IBM quit semiconductor manufacture but continued R&D in the area. It made money by licensing the know-how. Maybe India can find a small niche like that. This is an industry that requires PhDs to sit in the lab and debug problems. Even if we produce those PhDs, we will most likely lose them to brain-flight. This is a brutally competitive industry that requires protection, stealth subsidies and guarantees from govt.
"In a sense, India has lost an entire generation of mechanical engineers (and civil engineers) because they were all absorbed by the IT industry to do offshored services work"
Not just engineers, even estate owners in Chikmagalur left their estates and moved to cities and eventually settled abroad due to IT jobs. Kerala evangelicals moved in. Tragedy, indeed.
well, taiwan jump-started its semiconductor industry by setting up hsinchu tech park and luring away expats from the US chip industry. they have now made them world-beaters. is this possible for India? can we lure back the indian expats? even more to the point, can we put in the infrastructure to make it worthwhile for them, and for indians who chose not to migrate, to do good work?
the design niche is fine: RISC-V will enable us to design more chips, and of course the case of ARM which dominates fabless chip design is before us. but that still doesn't obviate the need for a physical fab or two, especially for national security reasons: we HAVE to build our defense-related chips in India. can't import them.
Our noisy, polluted, 'superstar' cities are a big turn off for returning expats. We should identify a few small towns that are clean, green and away from the din. Like the way New Mexico was chosen for Sandia National Labs.
A single-core RISC-V CPU can be built by hobbyists. It actually started as a college project at UC Berkeley. The high-performance versions can be challenging but entirely within India's capability.
IBM quit semiconductor manufacture but continued R&D in the area. It made money by licensing the know-how. Maybe India can find a small niche like that. This is an industry that requires PhDs to sit in the lab and debug problems. Even if we produce those PhDs, we will most likely lose them to brain-flight. This is a brutally competitive industry that requires protection, stealth subsidies and guarantees from govt.
"In a sense, India has lost an entire generation of mechanical engineers (and civil engineers) because they were all absorbed by the IT industry to do offshored services work"
Not just engineers, even estate owners in Chikmagalur left their estates and moved to cities and eventually settled abroad due to IT jobs. Kerala evangelicals moved in. Tragedy, indeed.
well, taiwan jump-started its semiconductor industry by setting up hsinchu tech park and luring away expats from the US chip industry. they have now made them world-beaters. is this possible for India? can we lure back the indian expats? even more to the point, can we put in the infrastructure to make it worthwhile for them, and for indians who chose not to migrate, to do good work?
the design niche is fine: RISC-V will enable us to design more chips, and of course the case of ARM which dominates fabless chip design is before us. but that still doesn't obviate the need for a physical fab or two, especially for national security reasons: we HAVE to build our defense-related chips in India. can't import them.
Our noisy, polluted, 'superstar' cities are a big turn off for returning expats. We should identify a few small towns that are clean, green and away from the din. Like the way New Mexico was chosen for Sandia National Labs.
A single-core RISC-V CPU can be built by hobbyists. It actually started as a college project at UC Berkeley. The high-performance versions can be challenging but entirely within India's capability.