Electronics industry to set up 3 chip design centres

In a bid to step up the availability of skilled human resources and support structure for start-ups, the electronics and semiconductor industry is to set up 60 academic centres in 12 states and three Chip Design Centres.

Christened NETRA (National ESDM Technology Research Academy), these academic centres would work on the hub-and-spoke model. “Each state would have a hub centre that will be connected to four spoke campuses. We will pick an academic institution to run the campus. We will help the colleges to include these aspects in their curriculum,” K Krishna Moorthy, Chairman of IESA (India Electronics and Semiconductor Association), said.

“In the first phase, these centres would come up in states such as Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh this year. The remaining will be opened in the following year,” he said.

He was here to launch the Hyderabad chapter of the association on Thursday. The association, which has chapters in Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai, would open a chapter in Pune soon. The association represents over 300 firms with a combined turnover of $100 billion.

Krishna Moorthy said the country consumed $100 billion worth of electronics goods annually, with 70 per cent of them being imports. “This could go up to $400 billion by 2020-23 and could cause huge pressure on imports. We need to build an ecosystem to develop the indigenous industry,” he said.

Chip Design Centres

The IESA will form special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to set up Chip Design Centres in three places in the country with an estimated budget of Rs 35 crore each. “The first of these centres will come up in IIT (Hyderabad). We have identified about 8-10 areas such as energy meters and lighting. If we can design and build products and components in these areas, we can reduce imports to a great extent,” he said.

The start-ups need not be located in the IIT campus. They would be connected to the centre via VPN (virtual private networks).

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