided into several levels: mild, moderate, severe, Indian. It is clear that Xiaomi has suffered an unprecedented catastrophe.
Xiaomi has solved a large number of jobs in India and trained many technical talents for India, so that India has the opportunity and ability to manufacture iPhones for Apple.
Now many netizens use a batch of iPhone 15 is "made in India", in the eyes of Indians can manufacture mobile phones for Apple, indicating that their own technical level is very high, so the next challenge is a little difficult project - to make chips.
What is the level of Indian chips? You may not believe it very well when you say it.
We all know that chips are mainly divided into two major links: design and manufacturing, and interestingly, India's chips have surpassed the continent and reached the world's lead; And the level of manufacturing is too crotch-pulling, even far behind the mainland.
Although India does not have world-famous chip companies such as ARM, Qualcomm, Intel, and Texas Instruments, the world's top ten IC design companies have carried out a lot of business in India.
India's Bangalore is also one of the world's largest chip design hubs.
As early as 1958, several Texas companies in the United States established design centers in Bangalore, India, which opened up new continents for other overseas companies.
The Indian government also set up the communications and defense research and development center in Class Rohr, and soon this place formed communications, automobiles, home appliances and other industries, and in the 80s, the information technology industry in Bangalore exploded, and it was famous in the software industry.
Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens, Philips, Huawei and other multinational giants have set up R&D centers in Bangalore, which has gradually become a concentration of global software outsourcing and is known as the "Silicon Valley of India".
With fame, it is naturally more attractive to the world's top companies, Broadcom, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, Intel and other top ten chip design companies in the world have set up R&D centers in Class Roll.
Today, 23 of the world's top 25 semiconductor suppliers have a significant presence in India. Half of the world's top 400 IC design companies have established in Bangalore.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Sethia Nader are Indian, Intel, Nvidia, Google A large number of executives, engineers are also Indian.
Apple's bionic chip, known as the world's most advanced mobile phone processor, is also inseparable from engineers in Bangalore.
These are enough to prove that India is very powerful in the field of chip design, and we must not take it lightly and blindly think that India can do nothing.
India is really pulling its crotch in the field of chip manufacturing.
In fact, when India developed chip design, it also realized the importance of chip manufacturing, but many plans were stranded because of economic problems.
In 2012, India's economy improved, the national treasury was abundant, so the chip manufacturing plan was launched, and it was naturally easy to do things with funds, and in recent years, some Indian chip companies began to emerge on the international stage.
For example, India's CC is an analog signal IP supplier, the company once wanted to enter the chip manufacturing field, but was acquired by the United States Songteng Electronics during the financial crisis, and finally failed to achieve the ideal.
Some startups have tried to get involved in the wafer manufacturing field, and although they have obtained a large number of technologies and patents, wafer manufacturing is an expensive project, and the funds are not available, and they simply cannot succeed.
Let's take TSMC as an example, the 5nm fab in Arizona invested 12 billion US dollars, equivalent to 87.7 billion yuan. 3nm fab, investment of 25 billion US dollars, equivalent to 182.7 billion yuan.
This cost is really not affordable for ordinary companies, is it that the price of the fab with mature process will be low?
SMIC has built four mature process fabs in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen, with a total production capacity of 350,000 wafers per month, and invested 150 billion yuan, with an average cost of 37.5 billion yuan per factory.
You think that's the end of it? Of course not!
Chip manufacturing is a typical power consumer and large drafter. Once the EUV lithography machine is started, it consumes 30,000 kWh of electricity a day and requires a large amount of ultrapure water to clean the wafer.
In addition, the fab also needs hundreds of supporting equipment, including lithography machines, etching machines, thin film deposition equipment, ion implanters, cleaning machines, cutting machines and so on.
High-end lithography mobile is more than a billion, and the price of other equipment is also ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan. These devices are a big expense.
Therefore, to engage in chip manufacturing, you must first have a sufficient budget, and don't think about it without tens of billions. This is also a key problem stuck in Indian chip manufacturing.
What's more, the lack of electricity and fresh water supply in Bangalore, and the local government's concern that wastewater and waste residue will affect the environment, have jointly curbed the development of India's chip manufacturing industry.
Now, in order to develop the chip manufacturing industry, India has introduced Micron. If you want to expand your industry with the help of a third party, is this solution feasible?
First of all, the Modi government must come up with enough subsidies and a huge market to retain Micron, otherwise it will be difficult for Micron to form an industry in the case of shortages of electricity, fresh water and skilled workers.
At the same time, India must also improve its own industrial chain and form a certain scale in chip equipment and semiconductor materials, otherwise even if the factory barely starts, it will stop work due to lack of equipment and materials.
In general, India still has many shortcomings to make up in the field of chip manufacturing, and the United States will not open all technologies and patents to India, and it will always leave a few trump cards in its hands.
As for the impact on domestic chips, it can be said that the current impact is not large, but there are still variables in the future.
Domestic chips have formed a whole industrial chain of design, manufacturing, packaging and supporting EDA, equipment and semiconductor materials, and the country's annual investment of trillions is naturally immediate.
Domestic chips can achieve breakthroughs under the blockade of the United States and manufacture chips such as Kirin 9000S, which is enough to prove that domestic chips are resilient and have unlimited development prospects.
But we should not be complacent and look down on Indian chips. After all, India is also a huge market with a population of 1.4 billion, as long as India is determined, then the probability of Indian chip success is also very large.
What do you think?
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