Murugappa Group’s CG Semi opens ‘pilot line’ in Gujarat semiconductor facility

CG Semi, a subsidiary of the Murugappa Group that has received fiscal support from the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), inaugurated a “pilot line” on its semiconductor packaging facility in Sanand, Gujarat, on Thursday. The firm’s ₹7,600 crore project is financed with 50% support from the Union government, in partnership with U.S. semiconductor firm Renesas Electronics, and Thai firm Stars Microelectronics.

This is the first plant among the 10 projects cleared under the ₹76,000-crore ISM to open its pilot line. Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw participated in the inauguration along with Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel. Mr. Vaishnaw said that the pilot line would start producing chips “very soon”.

A pilot line is used to make “qualifying” chips, which are sent to potential customers before full scale manufacturing starts, which at full capacity amounts to millions of individual chips a day. The facility in Sanand will make chips for everything from “refrigerators to automobiles to consumer electronics”, Mr. Vaishnaw said.

The ISM was announced in January 2022, and much of its corpus has already been earmarked for the 10 projects announced under it. IT Ministry officials have signalled that the next phase of the mission would expand on the funding that has so far been made available for establishing and growing the industry. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the IT Ministry’s main semiconductor-focused event, Semicon India, on September 2.

“The pilot line [in Sanand] is an important milestone,” Mr. Vaishnaw said. “It will have a capacity of 5 lakh chips per day, and is a very advanced, state-of-the-art plant … Micron’s plant construction is also going on at a very fast pace,” he added, referring to the assembly, test, marking and packaging (ATMP) facility, also in Sanand, another recipient of ISM backing.

(The author was hosted in Gujarat by CG Semi.)