PM Modi launches South India's first chip plant

Visakhapatnam | Bengaluru: Construction has begun on South India's first semiconductor packaging facility under the India Semiconductor Mission, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday virtually laying the foundation stone for ASIP Technologies' ₹2,387-crore project in Visakhapatnam.

The outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) facility at Tarluvada, being developed with South Korea's APACT as technology partner, will package and test chips for artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, data centres and high-speed communications.

It will initially use wire-bond and flip-chip ball grid array (BGA) packaging technologies before introducing advanced 2.5D and 3D packaging capabilities within two to three years.


The 30-acre facility, being established with an initial investment of ₹460 crore, will have a capacity to package and test 96 million semiconductor chips a year.

ASIP Technologies plans an additional investment of more than ₹2,000 crore. The project is expected to create more than 1,000 direct high-skilled jobs and 1,600 indirect jobs.

Advanced packaging has become a key segment of the semiconductor industry as high-performance AI chips require sophisticated methods to combine multiple chiplets into a single package.

Modi commended Andhra Pradesh's information technology talent pool and said the state is now well positioned to lead in semiconductor manufacturing. Chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu joined the prime minister virtually for the ceremony.

Venkata Simhadri, MD and chief executive of ASIP Technologies, said the project would establish "Advanced assembly, packaging and testing capabilities in India, while driving skill development, supply-chain localisation and contributing to the growth of Andhra Pradesh's semiconductor ecosystem."