Fab

Imagine a factory so sensitive that a single stray dust particle can ruin the product, requiring air cleaner than a hospital operating theatre, machines costing hundreds of millions of dollars each, and years of construction before it produces a single usable unit. That factory is a fab, short for fabrication plant, the place where raw silicon wafers are actually turned into working semiconductor circuits.

Inside a fab, silicon wafers go through hundreds of precise steps, layering, etching and doping microscopic circuit patterns onto their surface, using equipment so advanced that only a handful of countries in the world can supply the most cutting edge machines. This is why fabs sit at the very top of the semiconductor value chain in terms of both capital cost and technical difficulty, far beyond what ATMP or OSAT facilities require.

Tata Electronics' fab under construction in Dholera, Gujarat, is India's first real attempt at this hardest layer of the value chain, targeted for commissioning around 2028, a timeline that itself reflects just how much longer a fab takes to build compared to the ATMP and OSAT facilities that have already reached commercial production in India.