Modi opens SEMICON India as CDIL and Suchi start commercial runs

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated SEMICON India 2026 at Yashobhoomi in Dwarka on 17 September and used the stage to mark the start of commercial production at two more Indian plants: CDIL Semiconductor's assembly, testing, marking and packaging unit in Mohali, and Suchi Semicon's outsourced assembly and test unit in Palsana, near Surat.

"This year, we are talking about the commercial production of our chips. India's chips will go out to the world," he said. He walked the hall through the five editions of the conference. The first, in 2022, was about policy. Later editions covered project files and foundation stones. Last year the talk was pilot lines and test chips. This year the talk is product leaving the dock.

Three units approved under the first phase of the India Semiconductor Mission, Micron at Sanand, Kaynes Semicon and CG Semi, had already begun commercial runs, all in assembly, testing and packaging rather than wafer fabrication. CDIL and Suchi make five. Suchi's approved capacity is 1,033.20 million chips a year for power electronics, analogue devices and industrial parts.

The second mission, with a larger cheque

Modi also launched the second phase of the mission, cleared by the Cabinet in July. Phase 1, begun in December 2021, carried an incentive envelope of Rs 76,000 crore, about $8 billion at the time, and a five-year clock. Twelve projects were approved with combined investment of Rs 1.64 lakh crore. Twenty-four design projects received support under the Design Linked Incentive scheme. One hundred and five startups and MSMEs received electronic design automation tool assistance.

Semicon 2.0 is budgeted at Rs 1,27,500 crore, about $13.5 billion, over 12 years. Foreign firms may partner with Indian startups, design houses and overseas-citizen-owned entities. The political instruction from the podium was that fabless companies should grow in India and that intellectual property should be written here, not only packaged here.

On skills, Modi said India had trained 70,000 design engineers in four years against a ten-year target of 85,000. The second phase adds a target of one lakh factory-floor and clean-room workers.

Who was in the hall

Organisers put attendance at more than 600 companies from 52 countries. The list includes ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Teradyne, Tokyo Electron, Infineon, NXP, IBM Research and Merck, and Indian names Tata Electronics, Micron and CG Power. Applied Materials separately said it would invest $5 billion in India over the next decade. Infineon said its Indian headcount had grown 28 percent in a year.

Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra said the Sanand plant, in commercial production since last year, already exceeds the memory demand of India's entire laptop market. This year it will assemble and test tens of millions of chips. Next year the figure is hundreds of millions. Micron has been in India for seven years and employs more than 7,000 people directly.

The three-day show, themed "Silicon to Systems: Building the Ecosystem," runs until 19 September. It is the first edition since the second mission was approved. What the hall does not yet contain is a working Indian logic fab. Packaging plants are real plants, and they are now shipping. Wafer fabrication is the next claim the mission has to cash. Until that claim is cashed, India's semiconductor story is an assembly story with a design ambition and a very large public cheque.