India is prepared to launch its ambitious chip-to-startup (C2S) initiative to become a worldwide semiconductor hotspot after announcing the Rs 76,000 crore fabrication incentive plan. IIT Bhubaneswar is one of 104 institutions and companies nationwide that have been chosen for the programme, which intends to produce 85,000 PhD, MTech, and BTech-level qualified technocrats in the next five years.

Nishit Gupta, director (technology) of the India Semiconductor Mission, said that the Ministry of Electronics and Information (MeitY) will soon publish the list of universities that have been selected for the project at the precursor activities before the G20 Education Working Group summit here on Sunday.  

Under its C2S programme, MeitY last year invited applications from academic institutions, R&D facilities, startup businesses, and MSMEs in an effort to train highly competent engineers in the fields of extremely large-scale integration and embedded system design.

Over the course of five years, the plan would produce 175 application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), 20 system-on-chip (SoC) operational prototypes, and IP core repositories. By fostering a culture of SoC and system-level design at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels and acting as a catalyst for the expansion of start-ups engaged in fabless design, according to Gupta, the programme will be a step towards leapfrogging in the field of electronics system design and manufacturing (ESDM).

The list of 104 groups, including 13 startups, has been suggested by the selection committee to be a part of the initiative. Final clearances are still awaiting from the ministry. I'm hoping the list will be authorised in the coming days. The infrastructure for designing and fabricating chips will be made available to all of the chosen institutions, he said. A few more colleges are on the provisional list, despite the fact that Union E&IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had previously named IIT Bhubaneswar as one of the institutes to manage a project under the C2S initiative for chip creation and manufacture.

The research teams at IIT-BBS, according to director Shreepad Karmalkar, are already hard at work developing low-power integrated circuits (IC) for IoT-based sensing, monitoring, and wireless devices.  The first batch of integrated circuits was successfully manufactured. According to him, the C2S plan would provide the much-needed impetus and contribute in the realisation of the dream of a semiconductor hub.