Tata Electronics: Lam to open office at Tata Electronics’ Dholera chip fab

When Tata Electronics completes building India’s first semiconductor fabrication facility in Dholera, Gujarat, in partnership with Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), Lam Research India will set up an office there and support it, said a senior executive of the local arm of the US-based supplier of wafer fabrication equipment.

The facility will have a manufacturing capacity of up to 50,000 wafers per month. The Semiverse, Lam Research India’s virtual fab is actively used by all its customers and fabs around the world for simulation of their fab processes.

Rangesh Raghavan, corporate vice president and general manager, Lam Research India, told ET, in an exclusive interview, “We have engineering centres in the US, in California and Oregon, in Villach, Austria, and in Bengaluru, India. In terms of technology close to our customer, we have centres all over, wherever our customers are. So, if the Tatas complete the fab in Dholera, we’ll have an office there in Dholera and support them as well. We won’t support them from here in Bengaluru. Customers need immediate access.”
Lam Research India already works with PSMC.

“PSMC has many of our equipment. We work closely with them. In fact, when the Tata fab comes up, there will be teams from Lam, PSMC, and the Tatas that will be collaborating,” Raghavan said.

Each wafer run can cost $10,000, he said, adding, “If one must do 600 experiments, it could cost you $6 million to get the data you need to decide. With Semiverse, I can simulate all those 600 conditions, and I can identify the 20 conditions where I’m likely to find a solution. This will reduce the cost of experimentation… Tatas will see the value.”

The company has been in India for 24 years. “Eighty percent of our revenues come from Asia,” said Raghavan. “Our India centre is much better aligned to serve our customers than US centres. There is no product at LAM that is not touched by an Indian team. Every product, in some way, shape or form, is made by an Indian team. The Indian team is the largest team outside the US.”

Reflecting on the supply chain disruptions caused in the semiconductor industry during the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, “Interestingly, we also need chips for our machines. Our customers wanted our machines to make chips, but they couldn’t give us chips to make our machines… For a while, we also had a chip shortage that caused us to not be able to ship machines on time.”

“We’ve always believed in a globally diversified ecosystem. No country can do it all. We’ve never been dependent on any one country,” Raghavan said.