GoI democratizing chip design among Indian Universities with access to industry-grade EDA tools and MPW fab services

Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, handed over 28 chips fabricated at Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL) Mohali, including 600 bare dies and 600 packaged chips, by students from 17 academic institutions under the Chips to Start-up (C2S) Program. 

The chip handover ceremony was organized during his visit to the Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL), Mohali, to review the progress of work and ongoing modernization activities.

During the ceremony, the Minister stated that India is rapidly emerging as a distinctive leader in the global semiconductor landscape. Today, institutions across the country have access to some of the world’s most advanced design technologies, creating a large-scale semiconductor development ecosystem that is unique to India. The following image details out the number of organizations supported with EDA tools in different states of the country:

Director General, SCL and the team gave a detailed presentation on the chip design and fabrication process adopted under C2S Program leveraging SCL and ChipIN Centre collaborative approach under C2S Program, on this occasion.

ChipIN Center
ChipIN Center, one of the largest facilities established at C-DAC Bangalore, offers an extensive range of semiconductor design workflows and solutions, striving to bring national chip design infrastructure directly to the semiconductor design community across the country. It is a centralized facility which hosts the most advanced tools for the entire chip design cycle.

It also offers compute and hardware infrastructure, IP cores, and mentorship to provide comprehensive services for design fabrication at the SCL foundry and packaging to academic institutions under C2S (Chips to Start-up) Program of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

The ChipIN Center collects chip designs created by students from C2S Programme institutions. Every three months, these designs are grouped together and sent to SCL Mohali for fabrication using 180nm technology. The ChipIN Center conducts fab-compliance checks, working closely with students and institutions through iterative feedback and design revisions. 

Once approved, the designs are combined onto a single mask (MPW reticle) by ChipIN Center, which saves both time and cost by manufacturing multiple designs in a single run. SCL Mohali then fabricates, packages, and delivers the chips back to the students.

In the past year, ChipIN Centre organized five such MPW shuttle runs for fabrication of designs at SCL under C2S Programme. A total of 122 designs were submitted by 46 institutions across India. Out of these, SCL has successfully fabricated 56 student-designed chips and delivered them to the respective institutions.

With five shuttles successfully concluded in past one year for SCL Mohali, ChipIN Center is rapidly advancing its capability to act as value chain aggregator (VCA) for advance nodes too. During these design tapeouts and related teaching, instruction, and research activities at supported institutions, over 1 lakh students from participating institutions used more than 125 lakh hours of EDA tools. 

In addition, the ChipIN Center is supporting over 90 startups, which used about 50 lakh hours of EDA tools during the same period. This brings the total EDA tool usage to more than 175 lakh hours, making it one of the world’s largest centralized chip-design user facilities. Following is the State-wise EDA tools usage at various academic institutions:

During the ceremony, Ashwini Vaishnaw mentioned that this progress reflects the expansive vision of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, whose directive is clear: India must build capabilities of such scale and strength that, within the next few years, the nation establishes itself as a major global semiconductor power.

He also mentioned that the aim is to ensure that we do not depend on anyone else for our strategic needs and to become self-reliant in our strategic sectors and to use indigenous chips. In this strategy, SCL will play a very significant role.