Below is a summary of the four different ‘bucket’ of efforts that the incentives are intended for, a brief summary of their eligibility criteria and the fiscal support that the government has so far promised – for details, interested parties are requested to go through the policy related documents.
Rough callculations are as follows:
It gets more interesting:
The bucket of compound/Silicon-Photonics/sensor fabs and OSAT does not seem to have a ceiling in terms of capex eligible for 30 per cent incentive. Given that it is a diverse set of options and the fact that it is open for three years to apply, it is not easy to put a number for how much overlay may go for this.
I have intentionally avoided the jargon but the money is to be spent on creating the ecosystem of design and then fabrication. India has to decide whether it wants specific niche chips to power the datacentres or create general purpose chipsets for computing (like Intel or AMD). The cutting edge nodes remain with TSMC that has a 30 year lead over everyone else.
I’ll be exploring these ideas in follow up blog posts, once I am able to understand the engineering and the economics of this enterprise.
RadOncNotes 