Applied Materials invests $50mn in Bengaluru R&D facility

BENAGLURU: Applied Materials has invested $50 million to set up a research and development (R&D) facility in Bengaluru. The facility will be used by the company to extend support to its local supply chain, Applied Materials said at the SemiconIndia 2022 event on Friday.

The investment, which was completed in April this year, will help the company build new equipment to facilitate chip manufacturing in India. According to the company, India has been Applied Materials’ second largest market for engineering support services, and it now intends to expand its India operations with the R&D hub.

“In the coming years, we intend to expand our infrastructure and to build a lab, followed by a campus around it. The lab is the missing piece in India, as we already have a lot of engineers,” said Srinivas Satya, country president and managing director, Applied Materials India.

Explaining how the facility can help add to the company’s portfolio, Satya added, “Every two years the node of the performance of the chips has been increasing, and the power consumption has reduced as well. So almost every two years there is a new node or new technology that our customers adopt.”

He said that the demand for AI-specific chips, which enable application-specific integration, has risen. Automobiles and sensors for the Internet of Things (IoT), which include smart appliances and connected infrastructure for industrial applications, have also helped increase demand for such chips, which the new R&D facility will seek to fulfil.

According to a recent report by the Indian Electronics and Semiconductors Association (IESA), the Indian semiconductor industry could account for $85-100 billion of an estimated global opportunity worth $550-$600 billion by 2030.

Rajeev Khushu, chairman of IESA, had said that given this scope of business, a larger number of display and semiconductor-related facilities, such as the one announced by Applied Materials today, would come up in the country.

Satya also added that the R&D facility will be built over the next five years. “We will first need to get the lab infrastructure done. As customers and suppliers come up, we really want to have the necessary infrastructure to enable that part,” he said.