India Joins Global Semiconductor League with Micron’s Sanand Facility Launch

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to launch the Micron Technology plant in Sanand today. This new facility is intended to commercially place India on the world semiconductor map. The memory solutions company, with headquarters in Boise (Idaho), is believed to produce 10% of its total output while operating at full capacity at its Sanand plant. Both domestic and international markets will be served. This $37.4 billion conglomerate boasts 13 main production locations across the globe, including the US, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Japan. Soon, India will be a part of this club.

Micron Reducing Dependency on China

This comes as Micron has been working to lessen its reliance on China; thus, the decision is seen as significant by officials. The focus of the company's investments is now moving to the United States and India. An official from India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has confirmed the news. He stated that the ATMP (assembly, test, marking and packaging) plant, when fully operational, will span six or seven cricket fields.

This means that it will be more than enough to meet the country's and the world's increasing demand for memory chips. Local Chinese memory space enterprises, such as YMTC, have been seeing steady growth in their home market. This is happening because the government has passed a law that will help the brand's local supplier chain thrive. For grounds of national security, the Chinese government forbade Micron goods from being utilised in vital information infrastructure in 2023, marking the beginning of the transition.

Half of the money needed to construct an ATMP or OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) facility has been offered to interested parties as an incentive by the Indian government as part of their $10 billion semiconductor programme. Its initial customer was Micron, who invested 22,516 crore Indian rupees (INR) to construct a factory. A sort of flash memory utilised in storage devices, dynamic random-access memory (NAND), can be built and tested at the facility. Its product line will include solid-state storage devices. When fully operational, the plant is anticipated to provide direct employment for five thousand people.

Operations of the New Micron

The process begins with the import of wafers from its other operations, which are then assembled and tested in India. The memory products are transformed into finished goods, and only then are they packed. The next step is to sell them domestically and export them to other countries. In order to begin the plant's setup, Micron has moved some of its machinery from Penang, Malaysia, to India.

Micron officials had stated that the clean room will be the plant's nerve centre during project planning. Among the largest rooms of an ATMP plant, this one would be 1 million square feet. A tenth of the standard for an operating room is 1,000 tiny particles per square metre; thus, it must be dust-free. In addition to providing product value addition—which might be anywhere from 10% to 40%—it is anticipated to be one of the world's most automated ATMP facilities.