8 ms·

Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

122 points by yarapavan 7y ago

yarapavan 7y ago
Context: The designs are based on RISC-V ISA (https://riscv.org https://riscv.org). When India looks east, it sees Huawei, a Chinese tech giant, being cut off from American-made components as a result of the trade war. To the west, it sees its most talented engineers working in Silicon Valley. By pouring millions of dollars into Indian-made semiconductors, India’s government hopes to solve both problems at once. The open source academic project mentioned in the article is 'Project Shakti' at IIT Madras. Link: https://shakti.org.in/ https://shakti.org.in/
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Best of luck to India. I sincerely hope that RISC-V will grant them the ability to produce commodity grade (even if low end) chips that can be utilized with open source software system. The first such use may well be industrial systems where OS and spec are not the major concern.
throwe3123332 7y ago
> To the west, it sees its most talented engineers working in Silicon Valley. By pouring millions of dollars into Indian-made semiconductors, India’s government hopes to solve both problems at once. It really can't. Considering the "rootless" nature of Indian urban life, education and society, both culturally and linguistically, the lack of "pull" ensures that any money you pour into its colonial institutions is only going to accelerate its departure to American shores. There is little precedence of such a deeply colonial state ever being able to help its subjects in a meaningful way (ironically, it was perhaps less so during British era). People who think India (with literacy of < 80%) is the next China are too self-deluded for help.
- BAReF00t 7y ago
  You vastly underestimate the size and diversity of India. Their middle class is bigger than that of the USA or I think even that of the entire EU. The can have a low rate on pretty much every statistic, while still having a higher total amount of it than us, simply due to.the sheer size of people. They could have an entire state, more modern, rich and with more people than Germany, while keeping their current statistics. No problem. Also: Are you Indian (I think not), or what is your basis for the ”rootless“ statement. To us Germans, Americans appear rootless. But we are not competent to judge that! Finally, things like this right here ARE how you get Indians out of poverty and illiteracy! Even if just via the resulting businesses lobbying for more education.
  - simongray 7y ago
    > Their middle class is bigger than that of the USA or I think even that of the entire EU. According to Wikipedia: "Indian middle class is 3% or 40 million of Indian population." That's not a whole lot of people and definitely not comparable to North America or Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_India
    - geogra4 7y ago
      It's about the same size as France, who matches India in real gdp
      - simongray 7y ago
        That is not the claim that was being made though. The one I replied to said India's middle class was bigger than the American and European ones. Being comparable to country with 5% of India's population basically just underlines the fact that India's middle class is tiny.
    - accidentaldev 7y ago
      The same article has other stat that says anywhere between 30-300 million are considered middle class. Is there a consensus among economists on what the real number is ?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  This is ridiculous. If Malaysia is on the verge of surpassing Portugal in per capita GDP why can’t India? They’re each “deeply colonial states”, neither of them having any real connection to pre-British states except as constituent units. More generally India has already done plenty to help its citizens. Even before the end of the License Raj, when the wannabe Fabians we’re running India you had massive improvements in health and education. Since the worst of the economic mismanagement was removed the Indian economy and the general populace's living standards have just shot up and continue to do so.
  - theseadroid 7y ago
    Your statement on Malaysia and Portugal GDP per capita surprised me. So I did some fact checking. According to Wiki Malaysia’s 2018 GDP per capita is usd 10,941. Portugal is 23,176. [1] 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Portugal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Portugal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Malaysia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Malaysia
    - vincentmarle 7y ago
      If you look at purchasing power parity (PPP), the numbers are closer together: $30,859 (Malaysia) and $32,023 (Portugal).
      - xchaotic 7y ago
        How many MacBook Pros do you get though. If anything, what the software developers might want is likely more expensive in Malaysia than Portugal. Likewise for India.
        rohit2412 7y ago
        Then go define your software developer purchasing power parity index. Such economic measures are complex, and if you want to see a single number for a country, that number should be representative for everything and everyone
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  China did it, Korea did it, all the Asian tigers did it, (The USA too, long ago) and via the same way: domestic government investment and programs to stimulate manufacturing.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Yup, that Delhi-Lucknow Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb is deeply rootless. I’m sure Mamta didi et al and the by now Bengali minority in Kolkata are happy you’re dubbing them as deeply rootless.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  There is little precedence of such a deeply colonial state ever being able to help its subjects in a meaningful way America was a British colony, too, once upon a time.
  - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    US, Canada, Australia are/were rather different sorts of colonies from India or Malaysia.
- sbmthakur 7y ago
  Please, read more about the project. IITs aren't "colonial institutions".
madez 7y ago
I'm very excited about India's ambitions. It would not only be meaningful for India, but for many people around the world. We are lacking open chips, and project Shakti is on a trajectory to solve a part of that. I wonder when GCC learns to use the source code of the hardware along with the source code of the software to optimize the binary with full knowledge of the system.
- analognoise 7y ago
  We will never have competitive chips that are open down to the transistor and process level. Down to the RTL, sure. But a truly open competitive chip, never ever. You might get one on some ancient process from 20 years ago, which will be handily outclassed in every single metric except openness, which people make noise about but don't actually pay for (so no business case).
  - happycube 7y ago
    A ~20 year old process... that'd be 250nm or 180nm, which is Just Fine for many microcontrollers, if not the new 600mhz-1ghz Cortex M7's...
    - analognoise 7y ago
      If the 180nm design is good enough, and migrated it to a new process, you'd get more chips per wafer. Hence never competitive. "It's open!" doesn't make a business decide to buy a million and put them in a product - cost, features, availability, support do. Nobody cares about "open silicon" - it's only spouted by people who don't understand actual electronics, or if they do, they certainly don't understand the economics. It will never happen. If it did, it wouldn't be useful. It makes zero sense.
      - ghettoimp 7y ago
        From a corporate perspective, I think you're absolutely right, this kind of thing will never be profitable. From a state perspective, being reliant on other countries for your electronic may seem like such a threat to your ability to remain sovereign that it's worth developing your own, even if you are generations behind the latest and greatest.
BAReF00t 7y ago
They are trying to get in on the Trump ban of Chinese products before it is over, right after Trump is gone. Duh. Still good for them. Hopefully, being the world's next labor slave will lead to them gaining some more prosperity too. And not just getting stuck there, with nets being installed due to people jumping out of windows (aka Foxconn).
- mindentropy 7y ago
  > with nets being installed due to people jumping out of windows I see a lot of flak given to Foxconn (maybe because of them being Chinese). What is your opinion on the recent Facebook suicide? Also the articles on mental damage moderating articles in Facebook etc.
  - turnkeyreverse 7y ago
    What kind of an idiot compares ONE suicide in the us to hundreds in chinese companies? Seriously, do you think that is comparable?
BAReF00t 7y ago
The question is: What will they do after, when Trump is gone, and his policiey on Chinese imports anf foreign workers are gone with him? I hope they hurry. Now’s the time!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Iv 7y ago
I really would like an alternative to Shenzhen for cheap manufacturing. Does anyone here have experience with factories located elsewhere?
- syedkarim 7y ago
  I regularly quote PCBAs in different countries. If you are looking for any place as cheap as China, I can't say that such a place exists. The only way that the math works out is by building the product yourself with a cheap SMT line. Using a domestic CM is a non-starter for a low-margin consumer product.
  - Iv 7y ago
    That's for ideological reasons that I am looking for an alternative. I am just wondering what would be the additional cost. Is that more than 2x the cost?
    - syedkarim 7y ago
      I've found the domestic premium too be anywhere from 3X to 10X. It really depends on how much is being done. We sometimes build antennas, which are single layer PCBs. The cost-delta at production volumes is about 3X. On a circuit board assembly I've paid 15x more to build in the US, where the turnaround time was significantly slower and production yield was worse. This is CM-specific, of course.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Have experience in Vietnam. Some clients been asking for manufacturing there, but often get surprised that it will both be harder and cost the more than in China. Still some persist, and do that. You have to effectively import everything from China, and just do final assembly there. I see close to no point doing that when local inputs cannot reach even 10% of the value.
  - syedkarim 7y ago
    Just confirming your 10% figure. Across a dozen or so products I've been involved with, the actual labor/SMT assembly costs have been about 10% of the total BOM (bill of materials). Very roughly the cost per component-placement is about 1-cent (USD). My quoted labor rates are about $7/hour, though I see $15/hour at a lot of other factories (and warehouses).
dbuder 7y ago
Better late than never, with all the EEs they have it is sad that it has taken this long.
xvilka 7y ago
I hope they will be more involved in the open-source electronic design software than other countries. Software like LibreCAD[1] and FreeCAD[2], Yosys[3] and Symbiflow[4], Chisel/FIRRTL[5], OpenROAD initiative[6], Degate[7], and many others. [1] https://librecad.org/ https://librecad.org/ [2] https://www.freecadweb.org/ https://www.freecadweb.org/ [3] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ [4] https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://symbiflow.github.io/ [5] https://www.chisel-lang.org/ https://www.chisel-lang.org/ [6] https://theopenroadproject.org/ https://theopenroadproject.org/ [7] https://github.com/nitram2342/degate https://github.com/nitram2342/degate
neonate 7y ago
https://outline.com/E8CzrA https://outline.com/E8CzrA
miohtama 7y ago
What did make RISC-V a game changer? Why did not any open source chip enjoy such a success before?

122 points by yarapavan 7y ago

Context: The designs are based on RISC-V ISA (https://riscv.org https://riscv.org). When India looks east, it sees Huawei, a Chinese tech giant, being cut off from American-made components as a result of the trade war. To the west, it sees its most talented engineers working in Silicon Valley. By pouring millions of dollars into Indian-made semiconductors, India’s government hopes to solve both problems at once. The open source academic project mentioned in the article is 'Project Shakti' at IIT Madras. Link: https://shakti.org.in/ https://shakti.org.in/

Aperocky 7y ago
Best of luck to India. I sincerely hope that RISC-V will grant them the ability to produce commodity grade (even if low end) chips that can be utilized with open source software system. The first such use may well be industrial systems where OS and spec are not the major concern.

throwe3123332 7y ago

> To the west, it sees its most talented engineers working in Silicon Valley. By pouring millions of dollars into Indian-made semiconductors, India’s government hopes to solve both problems at once. It really can't. Considering the "rootless" nature of Indian urban life, education and society, both culturally and linguistically, the lack of "pull" ensures that any money you pour into its colonial institutions is only going to accelerate its departure to American shores. There is little precedence of such a deeply colonial state ever being able to help its subjects in a meaningful way (ironically, it was perhaps less so during British era). People who think India (with literacy of < 80%) is the next China are too self-deluded for help.

BAReF00t 7y ago
You vastly underestimate the size and diversity of India. Their middle class is bigger than that of the USA or I think even that of the entire EU. The can have a low rate on pretty much every statistic, while still having a higher total amount of it than us, simply due to.the sheer size of people. They could have an entire state, more modern, rich and with more people than Germany, while keeping their current statistics. No problem. Also: Are you Indian (I think not), or what is your basis for the ”rootless“ statement. To us Germans, Americans appear rootless. But we are not competent to judge that! Finally, things like this right here ARE how you get Indians out of poverty and illiteracy! Even if just via the resulting businesses lobbying for more education.
- simongray 7y ago
  > Their middle class is bigger than that of the USA or I think even that of the entire EU. According to Wikipedia: "Indian middle class is 3% or 40 million of Indian population." That's not a whole lot of people and definitely not comparable to North America or Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_India
  - geogra4 7y ago
    It's about the same size as France, who matches India in real gdp
    - simongray 7y ago
      That is not the claim that was being made though. The one I replied to said India's middle class was bigger than the American and European ones. Being comparable to country with 5% of India's population basically just underlines the fact that India's middle class is tiny.
  - accidentaldev 7y ago
    The same article has other stat that says anywhere between 30-300 million are considered middle class. Is there a consensus among economists on what the real number is ?
barry-cotter 7y ago
This is ridiculous. If Malaysia is on the verge of surpassing Portugal in per capita GDP why can’t India? They’re each “deeply colonial states”, neither of them having any real connection to pre-British states except as constituent units. More generally India has already done plenty to help its citizens. Even before the end of the License Raj, when the wannabe Fabians we’re running India you had massive improvements in health and education. Since the worst of the economic mismanagement was removed the Indian economy and the general populace's living standards have just shot up and continue to do so.
- theseadroid 7y ago
  Your statement on Malaysia and Portugal GDP per capita surprised me. So I did some fact checking. According to Wiki Malaysia’s 2018 GDP per capita is usd 10,941. Portugal is 23,176. [1] 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Portugal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Portugal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Malaysia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Malaysia
  - vincentmarle 7y ago
    If you look at purchasing power parity (PPP), the numbers are closer together: $30,859 (Malaysia) and $32,023 (Portugal).
    - xchaotic 7y ago
      How many MacBook Pros do you get though. If anything, what the software developers might want is likely more expensive in Malaysia than Portugal. Likewise for India.
      - rohit2412 7y ago
        Then go define your software developer purchasing power parity index. Such economic measures are complex, and if you want to see a single number for a country, that number should be representative for everything and everyone
Synaesthesia 7y ago
China did it, Korea did it, all the Asian tigers did it, (The USA too, long ago) and via the same way: domestic government investment and programs to stimulate manufacturing.
selimthegrim 7y ago
Yup, that Delhi-Lucknow Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb is deeply rootless. I’m sure Mamta didi et al and the by now Bengali minority in Kolkata are happy you’re dubbing them as deeply rootless.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar.
reaperducer 7y ago
There is little precedence of such a deeply colonial state ever being able to help its subjects in a meaningful way America was a British colony, too, once upon a time.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  US, Canada, Australia are/were rather different sorts of colonies from India or Malaysia.
sbmthakur 7y ago
Please, read more about the project. IITs aren't "colonial institutions".

madez 7y ago

I'm very excited about India's ambitions. It would not only be meaningful for India, but for many people around the world. We are lacking open chips, and project Shakti is on a trajectory to solve a part of that. I wonder when GCC learns to use the source code of the hardware along with the source code of the software to optimize the binary with full knowledge of the system.

analognoise 7y ago
We will never have competitive chips that are open down to the transistor and process level. Down to the RTL, sure. But a truly open competitive chip, never ever. You might get one on some ancient process from 20 years ago, which will be handily outclassed in every single metric except openness, which people make noise about but don't actually pay for (so no business case).
- happycube 7y ago
  A ~20 year old process... that'd be 250nm or 180nm, which is Just Fine for many microcontrollers, if not the new 600mhz-1ghz Cortex M7's...
  - analognoise 7y ago
    If the 180nm design is good enough, and migrated it to a new process, you'd get more chips per wafer. Hence never competitive. "It's open!" doesn't make a business decide to buy a million and put them in a product - cost, features, availability, support do. Nobody cares about "open silicon" - it's only spouted by people who don't understand actual electronics, or if they do, they certainly don't understand the economics. It will never happen. If it did, it wouldn't be useful. It makes zero sense.
    - ghettoimp 7y ago
      From a corporate perspective, I think you're absolutely right, this kind of thing will never be profitable. From a state perspective, being reliant on other countries for your electronic may seem like such a threat to your ability to remain sovereign that it's worth developing your own, even if you are generations behind the latest and greatest.

BAReF00t 7y ago

They are trying to get in on the Trump ban of Chinese products before it is over, right after Trump is gone. Duh. Still good for them. Hopefully, being the world's next labor slave will lead to them gaining some more prosperity too. And not just getting stuck there, with nets being installed due to people jumping out of windows (aka Foxconn).

mindentropy 7y ago
> with nets being installed due to people jumping out of windows I see a lot of flak given to Foxconn (maybe because of them being Chinese). What is your opinion on the recent Facebook suicide? Also the articles on mental damage moderating articles in Facebook etc.
- turnkeyreverse 7y ago
  What kind of an idiot compares ONE suicide in the us to hundreds in chinese companies? Seriously, do you think that is comparable?

BAReF00t 7y ago

The question is: What will they do after, when Trump is gone, and his policiey on Chinese imports anf foreign workers are gone with him? I hope they hurry. Now’s the time!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Iv 7y ago

I really would like an alternative to Shenzhen for cheap manufacturing. Does anyone here have experience with factories located elsewhere?

syedkarim 7y ago
I regularly quote PCBAs in different countries. If you are looking for any place as cheap as China, I can't say that such a place exists. The only way that the math works out is by building the product yourself with a cheap SMT line. Using a domestic CM is a non-starter for a low-margin consumer product.
- Iv 7y ago
  That's for ideological reasons that I am looking for an alternative. I am just wondering what would be the additional cost. Is that more than 2x the cost?
  - syedkarim 7y ago
    I've found the domestic premium too be anywhere from 3X to 10X. It really depends on how much is being done. We sometimes build antennas, which are single layer PCBs. The cost-delta at production volumes is about 3X. On a circuit board assembly I've paid 15x more to build in the US, where the turnaround time was significantly slower and production yield was worse. This is CM-specific, of course.
baybal2 7y ago
Have experience in Vietnam. Some clients been asking for manufacturing there, but often get surprised that it will both be harder and cost the more than in China. Still some persist, and do that. You have to effectively import everything from China, and just do final assembly there. I see close to no point doing that when local inputs cannot reach even 10% of the value.
- syedkarim 7y ago
  Just confirming your 10% figure. Across a dozen or so products I've been involved with, the actual labor/SMT assembly costs have been about 10% of the total BOM (bill of materials). Very roughly the cost per component-placement is about 1-cent (USD). My quoted labor rates are about $7/hour, though I see $15/hour at a lot of other factories (and warehouses).

dbuder 7y ago

Better late than never, with all the EEs they have it is sad that it has taken this long.

xvilka 7y ago

I hope they will be more involved in the open-source electronic design software than other countries. Software like LibreCAD[1] and FreeCAD[2], Yosys[3] and Symbiflow[4], Chisel/FIRRTL[5], OpenROAD initiative[6], Degate[7], and many others. [1] https://librecad.org/ https://librecad.org/ [2] https://www.freecadweb.org/ https://www.freecadweb.org/ [3] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ [4] https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://symbiflow.github.io/ [5] https://www.chisel-lang.org/ https://www.chisel-lang.org/ [6] https://theopenroadproject.org/ https://theopenroadproject.org/ [7] https://github.com/nitram2342/degate https://github.com/nitram2342/degate

neonate 7y ago

https://outline.com/E8CzrA https://outline.com/E8CzrA

miohtama 7y ago

What did make RISC-V a game changer? Why did not any open source chip enjoy such a success before?