Eight IIT student-designed chipsets dispatched to fabs: IT Minister Vaishnaw

Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) students have designed 20 chipsets and eight of them have already been "taped out" and dispatched to international foundries and the Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali for fabrication, IT and electronics minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.

Addressing the 14th convocation ceremony of IIT-Hyderabad, Vaishnaw also reaffirmed that the first made in India commercial-scale semiconductor chip would be constructed this year.

IIT students have developed the chipsets using tools available under the government's India Semiconductor Mission.

A chip is a single semiconductor material piece, usually silicon, onto which an electronic circuit is engraved while a chipset is a collection of interconnected chips that will work as a team to control and guide the data flow between the processor, memory, storage, and other peripherals within a computing machine. Taping out is finishing the design process prior to shipping to a manufacturing plant or foundry to have a fabrication.

India currently has six approved or in-development semiconductor fabrication facilities (fabs) as of July 2025. The Semi-Conductor Laboratory, which is government-owned and established in 1976, continues to operate but only at legacy technology nodes.

"The manner in which we are entering the capital equipment and material building to produce semiconductors, India will be among the top-5 semiconductor countries in the next few years," Vaishnaw said.

He attributed the boom in research on semiconductors to the government offering the newest electronic design automation tools (EDA) to 270 colleges and 70 startups. A total of 700 students at IIT-Hyderabad worked with these tools for a total 300,000 hours in the last half-year, the minister stated.

The Centre's open-source artificial intelligence resources platform, AIKosh, now has 880 data sets and 200-plus models available, he said.

India's exports of electronics have crossed $40 billion, an eight-fold growth over 11 years. "In 11 years, we have raised our electronics production six times. That is a double digit CAGR, which any company would be jealous of," he said.