A worker inspects a circuit board for a smartphone at Dixon Technologies’ Padget Electronics Pvt plant in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021. Dixon boasts a market value of more than $2.5 billion and the ability producing around 50 million smartphones this year. Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Qualcomm is already designing chips in India as it taps into the country’s pool of talented engineers, Qualcomm India’s president said in an exclusive interview.
“We already have chips that are actually designed completely end-to-end in India and we’re shipping them globally,” Savi Soin, president of Qualcomm India, told CNBC.
The American chip giant designs semiconductors and wireless telecommunications products. Qualcomm is best known for its Snapdragon processors that power some of the top Android smartphones around the world.
Like any chip designer, Qualcomm doesn’t make its own chips. On the contrary, this relies on chip makers such as TSMCSamsung Electronics and GlobalFoundries.
“We have more engineers in India now than anywhere else in the world,” Soin said. “We have a lot of engineers here doing integrated chip design.”
The chip design process is “very complex” as it requires “years of R&D, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and thousands of engineers,” he said. Semiconductor Industry Association in a report.
An integral part of the semiconductor manufacturing process, chip design defines the requirements for the chip’s architecture and system, as well as how individual circuits will be placed on the chip.
Qualcomm in January said it was expanding its operations in Chennai with a new design center focused on wireless technology.
The 1.77 billion rupee ($21.3 million) investment will also support Qualcomm’s commitment to the Indian government’s vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India.”
“We saw India 20 years ago as a big center of R&D excellence and a big talent pool. We see India as a big market as [a] big opportunity,” Soin told CNBC’s Sri Jegarajah.
“We are now in discussions with a lot of semiconductor back-ends as well as manufacturing that India is trying to build. Our CEO made a commitment two years ago that if India builds semiconductor manufacturing, we will really help bring the volume to that .” said Soin.
India’s chip
India’s semiconductor ambitions have taken giant strides, with the approval of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government three semiconductor facilities in Gujarat and Assam with investments of more than 15 billion dollars.
“India already has deep capabilities in chip design. With these units, our country will develop capabilities in chip manufacturing. Advanced packaging technologies will be developed indigenously in India,” according to a February 29 government statement.
India wants to become a major chip hub to compete with the US, Taiwan and South Korea and is attracting foreign chipmakers to set up operations in the country. Countries like India stand to benefit as global chipmakers look to diversify operations amid geopolitical uncertainty.
To boost domestic production capacity and exports, India announced worth billions of dollars incentives linked to production to “attract investment” in key sectors and cutting-edge technology as well as make India “an integral part of the global value chain”.
India aims to be one of the world’s top five semiconductor makers in the next five years, Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of electronics and information technology, railways and communications, told CNBC in March.
“What we have seen is – for example, the benefits of PLI – it has certainly brought more and more smartphones to India,” said Soin.
“So we’ve seen good incentives for IT, telecommunications and telecommunications equipment being made here. We’re seeing some discussions around the design elements. So we’re hoping that more and more things, some elements of our products that use our technology, get designed in India,” said Soin.
apple is one of the companies that has diversified some of its manufacturing operations in India amid US-China geopolitical tensions. Apple now assembles about 14 percent of its iPhones in India, double the amount it produced there last year, according to a Bloomberg report.
Google plans to start production of Pixel smartphones in India by Q2, Nikkei Asia mentionted February.