India, Taiwan to forge ties on chip making

Taiwan's chief scientific advisor is visiting India in early June to discuss details on how best the two counties can leverage their mutual strengths and the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) is working towards forging a strong partnership with the Taiwanese semiconductor industry.

S Janakiraman, vice-chairperson, ISA outlining the initiatives said: "Taiwan is pretty strong in the semiconductor design and manufacturing. India has strength in semiconductor design and software. These inherent strengths have to be tapped to broaden the scope of this industry. This is the kind of pacts which we are working on at ISA," he added.

"Increasingly, semiconductor design is driven by value-adds on to a device and software is the differentiator for this. Innovation is the key for this and ISA is taking up the initiative in this regard in a big way," Janakiraman noted.

The consumer electronics market is exploding in India and so is the kind of content that has to be served to the audience, which will give rise to demand in set-top boxes and a host of devices.

"We require to generate talent for this. Now we have close to 80,000 people in this industry but given the growth of this sector, we need around 3.5 lakh people to cater to this market. We are engaging with the universities on a large scale to generate graduate training in various electronic design automation tools," Janakiraman highlighted.