News: Recognizing chip design as a strategic national priority, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has implemented proactive measures to transform India’s semiconductor design landscape under the Chips to Start-up (C2S) Programme.
About Chips to Start-up (C2S) Programme
- The C2S Programme is an umbrella capacity-building initiative to build semiconductor design capacity, covering academic institutions across India.
- Nodal Ministry: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)
- Nodal Agency: Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
- Outlay and timeline: It launched in 2022, with a total outlay of ₹250 crore over five years.
- Objectives
- The Programme targets the development of 85,000 industry-ready professionals across undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral levels.
- It aims to catalyse the incubation of 25 start-ups and enable 10 technology transfers.
- It also seeks to provide access to SMART lab facilities, train one lakh students, generate 50 patents, and support at least 2,000 focused research publications.
- Functioning : It caters to the whole electronics value chain through:
- Specialized Manpower Training: The program provides in-depth hands-on exposure to chip designing, fabricating, and testing through periodic training provided jointly with industry partners.
- Design Infrastructure Support: Providing access to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools (e.g., from Siemens, Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, Silvaco, Ansys, Keysight), access to foundries for fabrication in MPW (Multi-Project Wafer) mode, support for packaging of chips, support for testing and characterization, and having an IP Core Repository.
- Centralized Design Facility: The C2S Programme initiated the ChipIN Centre at C-DAC, which is one of the biggest design facilities in the country, and is a centralized design facility providing high-end chip design infrastructure directly to the semiconductor design community in India.
- The ChipIN Centre has state-of-the-art tools which support the entire chip design cycle up to a 5nm or advanced node technology, and aggregate services for fabricating designs at foundries and packaging.
- Collaborative Projects: There are initiatives to promote Academia – Industry Collaborative Projects, Grand Challenges, Hackathons, and Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for the development of System/SoC/IP Core.
- Participation of Startups and MSME: Startups and MSMEs can also apply under various categories, using expertise from Academic institutions and R&D organisations.
- The MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) provides facilitation and monitors innovation and IPR activities, bringing together incubator centres and startups.
- Key Outcomes of the C2S programme
