India will offer 9% deployment incentive for startups to hasten chip designs: ISM CEO

Chip startups have rarely commercialized trials. Will Semicon 2.0 address this?

Yes. When small companies go to a commercial fab to try to tape out (physically build multiple copies of) their chips, they have to wait in a long queue for their turn. Further, there’s no discount for early-stage chip design startups, though large fabless chipmakers such as Nvidia and Qualcomm get up to 30% discounts in chip fabrication costs. About 30% of a chip’s cost is fabrication, for which big companies get a 30% discount, reducing their manufacturing cost by 9% overall. Under Semicon 2.0, we’ll offer Indian chip design startups this 9% as a deployment-linked incentive, so that early-stage ventures can absorb the cost impact when they are cash-strapped.