New Delhi, April 12 (IANS) India, which is shifting its stance towards export-led growth in electronics, is currently working on at least 25 chipsets with indigenous intellectual property (IP).

Union Minister for Railways and Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, informed via a media interaction that 13 such projects are currently underway which are led by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bengaluru.

Owning IP ensures security and transforms us from a services nation to a product nation, said the minister, adding that the upcoming semiconductor fabs will manufacture these chips locally.

Towards this goal, the government is in the process of systematic overhaul of semiconductor design approach at more than 300 organisations across the country — including 250 academic institutions and 65 startups.

With graded and proactive steps, these steps aim to debut an era of creative enablement where anyone with innate skills, anywhere in the country can get the semiconductor chips designed, according to the IT Ministry. In the process, chip design will be democratised in line with the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that ‘Design in India is as important as ‘Make in India’.

The ’Chips to Startup’ (C2S) programme aims at addressing each entity of the electronics value chain via specialised manpower training, creation of reusable IPs repository, design of application-oriented systems/ASICs/FPGAs and deployment by academia/R&D organization by way of leveraging the expertise available at startups/MSMEs.

The C2S programme aims to generate 85,000 number of industry-ready manpower at BTech, M.Tech, and PhD levels specialised in semiconductor chip design. The programme takes a comprehensive approach by offering students complete hands-on experience in chip design, fabrication, and testing.

A ‘ChipIN Centre’ has been setup under the C2S programme as one of the largest facilities established at C-DAC, which aims to bring the chip design infrastructure at door-steps of semiconductor design community in the country.

In February, a new Centre of Excellence (CoE) in chip design was inaugurated to address the growing demand for skilled professionals in the semiconductor and chip design industries. The CoE in chip design was launched by the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology’s (NIELIT) at its Noida campus.