India Chip, the HCL-Foxconn joint venture project, will manufacture about 36 million display driver chips a month at its upcoming semiconductor packaging facility in Uttar Pradesh, a capacity the company expects could meet roughly 40 per cent of India’s domestic requirement, its Chairman Shikhar Malhotra said on Thursday.
Delivering a keynote at Semicon India 2026, Malhotra said the company’s more than ₹3,700-crore facility would focus initially on display driver chips used in smartphones, laptops, cars, wearables, televisions and medical devices.
The facility, being built alongside the upcoming Noida International Airport, broke ground in February and is expected to open in 2028, Malhotra said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday, virtually laid the foundation stone of India Chip in the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority at Jewar in Greater Noida of Uttar Pradesh.
Large imports
“80-85 per cent of what goes into an Indian display comes from outside the country. The same chip sits in a television, car dashboard, the monitors in the ICU, laptops — anything with a screen. India still buys more than $30 billion of chips from abroad every year. That gap is large at home and is a problem, and in some ways, our invitation to solve that problem,” Malhotra shared.
The company expects the new OSAT facility to create demand for a wider domestic semiconductor supply chain, including substrates, lead frames, bonding wires, moulding compounds, specialty gases and precision tooling.
“Building packaging plants strengthens India’s ability to play an important role in the world economics of semiconductors. Do also consider the supply chain. Every OSAT pulls a constellation behind it — substrates, lead frames, bonding wires, molding compounds, specialty gases, precision tooling, calibration. Almost all of this is imported today. Each unit we commission is a customer that makes it rational for those suppliers to manufacture in India rather than import to India.”
Malhotra said India’s existing strengths in software, AI and chip design could converge with new manufacturing capabilities.
“Nearly one in five of the world’s chip designers is Indian. The largest base of global engineering centers anywhere on earth. We have software and AI in our bones. And now, we’re adding the making of things to it as well.”