Semicon boom expected to power up 100k jobs in three years

New Delhi: India’s drive to establish a domestic semiconductor ecosystem is expected to generate more than 100,000 jobs over the next three years, according to experts.

The country’s existing semiconductor workforce of 25,000 is set to quadruple over that period, according to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group. Meanwhile, separate research conducted by recruitment services and staffing firm CIEL HR Services for ET suggests that firms in the sector could create around 67,500 jobs over the next 18 months alone.

Industry specialists — including process engineers, fab engineers, chip design engineers, system engineers and product architects — can command four to six times higher salaries than their counterparts in IT services with comparable experience, especially at mid-to-senior levels, according to Ankush Wadhera, partner and managing director at BCG.


“The supply of fit-for-role talent is not keeping pace with demand and, as a result, many players are looking outside India for senior talent,” said Wadhera.

The US and Southeast Asia are popular regions for attracting such talent; a substantial part of this global talent pool is from the Indian diaspora.

“Entry-level and mid-level talent can be easily trained, but it is senior talent that is in acute shortage in the country,” he said.

Recruitment in the semiconductor sector is shifting away from traditional chip design. Firms are increasingly seeking specialists for high-value roles in process engineering, equipment maintenance, yield management, reliability engineering and advanced packaging.

India’s semiconductor talent pool currently numbers roughly 150,000 professionals across chip design, verification, engineering, testing and product development, according to a CIEL HR Services study.

“About 43% of the workforce has more than 10 years of experience, while nearly three-fourths have over five years of experience,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra, CEO of CIEL HR Services.

Fab & Packaging Creating Roles

The study on the semiconductor industry in India, shared exclusively with ET, revealed that Qualcomm leads the market for current vacancies, followed by AMD, Nvidia, Synopsys, Applied Materials, Infineon, Cadence and Micron.

“For years, India’s semiconductor workforce was almost entirely focused on design,” said Mishra. “Domestic fabrication and packaging units are now creating demand for roles in process engineering, equipment maintenance, yield management, reliability and advanced packaging, which until recently accounted for a negligible share of hiring.”

Talent shortages across India’s semiconductor sector remain severe, with 135 vacancies for every 100 engineers who possess microarchitecture expertise, according to the study.

Besides hiring from rival semiconductor firms, companies are increasingly sourcing talent from academia and IT services firms. The most sought-after skills include physical design and timing closure, digital design and RTL (register transfer level) coding, and design verification.

Demand is also strong for expertise in microarchitecture, emulation, formal verification, embedded systems and silicon bringup, as well as programming languages such as Python, C++, Verilog and SystemVerilog (a combined hardware description and verification language).

CIEL’s analysis tracked semiconductor hiring activity in India over the 12 months until November 2026, covering about 45,000 openings across more than 150 semiconductor companies.