Hyderabad (Telangana): From cell phones and TVs to aeroplanes and satellites, chips play an important role in all these and the country is spending lakhs of crores every year on the import of microchips---Rs. 1,29,703 crore in the last financial year alone. But, Osmania University has decided to solve this problem and start creating chips locally, turning Hyderabad into a 'chip' city.
Students of the varsity’s electronics department under the guidance of the Principal at the University's College Of Engineering Prof. Chandrasekhar, are in the process of creating a frequency synthesiser, which will likely be manufactured in a size of two millimetres and will operate at a gigahertz capacity. The central government has also agreed to give Rs. 5 crores.
The university has partnered with three leading companies to market electronic products while the central government has provided suitable software for it, Prof. Chandrashekar said. Almost 90% research was completed in this regard in August and Bengaluru-based Sea-Doc trained the research team on the frequency of the chips, he said.
Taiwan is the global address for manufacturing microchips as one mm chip is produced only there. All the countries are heavily dependent on them. Other chips of 3-5 millimetres (mm) in size are being manufactured to some extent in other countries, including India.
“Due to the stoppage of their exports during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world economy suffered damage,” Prof. Chandrashekhar said.
The central government announced the chip-to-startup scheme two years ago with the idea that the production centre of software engineers should make them in the country after which the Electronics Department of Osmania Engineering College responded to this.
"We are making frequency synthesiser chips to prevent the situations faced during Corona in the future. Once these are fully available, dependence on foreign countries for chips will be greatly reduced. 20% import of chips may decrease in the next 3-5 years. This is a revolutionary step in the Indian electronics sector. Once the manufacturing of these starts on a commercial scale... Osmania University will get a royalty on every chip sold in the market," Prof. Chandrasekhar added.
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