India builds a fuller chip ecosystem

India’s chip push is widening beyond factories that make wafers into a broader supply chain that designs, packages, tests and supports semiconductors. (livemint.com) Under the ₹76,000 crore India Semiconductor Mission, 10 semiconductor projects had been approved with total investment of about ₹1.6 trillion by late 2025, according to government data cited by Mint. Four of those projects — Micron, CG Semi, Tata Electronics’ Assam assembly plant and Kaynes’ OSAT unit — accounted for ₹66,000 crore. (livemint.com) A fab is the plant that prints circuits onto silicon wafers, while OSAT — outsourced semiconductor assembly and test — is the back-end step that cuts, packages and checks chips before shipment. India is now adding both: Tata’s ₹91,000 crore fab in Dholera and Micron’s assembly-and-test plant in Sanand are the clearest examples. (business-standard.com) (investors.micron.com) Micron opened its Sanand, Gujarat assembly-and-test facility on February 28, 2026 and said the first phase includes more than 500,000 square feet of cleanroom space. The company said the site has begun commercial production and expects to assemble and test tens of millions of chips in 2026, scaling to hundreds of millions in 2027. (investors.micron.com) The Dholera project moved again this month. On April 9, 2026, the commerce department notified a special economic zone for Tata Semiconductor Manufacturing’s Gujarat fab, and the government said the 66.16-hectare zone is expected to generate 21,000 jobs. (business-standard.com) The ecosystem is also filling in on the design side, where companies create chip blueprints before any wafer is made. HCLTech says it has more than 25 years in semiconductors, 4,500-plus engineers working for top original equipment makers, and more than 200 tapeouts, the step where a finished chip design is sent to manufacturing. (hcltech.com) MosChip is another example of that layer. The company says it has 1,500-plus engineers, more than 600 silicon tapeouts and five research-and-development centers in India and the United States, positioning it as a domestic design and engineering supplier rather than a fab owner. (moschip.com) State-backed demand is starting to connect with that private manufacturing buildout. Tata Electronics and Bharat Electronics Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding on June 5, 2025 to explore semiconductor fabrication, OSAT and design services for BEL’s needs, including microcontrollers, systems-on-chip and monolithic microwave integrated circuits. (business-standard.com) The HCL Group-Foxconn venture adds another back-end node. Business Standard reported in February 2026 that the ₹3,700 crore OSAT joint venture at Jewar in Uttar Pradesh is planned as India’s first display-driver chip OSAT unit, with first-phase capacity of 20,000 wafers a month and operations expected by 2028. (business-standard.com) India is also changing the industrial plumbing around these projects. The government said in April 2026 that it had reduced the minimum contiguous land requirement for semiconductor and electronics-component special economic zones from 50 hectares to 10 hectares, and that five new zones for those sectors had been notified so far, including Micron, CG Semi and Kaynes. (business-standard.com) That leaves India with a chip strategy that now stretches from design desks to packaging lines to a full-scale fab site. The next test is whether those approved plants move from groundbreaking and pilot runs into steady commercial output over 2026 and 2027. (livemint.com) (investors.micron.com)