Micron Chips: Leading DRAM manufacturer Micron announced its intentions to begin releasing its first chips made in India starting in 2019 at the recently built Sanand facility in Gujarat. Exports are anticipated by 2025.
Anand Ramamoorthy, the company’s managing director for India, revealed the information to the Economic Times at a separate event where Micron announced partnerships with Indian universities.
Even though the Indian market for semiconductors is growing, it is still small in comparison to the world market.
“No Indian factory will ever produce goods exclusively for the country. It will be a minor portion, with the majority going toward exports. A factory catering to the needs of India’s consumers is a convenience. However, the factory’s transformation into a truly global one in terms of turnaround time, cost structure, and quality says much more, according to Ramamoorthy.
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According to Mint, the Sanand facility primarily serves as a chipset packaging unit, supplying semiconductors for use in automotive, IoT, data centres, smartphones, and notebook applications.
The product offers from soon-to-be domestic chip foundries, including the joint venture between the Tata Group and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, are anticipated to have a significant impact on the local semiconductor market.
Although Micron wants to serve all industries, demand and supply will differ according to inventory levels, lead times, costs, and particular client requirements.
“We need to be extremely quick and nimble. It’s not like a chip we manufacture today has its intended application predetermined in a certain industry. Those particulars can change rapidly. That is our industry’s beauty and challenge, according to Ramamoorthy.
With an initial investment of $825 million (₹6,683 crores), Micron stated in 2023 that it will create a chip production plant in Sanand. The investment is expected to grow to $2.75 billion (₹22,314 crores).
At present, Micron employs 4,000 people in India, or 10% of its total workforce worldwide, spread between research centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad. In the upcoming years, the company hopes to create about 15,000 indirect jobs, and it intends to raise this number to 5,000.
Micron’s R&D staff in India receives training from its US, Japan, and China locations. The company still places a high priority on hiring recent college graduates, who make up 30% of its R&D staff in India.
The intriguing aspect of this situation is that there is a skill shortage everywhere. We frequently claim that India lacks talent. However, that is untrue. This holds for any nation. There is a constant worldwide skills shortage in specialized growing industries like cybersecurity, semiconductors, and others, according to Ramamoorthy.
