In a bid to capitalize on India’s chip design talent, India’s only device manufacturing facility Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL), Mohali has announced its end-to-end support for chip production from fabrication to testing and finally packaging. 

 Facilities available at SCL, Mohali 
SCL, Mohali currently has two fabrication lines facilitating 6-inch and 8-inch wafers along with an AMTP Unit and a compound semiconductor unit. The upgrade plans for the same are underway. At an event organized for startups on Tuesday, SCL urged Indian startups to consider its plant for the limited production of chips. 

Underlying Problems in Chip Production 
Currently, the Indian Chip startups that don't have a production unit are forced to take their designs to global foundries like TSMC and others to get even limited samples of their chips produced. This comes with several limitations from costs to analysis and many more. 

SCL aims to address these problems and also provide Indian startups with a solution to pull them off the woes of Chip production at hefty costs with added limitations of limited accessibility in the stages of production. 

Startup Meet
The startup meet organized by SCL in Delhi received participation from 32 chip design startups including Mindgrove Technologies, Aheesa, and InCore Semiconductors. The meeting aimed at addressing the issues and their potential solution with the Mohali facility in prototyping 180nM chip technology indigenously. 

How’s SCL Mohali doing currently? 
Since March 2005 SCL has been focused on research and development. It has been serving major sectors like space and satellites, railways, and telecom, among others by supplying them with 180 nm chips. 

Design Linked Incentive (DLI) Scheme 
The DLI scheme currently serves a limited category while the government has plans to open it for more broader categories to generate more IPs. As of now, only 14 startups have been approved for the DLI scheme.