India’s DeepTech Decade Needs More Than Funding — It Needs National Fabs

A few days back, Union Electronics & IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav revealed an ambitious ₹4,500 crore plan to revive and upgrade the Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali, Punjab — India’s only government-owned chip fabrication facility. The mission is clear: turn it into the country’s first large-scale, industry-facing tape-out and prototyping facility, primarily for academia and startups.


Chips to Startups

Since 2022, an ambitious programme called Chips to Startup (C2S) has been quietly training 85,000 engineers, funding the design of more than 175 custom ASICs and SoCs, and giving hundreds of academic institutions and startups free access to million-dollar EDA tools and multi-project wafer runs. The goal was simple yet audacious: turn India into a nation of chip designers rather than just chip assemblers.

However, for three years, one big question hung over C2S: “Great designs — but where do we actually fabricate and test them without spending tens of crores of rupees, after waiting in queues in other countries?”

The SCL upgradation means that the 85,000 engineers being trained under the C2S programme no longer have to beg TSMC or GlobalFoundries for expensive shuttle runs. They can, for example, design in Chennai, verify in Guwahati, and tape-out in Mohali — all in India.

This is not just about semiconductors. This is the blueprint India has been missing for four decades.


The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

The IIT Madras Research Park is now an exemplar in industry-academia collaboration: 1.2M sq ft of collaborative space fostering 43 R&D clients, 55 startups, and 5 centres of excellence — since its full launch. Emulating this, there has emerged similar industry-academia collaboration parks: IIT Bombay's SINE, IIT Delhi's FITT, IIT Kanpur's SIIC, and IIT Roorkee's TIDES, etc. All of these are unprecedented and much-needed developments in DeepTech. 

Yet, these parks remain campus-bound and multi-disciplinary, diluting focus in an era where DeepTech demands specialised, scalable infrastructure. 

At the same time, India's startup ecosystem has, rightly, pivoted toward DeepTech. DeepTech startup funding hit $1.6B in 2024,  and is poised to comfortabley overshoot that figure in 2025 (DefTech startup Raphe mPhibr, for example, garnered $100M in a single round this year). DeepTech funding is projected to reach $5B by 2030. Moreover, awards like the ET Startup Awards 2025 also now emphasise deep innovation (e.g., Qure.ai's HealthTech innovation and policies like the National Deep Tech Startup Policy).

Yet, despite all of these noteworthy progress, DeepTech remains an umbrella term  — scattering resources across legacy sectors like energy (e.g., biofuel innovations) and manufacturing (e.g., robotic process automation), where new-age breakthroughs could revitalise legacy industries but often get lost in broad fund cycles and award buzz. The result? DeepTech still gets just ~10% of total startup capital in India (vs. ~25% in the US), per recent reports.


What the C2S + SCL Combo Actually Solves

Talent pipeline (C2S) → 85,000 specialised engineers, 175+ ASICs designed

Design infrastructure (ChipIN Centre + EDA tools) → already live

Fabrication & testing bridge (SCL Mohali) → the missing “last mile” that turns GDSII files into real silicon

For the first time, an Indian researcher can take an idea from a whiteboard to a working chip, without leaving the country or burning tens of crores on foreign foundries.


The Real Question We Should Be Asking

If the C2S + SCL model works so brilliantly for chips, why stop there?

India should create one (or at most two) dedicated, industry-facing, government-backed national facilities for every major engineering discipline — exactly the way SCL Mohali is being transformed into the country’s go-to chip prototyping hub.

Picture this line-up of future “SCL equivalents”:

A National Advanced Prototyping & Testing Hub in Bengaluru or Hyderabad for mechanical and aerospace engineers — where drone frames, EV powertrains, gas-turbine blades, and hypersonic components move from CAD files to certified flight-ready hardware in months, not years.

A Green Chemistry Scale-up Foundry in Ahmedabad or Chennai that lets chemical and materials startups run pilot batches of biofuels, new polymers, carbon-capture sorbents, and sustainable textiles at 100–1,000 litre scale with full regulatory support.

A National Biomanufacturing & Clinical Validation Centre in Roorkee or Hyderabad where cultivated meat, mRNA therapeutics, affordable diagnostics, and tissue-engineered organs go from lab bench to GMP-certified pilot production.

An Urban Systems Integration Lab in Dehradun or Guwahati dedicated to smart infrastructure — testing seismic-resistant concrete, modular housing systems, embedded urban sensors, and water-recycling materials under real-world Indian conditions.

A Grid-Scale Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Facility in Jamnagar or Pune for the next generation of solid-state batteries, high-efficiency inverters, vehicle-to-grid controllers, and micro-grid hardware.

A National Robotics Validation Arena in Bengaluru or Coimbatore where warehouse robots, agricultural bots, and even humanoids can be crash-tested, endurance-tested, and safety-certified at full scale.


Each facility would operate on the same simple, powerful principles SCL Mohali is adopting today:

Open-access for academia, startups, and MSMEs

Heavily subsidised pilot runs and third-party certification

Funded through the ₹1 lakh crore Research & Development, and Innovation (RDI) Fund announced in Budget 2025

Jointly overseen by the relevant Ministry/Department/Organization 



Why This Beats Throwing More Money at “DeepTech”

Today’s DeepTech conversation is like trying to water an entire forest with a garden hose.
Specialised national facilities would act like irrigation canals — deep, directed, and impossible to ignore.

They would force investors, awards juries, and policy-makers to think vertically instead of spraying capital horizontally.


International Precedents 

According to Grok, there are multiple precedents of this idea worldwide:

Taiwan’s ITRI birthed TSMC and the entire foundry model.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes run one specialised centre for nearly every industrial vertical.

South Korea’s ETRI and government-backed fabs turned Samsung into a memory giant.


To put it other words, the countries that dominate hardware tomorrow are the ones that built disciplined, state-backed “last-mile” infrastructure today — not the ones that signed the biggest cheques yesterday.

India now has the political will, the ₹1 lakh crore RDI fund, the India Semiconductor Mission template, and a generation of engineers hungry to build.

All that’s left is the imagination to copy-paste the SCL playbook across ten more disciplines.


Closing Thought

2025 would be the year when we stopped celebrating merely “designing in India.” With SCL Mohali coming online, we are on the verge of celebrating “building in India” — at scale, at speed, and with sovereign control.

Let semiconductors be the first chapter, not the only one.
It’s time to build ten more SCLs.
Our DeepTech decade depends on it.

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