India's entry into semiconductor manufacturing presents an opportunity that goes far beyond building fabrication plants, importing machinery or obtaining technology licences. The real opportunity is to develop a generation of Indians who can understand, operate, maintain, adapt and eventually advance the technologies that underpin modern computing.
A technology transfer can give India access to a manufacturing process. It cannot automatically transfer decades of accumulated engineering experience, the ability to solve unfamiliar problems, or the institutional knowledge required to develop the next generation of technology.
India must therefore pursue two objectives together: acquire technology from wherever possible, and grow the people capable of using that technology independently.
The technology is only half the equation
India's semiconductor ambitions naturally focus on fabrication plants, process nodes, investment and manufacturing capacity. These are essential, but a fab is only one component of a much larger technological ecosystem.
A functioning semiconductor industry requires chip designers, computer architects, verification engineers, electrical engineers, materials scientists, chemical engineers, equipment specialists, manufacturing technicians, software developers and technical programme managers.
It also requires people who can connect these disciplines. A chip design must be translated into a physical layout, manufactured using carefully controlled processes, tested, packaged and integrated with firmware, drivers, operating systems and applications. Every transition introduces problems that must be understood and solved.
A country may import advanced equipment and license a manufacturing process, yet remain dependent on foreign specialists if it has not developed enough people who understand how the entire system works.
The objective should not be to avoid foreign technology. It should be to ensure that every technology partnership increases India's ability to understand, maintain and improve what it acquires.
Use the global open-technology movement as a training ground
India does not need to recreate every technological foundation independently. Europe and the United States already support extensive ecosystems of open-source software, open hardware, research collaborations and reusable engineering tools.
European initiatives provide particularly relevant examples.
TRISTAN is working to mature and industrialise an open RISC-V ecosystem, including processor building blocks, verification, electronic design automation and supporting software. ISOLDE and RIGOLETTO contribute to the wider European open-hardware landscape, including work on automotive computing platforms. These initiatives create opportunities to study real engineering practices and contribute to reusable technical foundations.
The European Unified RISC-V IP Access Platform also brings together hardware components from multiple projects, making it easier for researchers and companies to discover and reuse existing designs rather than repeatedly starting from scratch.
India should actively encourage its students, researchers and companies to participate in these international projects, alongside established American open-source software and hardware initiatives.
The principle is straightforward: do not build from zero when the world already offers a foundation that can be studied, tested, improved and reused.
Participation must, of course, respect each project's eligibility requirements, intellectual-property rights, export controls and licensing conditions. Not every project is fully open, and not every component is available for unrestricted commercial use. These constraints should be understood before students or institutions commit to a project.
Give practical technical contributions academic value
One way to make this participation widespread would be to introduce an Open Technology Experience Credit within Indian technical education.
Universities, engineering colleges, polytechnics and technical institutes could recognise verified contributions to approved international open-source and open-hardware projects as part of internships, laboratory work, research credits and final-year projects.
A student should not receive credit merely for creating an account, attending a workshop or collecting a certificate. The credit should reflect demonstrable work.
Examples include:
- Developing or improving a compiler, driver, firmware component or software library.
- Writing verification tests for a processor core or hardware interface.
- Improving the documentation and reproducibility of an electronic design automation tool.
- Building and testing an FPGA prototype.
- Contributing to an open processor design or a reusable hardware IP block.
- Investigating materials, manufacturing processes, equipment reliability or testing methods through supervised research.
- Developing automated testing systems, measurement tools or manufacturing data pipelines.
- Coordinating a multidisciplinary project and demonstrating that its technical components work together.
Contributions should be reviewed by experienced maintainers, researchers or industry engineers. Assessment should reward correctness, documentation, testing, collaboration and learning rather than simply counting lines of code or commits.
This would create a bridge between classroom education and the engineering practices used in actual industrial projects.
Grow the entire technical workforce, not just IT engineers
The semiconductor industry is often discussed as if it were primarily an extension of software engineering. Software is important, but the physical manufacturing process depends on many other disciplines.
Computer science students can work on operating systems, compilers, development tools, simulation and firmware. Electronics students can explore circuit design, digital logic, verification, signal integrity and FPGA implementation.
Materials and chemical engineering students can investigate substrates, photoresists, deposition, etching, cleaning, contamination control and process reliability. Electrical and mechanical engineers can work on power delivery, thermal management, precision equipment, sensors and automation.
Manufacturing technicians and diploma holders can develop expertise in equipment operation, maintenance, process monitoring, inspection and quality control. Technical managers can learn how to coordinate design teams, research institutions, equipment suppliers and fabrication facilities.
These are not separate talent pipelines that should remain isolated. They must learn to work together.
A semiconductor product succeeds when the design, manufacturing process, software and physical system function as a whole. India's education system should create more opportunities for students from different disciplines to work on shared projects, using common technical objectives and measurable outcomes.
Move from software to physical silicon
An open-source contribution is valuable, but the larger opportunity emerges when people can follow their work into physical products.
Students who develop processor designs should be able to progress towards simulation, verification, FPGA prototypes, physical implementation, fabrication, packaging and post-silicon testing.
India already has a foundation on which to build. The government's Chips to Startup programme has supported chip-design education, access to design tools, shared fabrication services and student-designed chips. A January 2026 government update reported that more than one lakh individuals had enrolled in chip-design training, approximately 67,000 had been trained, and 56 student-designed chips had been fabricated, packaged and delivered through the programme's reported activities.
These are meaningful foundations. The next step is to connect such initiatives more systematically with international open-hardware projects, industrial internships, research collaborations and actual manufacturing programmes.
A student who begins by writing a verification test for an open processor should have a route towards working on the processor's physical implementation. A materials engineering student should have a route from laboratory research into process engineering. A firmware developer should be able to work with the hardware team to diagnose problems discovered after fabrication.
The aim is to create a continuous learning pathway from foundational knowledge to practical engineering and, ultimately, independent innovation.
Acquire technology while building the capacity to improve it
International technology partnerships remain essential. India should pursue licensing, joint research, training and technology access from willing partners across Europe, Japan, South Korea, the United States and elsewhere.
But every agreement should be evaluated against a broader question: what will Indian engineers be able to do after the agreement that they could not do before it?
A successful partnership should include opportunities for Indian specialists to participate in design, process integration, testing, reliability engineering, equipment support and manufacturing improvement. Where commercially and legally feasible, it should also create pathways for local research and progressively greater domestic capability.
The same principle applies to mature and advanced semiconductor processes. India can begin with technologies that are commercially accessible today while investing in the people and institutions needed to advance towards more sophisticated manufacturing.
It does not need to wait for the most advanced process node before developing world-class engineering expertise.
Keep the technological commons alive
Open-source software and hardware can accelerate this process because shared foundations allow many teams to learn from one another. However, these foundations require continued maintenance.
A project may produce an excellent processor design, firmware library or development tool and still lose momentum when its principal maintainers move on. Without documentation, testing, funding and a succession of contributors, valuable engineering work can become difficult to use.
India should therefore support not only the creation of new projects but also the long-term stewardship of existing ones. This includes funding maintainers, supporting documentation, improving verification, providing test infrastructure and helping promising projects mature into reliable engineering resources.
Commercial companies can then build differentiated products on top of these shared foundations. Their proprietary innovations need not all be open, provided that the underlying licences and interfaces permit the intended forms of reuse.
The objective is to create a sustainable relationship between the commons and commercial innovation: shared foundations enable more participants to innovate, commercial products create economic value, and continued stewardship ensures that the foundations remain useful.
A million opportunities for hands-on experience
India should consider a long-term ambition of giving at least one million people meaningful opportunities to participate in real technical projects across open software, hardware design, semiconductor research, manufacturing and systems integration.
This should not mean one million people completing the same semiconductor course. It should mean a broad network of practical learning opportunities, appropriate to different educational backgrounds and levels of expertise.
Some participants will become chip architects. Others will specialise in materials, chemicals, process engineering, equipment maintenance, verification, firmware, operating systems or technical programme management. Many will contribute to the software and hardware infrastructure that makes semiconductor development more efficient.
The programme should be judged by what participants can actually do, the quality of their contributions, their progression into more demanding work, and the ability of Indian organisations to retain and develop their expertise.
A million certificates would prove little. A million genuine opportunities to learn through practical work could help transform the country's technical workforce.
The real measure of semiconductor success
India should not measure its semiconductor future only by the number of fabrication plants it builds, the amount of investment it attracts or the smallest process node it can manufacture.
It should also measure how many people can design, verify, manufacture, test, maintain and improve the technology inside those facilities.
A fab can be built with sufficient capital, equipment and external expertise. The accumulated engineering judgement required to operate it efficiently and develop the next generation of processes takes sustained effort to cultivate.
India's opportunity is to combine international technology access with grassroots technical enablement. The global open-software and open-hardware movement can provide a practical learning ground, while domestic research institutions, manufacturers and industrial partnerships can connect that experience to physical products.
The objective is not to make India independent of every foreign supplier. It is to ensure that India becomes increasingly capable of understanding, adapting and advancing the technologies on which it depends.
Technology transfer gives India access to today's capabilities. People give India the ability to use those capabilities. A sustained culture of learning, research and engineering gives India the chance to create tomorrow's capabilities itself.
That is the investment that can outlast any single fab, technology licence or semiconductor generation.
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