New Delhi: Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL), India’s only operational chip fabrication plant, can become a crucial resource for strategically important sectors even though a modernization push will not upgrade its legacy chipmaking process to a more cutting-edge standard.
The fab seeks to design, package, fabricate and validate semiconductor chips that can fully indigenize production of electronic equipment for the armed forces and space companies, a capability that “no one else” has today, Kamaljeet Singh, director general of SCL, said in an interview with Mint.
“We are an integrated device manufacturer, which means that we start from designing a chip, and then go through technology readiness levels one through nine to bring a chip to production standard. We offer design, fabrication, packaging and then qualification of the chip for use with customers—and then deliver it to them. So, we offer the full stack of the chipmaking process here in India itself,” Singh said.
This capability could be crucial for national security applications where India’s only option so far was to import equipment.
“One such product that we can indigenize is a thermal vision camera. While India was previously reliant on other countries and had to import everything—even for sensitive equipment to be used in strategic sectors—even then such products were in heavy shortage and allowed only for two or three to be sourced at a time,” Singh said.
SCL, based in Mohali, was approved initially by the Centre in 1976 and operationalized in 1984. It was assigned ₹4,500 crore by the ministry of electronics and IT’s India Semiconductor Mission in November 2025 for a three-year modernization plan, including a large-scale increase in production capacity, targeting 100 times production of wafers from current levels.
On 4 December, three private companies–Tata Semiconductor Manufacturing, Cyient Semiconductor and Applied Materials Singapore–were selected to modernize the plant.
Awaiting approval
However, clearance from the Union Cabinet is pending for approval of the budgetary outlay for SCL’s modernization drive. The finance ministry set aside ₹900 crore for this project in FY27, but until approvals come through, the project cannot begin.
Singh did not elaborate on the timeline for SCL’s modernization to begin. However, he confirmed that its chipmaking process node will not be upgraded to make more sophisticated chips.
The process node of a chip, measured in nanometres, refers to the size of the core chip used in electronics circuits for various products. Typically, smaller chip sizes indicate the highest levels of sophistication. Modern chips in smartphones are 2 nanometres (nm) in size while SCL currently manufactures chips that are 180nm in size.
Singh said the legacy 180nm node remains “strategically important and a lot of products and platforms in the automobile and consumer electronics industries are still built using it.”
More importantly, upgrading the node is a significant cost challenge.
“If you want to bring in a new node such as 90nm or 110nm, the entire machinery has to be changed. This would entail making SCL Mohali upgrade from using 8-inch semiconductor wafers to 12-inch ones. This would need triple the investment for it will need us to use entirely new technologies and completely discard the older processes,” Singh said.
The modernization plan is designed to help SCL do the maximum amount of things at minimal cost. The expansion plan will remove an existing 6-inch wafer production facility and increase the area dedicated to production of 8-inch wafers.
“This will ensure that there will be no closure of the chip fab—work will continue parallelly. If we were to completely bring in a new wafer size and process node, SCL Mohali would need to be closed for at least three to four years,” Singh said.
Small facility
For now, SCL has a chip manufacturing capacity of 600 wafer starts per month (WSPM). WSPM refers to the number of pure silicon wafers that a fab can process and turn into chips.
Comparatively, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest chip fab, has a capacity of 1.4 million WSPM, while Tata Electronics’s upcoming commercial chip fab in Dholera, Gujarat, has a planned capacity of 50,000 WSPM—thereby making SCL Mohali a small facility by volume, at least until its modernization and expansion process is completed.
In the long run, Singh said that SCL’s chip production facility could look to generate commercial revenue, depending on how the Centre utilizes its expanded chipmaking capacity.
“If strategic applications do not need all of the capacity in terms of chip volume, we’ll look to offer commercial services as well. Even last year, we produced 10,000 chips commercially. It generated nominal revenue for us, but we are capable of doing so,” he added.