Odisha has approved five semiconductor projects worth more than $1.2B, and construction has started on two of them within six to eight months of approval. Vishal Kumar Dev, the state electronics secretary, gave the figures at TiECon Bhubaneswar.
The national mission has cleared a dozen projects, and two are being set up here. Neither is a leading-edge logic fab, which is the point.
A compound fab and a glass substrate plant
SiCSem is building a 3,406 crore plant producing silicon carbide diodes and switching devices, the country’s first compound semiconductor fabrication unit. The material handles voltage and heat better than silicon, and its buyers are electric vehicles, renewables and defence.
ASP Semicon has a 4,620 crore memory module plant in Khordha. US-based 3D Glass Solutions proposed a 1,943 crore facility in partnership with Intel that Dev called India’s first advanced 3D chip packaging site, and Sancode Semi has a 1,650 crore assembly and test unit.
Dev argued the state has an edge in glass-core packaging, which uses glass in place of plastic or silicon as the package base layer, a technology the rest of the industry is only now qualifying.
The import arithmetic behind it
India imports 90 to 95 percent of the chips it uses and spent close to $150B on them between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2025. Of the first phase’s 1.64 lakh crore rupees of approved projects, three have reached commercial output. July brought cabinet approval of a follow-on round, funded at 1,27,500 crore.
Packaging and compound devices need far less capital than a 2nm fab and absorb workers faster, which explains why a state without a logic plant got there first.
