(HT)
The Union cabinet on Wednesday approved a new semiconductor manufacturing facility, a joint venture between India’s HCL and Taiwan’s Foxconn, which will come up in Jewar, Uttar Pradesh, Union Information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said.
Vaishnaw said the facility will be near Jewar airport, an “up and coming area” within the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) region.
This is the sixth semiconductor unit being planned in the country under the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) and is slated to begin commercial production in 2027. It will serve as an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT)facility for display driver integrated circuits (ICs).
This is Foxconn’s second attempt to set up a semiconductor unit under the ISM. In 2023, the Taiwan-based company had teamed up with Vedanta, but the partnership ultimately fell through.
“HCL has a very long history of manufacturing electronics and computers,” the minister said, adding that the new unit will use wafer-level packaging technology, specifically tailored for assembling display driver chips.
“Once the display driver ICs get properly assembled here, then the display panel plant will also come to India,” Vaishnaw said. The facility is expected to cost ₹3,706, said Vaishnaw. It wasn’t disclosed how this investment will be split between HCL and Foxconn.
The two companies could not be reached for comments. In January 2024, the two companies had announced their joint venture to build the facility.
The facility will assemble display driver chips, which are a small but important part in electronic devices that control how images, videos, and graphics appear on a screen. They are used in devices such as phones, laptops, and computers.
“The plant is designed for 20,000 wafers per month. The design output capacity is 36 million units per month,” a government statement said.
The minister said the Foxconn-HCL facility was expected to cater to 40% of India’s domestic demand for display driver chips, and support Foxconn’s global supply chain needs.
Over the past decade, the country’s electronics manufacturing output has grown five-fold, according to government data. With the addition of this unit under the ISM, the government moves a step closer to its goal of increasing value addition in electronics from the current 20% to over 35% by 2030, a target the minister has repeated on multiple occasions. He did not indicate when the next phase of the mission, dubbed ‘ISM 2.0’ would be launched, insisting that government’s focus was on execution of current projects.
