Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A chip fabrication plant is one of the few structures where the concrete is the cheap bit and the air is the expensive one. Construction of the Tata Electronics–Powerchip fabrication plant at Dholera in Gujarat has crossed the halfway mark, with foundations complete and the two phases that actually determine whether the plant works — cleanroom installation and equipment calibration — now under way ahead of trial production targeted for December 2026.
The specifications explain the sequencing. The ₹91,000 crore line is designed for 50,000 wafers a month, starting at the 28-nanometre node, and has secured advanced lithography tools from the Dutch supplier ASML. A cleanroom for that work must hold particle counts, temperature, humidity and vibration inside tolerances that would be invisible anywhere else in industry; a single speck of dust in the wrong place is a dead die. Equipment calibration is the step where a plant discovers whether it can hold those tolerances repeatedly — which is what yield means, and yield is the only number that decides whether a fab is an asset or a monument. That is why the halfway point is worth marking: the remaining half is not more of the same, it is a different and much harder kind of work.
The unit of account: 50,000 wafers a month at 28 nanometres is the Dholera design target — a mature node chosen for volume markets rather than headlines.
Nobody photographs a cleanroom being commissioned. It is nevertheless the moment at which a semiconductor programme either becomes real or does not.
At a Glance
• Project: Tata Electronics with Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Dholera, Gujarat
• Investment: about ₹91,000 crore
• Design capacity: 50,000 wafers a month, starting at the 28 nm node
• Status: past halfway; foundations complete, cleanroom and calibration under way
• Trial production target: December 2026
• Tooling: advanced lithography equipment secured from ASML
• Mission-wide: three of 12 approved commercial facilities operational as of July
• Already running: Micron’s assembly and test plant at Sanand (inaugurated February 28, 2026) and Kaynes Semicon’s OSAT facility at Sanand (March 31, 2026)
The choice of 28 nanometres deserves a word, because it is routinely mistaken for a limitation. The most advanced logic nodes make headlines and phones; 28nm and its neighbours make the chips that go into cars, industrial controllers, power management, displays, appliances and the vast middle of the electronics world, and demand for them is large, stable and long-lived. It is also the node at which a first-time manufacturing nation can realistically build process expertise, retain engineers and win qualification from customers whose products stay in production for a decade. Starting there is not modesty; it is how essentially every successful semiconductor industry has started.
Around the fab, the supporting layer is further along than the fab itself, which is the right order. Micron’s assembly and test plant at Sanand was inaugurated in February and Kaynes Semicon’s packaging and testing facility followed at the same location in March, giving India working back-end capacity before front-end silicon arrives. Three of twelve approved commercial facilities are operational, with ten projects worth about ₹1.60 lakh crore approved across six states. The honest caveat is that first silicon and commercial yield are different milestones, sometimes separated by a year or more, and it would help public understanding if that distinction were stated plainly whenever a date is announced. The constructive point is that India is now doing the difficult work rather than the announceable work — and difficult work, done in order, is what a manufacturing base is made of.
