Lam Research, a US-based semiconductor fabrication equipment supplier is setting up its second research and development (R&D) centre in India in September. In an interview, Rangesh Raghavan, corporate vice president and general manager of Lam Research, India, said the new facility will help the company’s engineers complete designs locally and reduce the reliance on US counterparts.

“This will improve capability. Until now we relied on US counterparts to build and test our designs," Raghavan said. He said that the new centre, the company’s second in Bengaluru, will include a “state of the art" hardware engineering lab consisting of deposition (a fabrication process in which thin films of materials are deposited on a wafer), etching (chemically removing layers from the surface of a wafer), and wet processing units (used for etching and cleaning the wafers), along with AR/VR-enabled capabilities.

Lam Research is a leading supplier of equipment to semiconductor manufacturers such as Intel, TSMC, Samsung and Micron. The company already has over 2,000 employees in India and the new facility will help bring the majority of its work to the country. “This will help develop a network of local suppliers, which will contribute to the economy," Raghavan said.

According to an April 2022 report by industry body Indian Electronics and Semiconductors Association (IESA), India could account for $85-100 billion of the global $550-600 billion global market for semiconductor manufacturing by 2030.

Raghavan said that while semiconductor manufacturing in India is in its early stages, its participation in the ecosystem is already very strong from the design perspective. Large chip design firms, including Intel, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Nvidia are already designing chips in India.

Further, he said more than half the company’s hardware and software engineers are in Bengaluru. “More than 80% of our revenues come from the Asia Pacific region. We have made significant investments and grown quite substantially in India over the last few years. We have seen a 100% growth in India in the last two years," he added.