India should financially support fab units to draw in semiconductor firms: Qualcomm chief

Rahul Patel, global general manager for connection, broadband, and networking at Qualcomm Technologies, suggested that in order to draw in semiconductor production firms, India should increase the size of its $10 billion financial incentive program.

According to Patel, industrialized countries like the US, Europe, Japan, and China are offering incentives totaling tens of billions of dollars, and India is competing with them.

“India is competing against developed nations. Companies (fabs) are very capitalistic minded, they’re going to look for the best financial outcome, the size and longevity of the incentives and how competitive they are versus the US, China, Europe, Japan, South Korea,” he added.

“A $10 billion incentive is not the same as $40-50 billion. I’m sure it’s not an issue of India not being capable, but it is going to be an issue where the priorities are spent.”

Even though the South Asian nation has a similar policy to other countries regarding having semiconductor manufacturing capability, he pointed out that India did have a geopolitical advantage globally as corporations were wanting to diversify away from China. Obtaining the semiconductor fabs was crucial, according to Patel, but assembly, testing, marking, and packaging, or ATMP units, were appropriate places to start.

“Semiconductors are the new oil,” he stated.

“Qualcomm is building the latest Wi Fi elements out of Chennai, modem products out of Bangalore and Hyderabad, designing processing engines, building products that go into IoT markets from India, irrespective of incentives. This size of talent pool is not available outside of India,” he continued.

Patel further stated that, although though Wi-Fi 6 based equipment and devices were only now starting to roll out for deployment into networks, Qualcomm has already begun negotiations with Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea about bringing Wi-Fi 7, the most recent standard on wifi technology.  “I will not be surprised in 2025, you will see Wi-Fi 7 in India,” he said.

As a supplier to smartphone manufacturers in the Indian market, the company faces competition from Mediatek. It aims to be the first to introduce AI-enabled capabilities to chipsets in handsets.

Customers will have high-end experiences thanks to hybrid AI processing, since AI capabilities are already present in the cloud.

“The Qualcomm AI hub has over 80 open source models which can be used by developers to build an edge AI experience,” he added.

He continued, saying artificial intelligence (AI) on the edge, for example, may provide use cases with enormous consumer value, like live translation on call, which is offered by the Samsung Galaxy S24.