India's next bottleneck is people on the fab floor

India's semiconductor workforce is often described with one statistic: the country is home to roughly a fifth of the world's chip design engineers. It is a real strength. It is also a different skill set from the one India's new fabs and assembly plants need most urgently.

Two different workforces

Chip design is done at desks, in software, with skills that overlap with computer science and electrical engineering. India built this workforce over three decades through the design centres of global companies, and it is world-class.

Manufacturing is different. A fab needs process engineers who understand deposition, etch and lithography chemistry; equipment engineers who keep complex tools running; yield and integration engineers who connect data to physics; facilities engineers for ultrapure water, gases and power; and above all technicians who operate and maintain the line around the clock. An assembly and test plant needs packaging, test and reliability engineers and a large technician base. Very few of these people exist in India today in the numbers required.

The scale of the need

A large fab typically employs a few thousand people directly, and its supply chain several times that. OSATs employ large numbers of technicians and operators. With several fabs and assembly plants coming up over a few years, India will need tens of thousands of people with manufacturing skills it has not trained at scale before. The first phase of the India Semiconductor Mission has trained tens of thousands of students and put industry design tools into hundreds of universities. Manufacturing skills are harder to teach in a classroom, because they are learned on a working line.

Design talent can be trained in a classroom. Fab talent is mostly trained in a fab.

How others solved it

• Return talent. Taiwan and Korea drew heavily on engineers who had worked in the United States and returned home with experience. India has a large semiconductor diaspora, much of it in manufacturing roles in the US, Singapore, Taiwan and Europe.
• Training at the partner's fab. New fabs often send engineers to their technology partner's existing fabs for months before start-up.
• Technician programmes. Polytechnics and community colleges near fab clusters run courses designed with the fabs, with cleanroom training facilities.
• Supplier training. Equipment makers train customer engineers on their tools, and local service organisations become a talent pool of their own.

What India can do

1. Train technicians near the clusters. Diploma and certificate programmes in Gujarat, Assam and Uttar Pradesh, designed with the fabs and OSATs and taught partly on real equipment.
2. Bring back experience. Targeted programmes to attract Indian engineers with fab experience abroad, especially for leadership, yield and equipment roles.
3. Use the supply chain as a training ground. Every local supplier and service company that opens is also a place where people learn semiconductor-grade work.
4. Teach fundamentals widely. Short, practical courses on how chips are made help engineers from adjacent industries, and the managers, investors and officials making decisions, understand what they are working with.

Our view

Capital and policy have moved quickly. People will set the pace from here. India's design strength is an asset, but it will not run a fab. The country needs a manufacturing workforce built deliberately, close to where the plants are, and that work should be moving as fast as the construction. Our own Semiconductor 101 series and training programme are a small contribution to it.