IESA moots expansion of fab facility in Chandigarh

India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) on Wednesday said it is working hard to strengthen the electronics manufacturing capability of India by expanding the Chandigarh-based fab facility owned by government of India.

The association has laready submitted a memorandum in this regard to the government, IESA Chairman Ashwini K Aggarwal said.

"Semi-Conductor Laboratory, located in Mohali and under the Department of Space, can help the country to enhance its chip manufacturing capability. IESA had proposed the expansion of the government owned foundry in 2012," he told DH on the sidelines of the two-day IoTNext 2017 summit, organised by IESA in association with The Indus Entrepreneurs, here.

Aggarwal said the Chandigrah facility's capability is confined to certain areas. "We want the government to make some framework policy so that its capacity expansion is expedited on war-footing and it will help India to meet its hardware requirement in the electronics and semiconductor area," he said.

Manufacturing
IESA is also planning to come up with a common manufacturing facility to help startups and other companies in their go to market strategy. "We have already acquired eight acre land in Noida for this project which will be funded by World Bank and Central government," he said.

The association chairman also said the detailed project report (DPR) for the facility has been prepared and the work is underway. "IESA believes that the facility will help in coming up with a comprehensive hardware ecosystem," Aggarwal added.

The event showcased a 100% growth in the 2nd edition of the Start-up IoT Directory, launched with IoTForum. The Directory includes 900 start-ups working in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) across the nation. It has been compiled with support from Nasscom, IoT CoE, IIT Mumbai, SINE, IKP EDEN, Revxx, IoTBLR,T-Hub, Forge and Excubator.

The Directory includes 900 start-ups, working in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) across the nation. It has been compiled with support from Nasscom, IoT CoE, IIT Mumbai, SINE, IKP EDEN, Revxx, IoTBLR,T-Hub, Forge and Excubator.

He also pointed out that the start-up ecosystem in India has already reached great heights and with the support of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics the growth in this space has been exponential.

"Last year, we had about 500 start-ups listed in our directory and now the number has reached to 1000 start-ups in the IoT field, in just one year," he said.

Aggarwal said IESA Innovation Initiative – leveraging Industry CSR and Best-in-class models from the world – is looking at direct industry intervention at academia-incubator-startup level to enable the Indian IoT hardware ecosystem.

"We would like to take this to at least another 100% growth that it is currently witnessing," he said. IESA President Sandeep Garg said the event will delve deep into the new perspectives and fresh thinking on IoT Security.

"The event will showcase innovations at the IoT Hack Fest, with symposiums to discuss and debate leading topics to foster an ecosystem to promote start-ups that develop fabless semiconductor and electronic products especially around connected devices or in the IoT space," said Garg.

He also said the two day event will address key challenges faced by the industry and build strategy for scalable, secure and efficient IoT implementation, by determining which new technologies will drive IoT to the next development stage.

"It will also focus on the start-up ecosystem by upskilling the workforce in the field of IoT with workshops on new technologies like LoRa and Julia Scientific computing," he said.