As India’s semiconductor plans shift from big announcements to real-world execution, one message is getting louder: the country’s biggest opening may not be limited to landing shiny new chip fabs. It could be in building the less visible, but absolutely essential ecosystem that makes modern chip manufacturing possible.
That’s the view from Lam Research, a US-based semiconductor equipment leader known for deposition and etch technologies—two critical capabilities that account for roughly 35% of the steps involved in making chips. According to Rangesh Raghavan, Managing Director of Lam Research India, the country can play a meaningful role in the global semiconductor supply chain by strengthening three areas that often get less attention than fabs: precision suppliers, advanced systems engineering talent, and scalable training infrastructure—including virtual “fab” learning.
From back-office beginnings to deep engineering ambitions
Lam’s India story will sound familiar to anyone who’s watched multinational tech companies grow in the country. The company’s presence began about 25 years ago with software development and back-office support. But over the last five to six years, the strategy has shifted. The driver is straightforward: the semiconductor industry is growing fast, and it needs far more people and far more resilient supply chains than it relied on in the past.
Even as chips enable AI and automation, demand for skilled human talent keeps rising. The industry needs engineers who understand complex tools and processes, and it needs suppliers that can deliver ultra-precise components reliably and quickly.
Why India’s opportunity goes beyond chip fabs
Fabs matter—but they’re also incredibly difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to build. That naturally limits how many can exist. Supply-chain participation, on the other hand, can scale much more broadly, creating opportunities across many companies, specialties, and regions.
Lam expects massive demand across its global supply network over time, and that reality is pushing the company to diversify beyond traditional manufacturing hubs. The pandemic highlighted a hard truth: supply chains that worked fine under “normal” growth can break under sudden spikes in demand or disruptions. For Lam, expanding supplier development in India is part of building long-term resilience.
Raghavan compares the moment to India’s automotive journey—where suppliers originally built capabilities to serve domestic clusters, then evolved into global players. He sees a similar path emerging for semiconductor manufacturing suppliers, where Indian companies that meet the requirements could ultimately sell into the worldwide chip market, not just local projects.
What India can build today—and what it still needs to master
Semiconductor equipment may sound exotic, but much of it is built on mechanical and electrical systems that have parallels in other advanced industries such as aerospace, rail, and complex industrial machinery. India already has strengths that can translate well, especially in:
Precision-machined parts (a large portion of what equipment makers need)
Electrical distribution systems
PCBs and power-related engineering
Where India is still developing depth is in more specialized semiconductor domains such as specialty chemistries, chemical delivery systems, radio-frequency components, and plasma generation units. Those areas require niche expertise and process maturity that take time to build.
But even within mechanical manufacturing, semiconductor-grade expectations push suppliers into a new league. The toughest leap, as Raghavan describes it, is often the “last 20%”—not because companies can’t do it, but because they may not have been forced to meet these exact standards before.
In chip manufacturing, surface quality and precision aren’t just “nice to have.” They are directly tied to yield, reliability, and performance at nanometer scales. Contamination is a constant enemy, including tiny particles and metallic impurities that can ruin advanced chips. That means suppliers must learn and consistently deliver:
Ultra-polishing capabilities
Tighter surface roughness control
Post-machining surface processing tailored for contamination control
Speed is the other cultural shift. Many suppliers in traditional industries wait for firm purchase orders before investing in capacity. Semiconductor timelines are less forgiving. Product cycles often run two to five years, and the market demands rapid time-to-market. Suppliers may need to invest ahead of demand—similar to how chipmakers and equipment companies plan for the next technology node before the market fully arrives.
The talent gap: plenty of engineers, not enough semiconductor experience
The second pillar of Lam’s India focus is talent development. India produces a large number of engineers, but semiconductor-specific training opportunities remain limited. Physical infrastructure such as nano labs exists only in a handful of top institutions, and hands-on exposure to chip processes is still scarce for most students.
To close the gap, Lam is expanding a training approach built around virtual semiconductor manufacturing. Through its Semiverse initiative, students can replicate semiconductor process flows digitally, building a “digital twin” of a chip and simulating the full manufacturing sequence—potentially up to a thousand steps—on a regular computer.
The aim is to bridge a large part of the learning gap quickly. While hands-on fab experience is still necessary to become fully job-ready, virtual training can help students build foundational understanding at scale, faster than physical lab capacity alone would allow.
Training 60,000 students: a long game for India’s chip workforce
Lam’s goal, in coordination with national efforts, is to help train 60,000 or more students over a 10-year period. The initiative has already attracted thousands of students and participation from over 100 universities.
A key element is a train-the-trainer model developed with the Indian Institute of Science. Faculty members undergo an intensive program where they physically build a chip and also build the same chip virtually, then return to their home institutions to teach the course and expand reach.
This approach tackles a practical bottleneck: even if students are eager, they need instructors who are comfortable teaching semiconductor manufacturing concepts with real process context.
The bigger takeaway: a semiconductor ecosystem is built, not bought
Lam’s message aligns with what successful chip regions have learned the hard way: semiconductor leadership isn’t achieved only through capital spending. Fabs are just one piece. The durable advantage comes from the surrounding ecosystem—suppliers that meet semiconductor-grade quality, engineers who understand complex toolchains, and an education pipeline that produces people with systems-level thinking.
Modern semiconductor equipment is among the most complex industrial machinery on the planet, requiring multidisciplinary expertise spanning chemical mechanisms, mechanical systems, electrical design, robotics, and troubleshooting under extreme precision requirements.
For India’s chip dream, that complexity is exactly why the opportunity is larger than a few fabs. The real prize is building a workforce and supplier base that can plug into the global semiconductor supply chain—and keep growing long after the headlines fade.
