» Will Maran’s dream of making India a semiconductor powerhouse take off?

Will Maran’s dream of making India a semiconductor powerhouse take off?

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Will Maran’s dream of making India a semiconductor powerhouse take off?

For the last few days, Vinod K Aggarwal has been keeping a strenuous schedule — dashing in and out of meetings with technology bigwigs — hardly any time to catch up on his sleep.

The soft-spoken former electrical engineering professor at McGill University and chairman of SemIndia, which he founded with a group of non-resident Indians, says with a smile: “Earlier, my mobile phone used to ring once in a while. Now it refuses to stop ringing. My battery has got exhausted and I have no choice but to borrow my friend’s mobile phone”.

That Aggarwal’s phone does not stop ringing and his being the most sought out entrepreneur is no surprise. Last fortnight, in a coup of sorts, Aggarwal’s SemIndia announced it was tying up with chip-maker AMD to set up a $3 billion semiconductor fab plant in the country.

However, that is not the only reason why everyone is sitting up and listening. What makes the mega deal really hot is what Aggarwal was able to bring to the table: the US chip-maker has never earlier licensed its proprietary chip-making technology to any third party manufacturer.

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