India’s first semiconductor fabrication unit chips in

Nearly 35 years after a mysterious fire destroyed its facilities at the 51-acre campus at Mohali in Punjab, Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) is fighting back to extinguish old memories and earn its place in the sun. That’s courtesy a generous Rs 10,000 crore modernisation plan drawn up by the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity), which wants India’s original semiconductor fabrication unit to not only continue its operations in the 180 nanometer (nm) technology fab, but upgrade to 28 nm.

It’s an irony that SCL first started manufacturing in 1984, three years before Taiwan’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC),