Semicon India 2024: Larsen & Toubro Ltd (L&T) is investing over $300 million in a new fabless chip company, marking the conglomerate’s entry into India’s growing semiconductor industry. The company will spend this amount over the next three years to establish a chip design and sales unit, while contracting out production.
L&T Semiconductor Technologies aims to design 15 chip products by the end of 2024, with plans to start selling them by 2027. According to Sandeep Kumar, head of L&T Semiconductor Technologies, the focus will be on power chips, radio-frequency semiconductors, and mixed-signal integrated circuits, targeting the automotive, industrial, and energy sectors, which are undergoing significant transformations.
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India is encouraging domestic semiconductor production to reduce reliance on imports, offering subsidies to global and local firms. This initiative is partly driven by the need to diversify semiconductor manufacturing beyond China and Taiwan, as geopolitical tensions rise between the US and China.
L&T’s investment is smaller compared to global fabless chip makers like Nvidia and AMD, but the company sees opportunities to compete and capture market share in select sectors. L&T Semiconductor Technologies currently employs 250 people, mostly chip designers, and plans to double its workforce by 2024.
The company is pushing for government subsidies for chip designing but won’t seek external funding, relying on the L&T group to finance the venture.
