New Delhi: Picture a grain of sand. Ordinary silica, dug out of a beach or a quarry, worth almost nothing. Now picture that same sand purified to 99.99 per cent purity, sliced into a wafer thinner than a fingernail, and etched with billions of nodes.
That transformation — sand into silicon converted to a working brain of glass and metal — is precisely the USD 900 billion business model of the semiconductor industry that will be displayed in full splendour at the three-day SEMICON India 2026, scheduled to be held here from September 17.
A semiconductor is simply a material, silicon, that conducts electricity better than an insulator like rubber but not as good as pure conductor like copper.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will walk into Yashobhoomi in Dwarka and inaugurate SEMICON India 2026. Global chipmakers, policymakers and investors will fill the halls behind him, all watching an industry India has built from the ground up. For three days, the country’s semiconductor) manufacturing story will be on full display. For an industry that barely had a heartbeat in India a decade ago, this is not just a conference. It is the moment India’s semiconductor ambitions step into the spotlight.
The theme this year is “Silicon to Systems: Building the Ecosystem.” That phrase carries more weight than it first appears to. India is no longer asking whether it can make chips. It is now asking how fast it can build everything around them.
Chips are not a niche product anymore. They sit inside cars, drones, aeroplanes, MRI machines and satellites. At the moment, the global electronics industry is valued at around $4.3 trillion and growing fast. Semiconductors sit right at the base of this growing structure, forming it’s foundation. Every other industry, from automobiles to healthcare to defence, depends on what comes out of a chip fabrication plant. That is what makes semiconductors a foundational industry. Miss this layer, and every layer above it becomes fragile.
The world learned this the hard way. For example, during the COVID pandemic, car factories faced shutdowns. Not because of a lack of steel or labour, but because they could not get chips. Countries that had spent decades treating semiconductors as someone else’s problem suddenly scrambled to build their own capacity. The pandemic did not create the race for chips. It simply forced everyone to run faster.
India’s interest in semiconductors goes back further than most people realise, decades of quiet attempts, small starts, and lessons learned the hard way. For a long time, the ambition was there, but the ecosystem around it never quite came together. That changed with a different approach. Reforms in foreign investment, taxation and customs opened the door wide. Global electronics companies slowly began setting up manufacturing lines in India, and the results are hard to argue with.
In 2014-15, India produced about ₹1.9 lakh crore worth of electronics goods. By 2025-26, that number touched ₹13.11 lakh crore, a sevenfold jump. Electronics exports rose from around ₹38,000 crore to ₹4.24 lakh crore, an elevenfold increase.
Mobile phones tell an even sharper story. Production rose 33 times, from ₹18,000 crore to ₹6.27 lakh crore. Exports rose 165 times, from about ₹1,500 crore to ₹2.59 lakh crore. Smartphones did not even feature among India’s top 100 exported goods in 2014. In FY 2025-26, smartphones became India’s single largest exported commodity. Ahead of petroleum products and ahead of gems and jewellery. India now makes 99.2 percent of the phones it uses, and has flipped from a net importer of mobiles to a net exporter. This entire manufacturing engine now supports 2.5 million jobs.
This is the moment when the picture shifts. A country once known for false starts in electronics is now the second-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world by volume. Electronics manufacturing was the proof of concept. Semiconductors were always the next step.
