Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

India is following the Chinese model of starting off in Memory Fabrication and Packaging to build up Fab infrastructure.

There's a similarly sized Packaging plant opening in Assam in Northeast India, and India is working with Tower Semiconductors to restart the SCL Fab in Chandigarh, which back in the 1980s used to sell Intel knockoffs to the Soviet and Indian defense industries before it was burned down during the Khalistan insurgency.

It doesn't hurt that the ministers leading India's semiconductor strategy was part of the team that designed and fabricated the Intel i486 in the 1980s-90s [0] and managed GE Transportation and Siemens Transportation in India [1]

At least India already has a very strong Hardware and Chip Design base, as most companies do Semiconductor Design in India already, and have been since TI opened their office in Bangalore in the early 1980s, and most EDA software is coded in the India offices of Synopsys, Cadence, Ansys, Siemens, etc.

Edit:

Cool article from the early 1980s about India's initial attempt at chip fabrication - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/economy/story/19831015-se...

Most Indian and Indian American leadership and middle management in the Electronics and Chips industry are alumni of SCL Mohali.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Chandrasekhar

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashwini_Vaishnaw

> SCL Fab in Chandigarh, which back in the 1980s used to sell Intel knockoffs to the Soviet and Indian defense industries before it was burned down during the Khalistan insurgency.

Among other things, they also made a BBC Micro clone called the SCL Unicorn, our school had half a dozen of them and they were always in popular demand with us computer nerds.

I'll let the team know. I know the uncles who worked on that!

The entire old school SCL and DRDO Chandigarh community emigrated to the US in the 1990s.

There is a digital artist who does live show effects for some of the largest bands in the world, he got his start learning 3D programming as a teen on the Unicorns in the BBC's excellent structured BASIC.

What their name?

Rather not mention their name here without their permission, sorry! But this is one of the outcomes[1]

1. https://www.disguise.one/

No worries! This is really dope actually! Def letting the uncles know!

They'll have a blast talking about this over Glenmorangie, Chicken 65, and Punjabi backchodi

Well it is high time the world's most populated country has some capability in sophisticated industries. I hope the market exists to justify this.

I wonder how long it will take even say China to reach the likes of Intel/AMD forget about NVIDIA for now ? Or have they already ?

> Or have they already ?

On the Fabrication front, domestic fabrication capacity by Chinese firms like SMIC is comparable to Intel in the late 2000s-mid 2010s (aka good enough for most usecases - an Nvidia Maxwell GPU or Intel Sandy Bridge CPU can hypothetically be fabricated using purely Chinese tooling).

The Chinese government did a massive subsidy dump like India is doing today in the late 2000s to try and build this kind of capacity.

Design is not there yet though (but changing rapidly), as EDAs are hard and margins low, so that entire industry got outsourced to India in the 1990s.

> world's most populated country has some capability in sophisticated industries

India does very well in High Precision High Margins sectors such as Pharmaceuticals or purely R&D focused functions like Chip Design or Software Development.

High Precision Low Margins manufacturing was always a shitshow in India due to regulations - you didn't need to deal with headaches like paying of local or state Labor Commissions for breaking labor laws in China in the 1990s or 2000s, as you can work directly with the local CCP apparatus to smooth the way

AMD and NVIDIA are fabless semiconductor companies. In manufacturing, TSMC and SMIC would be more relevant competition.

"The Ascend 910B is widely considered the most competitive non-Nvidia AI chip available in China."

Those chips are produced by SMIC. So they have a competitor not only to Nvidia, but also to TSMC. The biggest break on SMIC growth seems to have been the EUV export emergency break by Pompeo. But it may in the end turn out to be a blessing in disguise for China. The jury is still out on this one.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-chip-demand-forces-hua...

Can you explain what the khalistan movement has to do with it? I just read multiple articles about the 1989 fire and there's nothing that says that

The villages and areas outside of Chandigarh had active guerilla conflicts in the 1987-1995 time period.

When my parents were growing up in Chandigarh back then, there were soldiers at checkpoints at every block and the law and order situation outside of the city was horrible, and bus massacres were very common, for example at this village in the outskirts of Mohali [0][1] (there are way too many to count so I won't even try on here)

There was no point rebuilding after the fire when guerilla warfare was happening 1-2 miles away.

It was dark times and my parents are definetly messed up from that experience.

I recommend watching the art film "Chauthi Koot" to get a feel of those times [2]

[0] - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/1987073...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/04/world/44-slain-in-sikh-hi...

[2] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CBqMc-Kbw

Thats interesting and all, but your comment implied that it had something to do with the SCL lab fire so I was hoping for sources about that.

where does it say in your links that these people were part of the team that designed chips in the 90s ? Are these wrong links maybe ?

Here's Rajeev Chandrashekar's interview with IIT/IllinoisTech which he is an alum of - https://magazine.iit.edu/fall-2012/ahead-curve

Vaishnaw wasn't on the chips side. He's Engineering Management (GE and Siemens and a Wharton grad)

"He was handpicked by Vinod Dham to join Intel and worked there from 1988 to 1991. At Intel he was part of the architectural team that designed the i486 processor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Chandrasekhar

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