India must make its defence chips end-to-end, say scientists

India’s increasingly network-centric weapons, from the BrahMos cruise missile to the proposed Sudarshan Chakra air defence shield, will remain vulnerable so long as the semiconductors inside them are imported, senior defence scientists said on Tuesday, calling for chips to be designed, manufactured and packaged end-to-end in the country.Speaking at the ‘Chips for the Next Battlefield: Semiconductors, AI & the Future of Defense’ panel at SRM Presents The Hindu Semiconductor Summit 2026 here, former Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Director General V.K. Saraswat said warfare had moved from platform-centric fighting to network-centric operations, in which command, control and communications riding on semiconductors decide the outcome.“What you saw in Operation Sindoor … is that we are today more or less equipped with complete network-centric capability,” Dr. Saraswat said. Sudarshan Chakra, the multi-layer, multi-domain air defence system announced by the Prime Minister, would fuse data from satellite, sea, air and land-based sensors using artificial intelligence-enabled software, he added. “But we have realised that is not enough for future warfare, for long-duration warfare, to take care of saturation attacks.” Drone swarms, he noted, now arrive “in hundreds and thousands”, and directed energy weapons were needed alongside ballistic missile defence.A. Sivathanu Pillai, founder, CEO and Managing Director of BrahMos Aerospace, said precision was the point at which chips entered the picture. A BrahMos missile given a target’s coordinates changes course within milliseconds to secure a “bullseye hit”, he said. “How has the intelligence come to that? It is a processor and the software. So semiconductors play a very important role there.” He added that the Light Combat Aircraft Mark 2 could, on a single mission, process as much data as the entire MiG-21 fleet processed in 1971, and that even Chandrayaan-3’s landing was achieved with semiconductor systems that “was all imported, you know; that was our problem”.Urgent imperativeMost Indian defence systems are based on 28-nanometre chips, Dr. Pillai said, while the world has moved to 3 nanometres. India is compensating for weaker hardware with software — for instance, by collating data from multiple GPS sources because it does not have a military satellite giving it military-specification accuracy, but that approach would not be enough for hypersonic systems, he argued.“The government has said that 3 nanometre we will achieve sometime around 2030 to 35. That is too late in the present situation,” Dr. Pillai said, warning that controls on materials, devices and chip-making equipment were coming. “If you want to wait for 2030 to 35 to achieve it, you will miss the bus.” The equipment needed to make a foundry, and not just the foundry itself, would also have to be produced in India, he said.Dr. Saraswat added that advanced nodes of 5, 3 and 2 nanometres would be essential for AI systems, including large language models and AI at the edge, even if 28-nanometre chips, and perhaps 14-nanometre chips, could carry today’s Sudarshan Chakra requirements.Import vulnerabilityDeleep Nair, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, traced how far behind domestic fabrication remains. India received complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology from the Radio Corporation of America before Taiwan did, he said, but the Semiconductor Complex Limited (SCL) in Chandigarh was shut for a long period after a fire in the late 1980s. The leading-edge technology running in India today, at SCL, is 180 nanometres, he said, which is the same that Intel, AMD and IBM had in the mid-1990s. Under the DRDO, the Gallium Arsenide Enabling Technology Centre (GAETEC) works on gallium arsenide and gallium nitride, he added.That dependence carries a security risk, Dr. Saraswat said, recalling how supplies of the 8086/8087 processors used in the first Prithvi missile were curtailed once the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme was announced, and dried up further under the Missile Technology Control Regime. “These devices, if they are compromised while they are being manufactured, then your weapon is compromised,” he said, citing Stuxnet, in which a flaw introduced during fabrication allowed a controller running centrifuges at an Iranian enrichment plant to be remotely overrun. Communication links, foreign cloud infrastructure and foreign GPS-based position, navigation and timing systems posed the same problem, he said: “If the cloud is sitting outside, the entire information going through my network-centric warfare system through the cloud, I am compromised.”R&D, mineralsThe prescription from the panel was end-to-end domestic capability under the India Semiconductor Mission covering materials, design, manufacturing, equipment and human resources, including compound semiconductors such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide, which sit at the front end of radars and imaging systems. The waiting line for extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment needed for advanced nodes was already four to five years, Dr. Saraswat noted.Both he and Dr. Pillai called for research and development fabs in the IITs and other universities, on the model of Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre, warning that without them India would again have to import technology for the next generation, such as neuromorphic chips. Dr. Pillai said India already accounted for 20% of the world’s chip design capability. “Why not go in a big way to develop the manpower? Instead of 20%, let us take 50% of the design we should do for the world,” he said, adding that universities should also take up packaging and testing.Dr. Nair said the Tata fab in Gujarat, being set up with a technology licence from Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, would bring the 40-nanometre node, on which a lot of applications could run, while packaging plants were coming up under the mission.Asked why China was ahead, Dr. Saraswat pointed to sustained investment from the 1980s onwards, and to China bringing back Chinese-origin engineers trained in U.S. foundries and universities. “Till 2021 we never made any major investment in semiconductors, and hence we are at this stage,” he said. On critical minerals, Dr. Pillai said India was at an early stage of identifying and stockpiling them. “We don’t even stockpile … China has done it very effectively, and there is going to be a big control coming on us; before that, we should do it,” he said. “We are behind many, many years.”