The Hindu Business Line : Intel inside India in the sixties!

Chennai April 1 After Intel recently announced its intention to build a $2.5 billion semiconductor plant in China, doubts have been aired whether India has missed the chip bus.

Mr Paul Otellini, Intel's president and chief executive officer has been cited in a March 26-dated story on http://news.xinhuanet.com thus: that Intel chose Dalian (a port city in northeast China's Liaoning Province) over a dozen other sites, including cities in Israel and India, because China is Intel's fastest growing market and the cost of production is lower; and that infrastructure, education, adequate power, water and logistics in Dalian were all factors in securing the deal.

One also learns, "It took Intel and the Dalian government three years of negotiations before the deal was sealed."

No tears are being shed in India, because two days after Intel took its chip factory to China, we had Infineon Technologies and Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation announce a $4.5 billion investment to manufacture chips in India.

Only, this may not be the first time that we lost out Intel. Something similar had happened many decades ago. Mr Robert Noyce, the co-inventor of the integrated circuit and cofounder of Intel, had visited India in the sixties. "Mr Noyce spent fifteen days trying to convince the Indian Government to allow Intel to establish a chip company in India," reads a quote of Mr Vinod Dham cited in `Sand to Silicon' by Mr Shivanand Kanavi, a book on `the amazing story of digital technology.' Mr Dham, as you may be aware, joined Intel in the mid-1970s, and led the Pentium project, `the most successful Intel chip to date.'

Mr Noyce's proposal met with rejection from the Indian Government. To Mr Kanavi it seems inexplicable why the government adopted such an attitude towards electronics and computers in general. The book goes on to recount `many horror stories' about how India routinely missed `the microchip bus.' Such as, this tale that Mr Kanavi gleans from Bishnu Pradhan, former chief of C-DOT (Centre for Development of Telematics).

"Prototypes of PCs (personal computers) were being made in India way back in the 1970s. These PCs were as sophisticated as those being developed in the Silicon Valley. But the Indian Government discouraged these attempts on one pretext or another. That is why, while India has supplied chip technologists to other countries, several countries, which were way behind India in the 1960s, are today leagues ahead of us. Taiwan and South Korea are two such examples."

Mr Kanavi rues that a modern fab in the country early on would have given a boost to Indian chip designers. "They could not only have designed chips but also tested their innovative designs by manufacturing in small volumes."

Meanwhile, Mr Noyce, often called Silicon Valley's father, raced ahead. His belief is captured in this quote, cited in `Andy Grove' by Mr Richard S. Tedlow: "Don't be encumbered by history. Go out and do something wonderful."

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