Chip manufacturing and test equipment

Making the chip in the fab, then testing and measuring it

Almost every chip in an Indian phone or laptop was made abroad, mostly in Taiwan, South Korea, China or America. A chip is made in a fab, short for fabrication plant. A leading fab costs tens of billions of dollars to build. India is now, for the first time, building fabs of its own.

How a chip is made. Chips are made many at a time, on a thin disc of silicon called a wafer. The wafer goes through hundreds of steps, repeated layer by layer, over about three months:

Deposit

a very thin layer of material is laid on the wafer, sometimes only a few atoms thick.

Lithography

the pattern of the circuits is printed onto the layer with light.

Etch

material is removed where the pattern says, leaving the circuit behind.

Inspect and measure

every layer is checked for defects too small to see, and measured.

In the fab, each layer of the wafer goes through deposit, lithography, etch, and inspection and measurement, repeated over hundreds of steps for about three months in a clean room; the finished wafer is then cut into chips, packaged and tested. Lam Research and Applied Materials India make machines that deposit and etch, and KLA makes the systems that inspect and measure.

All this happens in a clean room, where the air is far cleaner than in a hospital operating theatre. Finished wafers are then cut into separate chips, which are packaged and tested. (More on chip assembly and testing in Market Segment 35.6, Memory chips and storage drives.)

Yield. Not every chip on a wafer works. The share that does is called the yield. A fab earns only on working chips, so finding defects early, and fixing their cause, is worth a great deal. That is what inspection systems are for.

Yield is the share of chips on a wafer that work. A fab earns only on working chips, so finding defects early, and fixing their cause, is what inspection systems such as KLA's are for.

Who makes the machines. A handful of companies make the machines that fabs use, and each machine can cost millions of dollars. Their buyers are the chip makers and the foundries, the factories that make chips for other companies. The machines run on complex software, which controls each step and analyses the data it produces. The equipment makers run large engineering centres in India that write much of that software.

Testing and measuring. Every electronic product is tested with instruments while it is designed and made. The best known is the oscilloscope, which shows how an electrical signal changes over time. Engineering students use it in college labs. Other instruments test radios, networks and colour.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment has two sub-segments:

Making the chip: the machines that make and inspect chips, the factories that make them, and India's first fabs

Testing and measuring: the instruments that test chips, phones and networks

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Making the chip
Testing and measuring

Making the chip

Wafer fabrication equipment, inspection and metrology, foundries, India's first fabs

Inspecting and measuring the wafer

KLA

with engineers in Chennai, makes the systems that inspect wafers for defects and measure every layer. Its Chennai centre writes much of their software. KLA has the most job postings in this Market Segment.

Depositing and etching

Lam Research

with engineers in Bengaluru, makes the machines that etch the layers of a chip and deposit them.

Applied Materials India

with engineers in Bengaluru and Chennai, is the Indian arm of Applied Materials, the largest maker of chip-manufacturing equipment.

Making chips for others

GlobalFoundries

with engineers in Bengaluru and Pune, is a foundry: it manufactures chips for other companies. It designs manufacturing processes and chips in Bengaluru.

India's first fabs

Tata Electronics

with engineers in Bengaluru, is building India's first commercial chip fab, at Dholera in Gujarat, with Powerchip of Taiwan. It is also building a chip assembly and test plant in Assam.

India has designed chips for decades and is now beginning to make them: Tata Electronics is building a fab at Dholera in Gujarat with Powerchip of Taiwan, and assembly and test plants are being built by Micron at Sanand in Gujarat, by Tata Electronics in Assam, and by others.

Testing and measuring

Electronic test and measurement instruments, network and radio test, colour measurement

Electronic test instruments

Keysight Technologies

with engineers in Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru, makes oscilloscopes, signal analysers and network testers. Engineers use them to test chips, phones and networks.

Rohde & Schwarz

the German maker of radio and network test equipment, has engineers in Delhi and Bengaluru. It also makes encryption equipment and firewalls. (More on that in Market Segment 4.5, Network security, firewalls and SASE, in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity.)

Tektronix

with engineers in Bengaluru, makes oscilloscopes.

Keysight and Rohde & Schwarz also test networks. (More on both in Market Segment 1.3, Network testing, visibility and monitoring, in Industry Vertical 1, Networking and telecom.)

Measuring colour

X-Rite

makes instruments that measure colour, for printers, paint makers and textile makers.

One company covered mainly in another Market Segment also works here:

VIAVI Solutions

with engineers in Bengaluru and Chennai, makes testers for fibre and networks. (More on it in Market Segment 1.3, Network testing, visibility and monitoring, in Industry Vertical 1, Networking and telecom.)

India makes chips.

India designed chips for decades without making them. Now, with government subsidies, that is changing. Micron is building a memory assembly plant in Gujarat, Tata Electronics is building a fab at Dholera, and others are building assembly plants. The equipment makers' Indian centres have long written software for fabs abroad. They are beginning to support fabs at home.

That is chip manufacturing: fabs that make chips layer by layer, the machines that make and inspect them, and the instruments that test every electronic product. India is taking its first steps from designing chips to making them.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What semiconductor and chip design companies hire for.

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