For years, whenever the topic of semiconductors came up in India, the conversation quickly turned to the same uncomfortable truth. India designs software for the world but depends almost entirely on other countries to build the hardware underneath it. The chips that run our phones, our data centres, our defence systems, and increasingly our daily lives have mostly come from outside, manufactured in Taiwan, designed using American tools and infrastructure, and imported at a cost that goes far beyond just money.
That dependency has been a quiet vulnerability sitting at the centre of India's technology ambitions for a long time. And in April 2026, something changed.
At the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology launched two technologies that most ordinary people will never hear about but that matter more than most headlines suggest. The first was a Silicon Photonics Process Design Kit, a comprehensive library of over fifty verified components that gives engineers in India the building blocks they need to design advanced photonic chips without depending on foreign toolkits. The second was a Universal Programmable Photonic Integrated Circuit Test Engine, an automated platform that can test photonic and optoelectronic modules across a wide range of applications.
Both were developed at the Centre of Excellence for Programmable Photonic Integrated Circuits and Systems at IIT Madras, a facility backed by MeitY and led by Chief Investigator Prof. Bijoy Krishna Das. The launch was led by S. Krishnan, Secretary at MeitY. It was not a prototype announcement or a research paper. These are demonstrable products ready for market adoption.
Most chips today move data using electrical signals. Electrons travel through copper wires, generate heat, consume significant energy, and hit speed limits that become harder to push past as computers get more powerful. Silicon photonics changes that equation by using light instead of electricity to transmit data. Chips that use light are faster, consume far less energy, and can handle the kind of data volumes that artificial intelligence infrastructure, high-performance computing, and modern communication networks are demanding right now. This is not future technology. It is being used today in the most advanced data centres globally. And India, until recently, had no indigenous capability to design or test it. That is what makes what happened at IIT Madras significant.
The semiconductor industry is one of the most concentrated in the world. Taiwan's TSMC manufactures chips for a staggering proportion of the global market. American companies control most of the design software, the equipment, and the intellectual property that the entire ecosystem runs on. When geopolitical tensions rise, when supply chains get disrupted, or when export restrictions get applied, countries that cannot build their own chips find themselves in a difficult position very quickly.
India experienced a version of this during the global chip shortage that followed COVID-19. Automobile production slowed. Electronics prices rose. Industries that had nothing to do with technology felt it anyway because modern manufacturing runs on semiconductors at every level. Building domestic capability in silicon photonics is not just an academic achievement. It is an attempt to reduce that exposure over time, starting with the design and testing infrastructure that has to exist before any manufacturing can follow.
Before this launch, an Indian engineer or company wanting to design a photonic chip had to rely entirely on foreign process design kits and foreign testing infrastructure. That meant intellectual property flowing outside India, costs going up, timelines stretching, and India having no real seat at the table when it came to this next generation of chip technology.
The Process Design Kit developed at IIT Madras now gives Indian researchers and companies a homegrown toolkit to design photonic chips within India. The Test Engine gives them a world-class facility to validate those designs without sending them abroad. Together, they create a foundation that did not exist here before.
Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras, put it simply: the centre has come out with demonstrable products that can be quickly adopted by the market. That is a different kind of statement from a research institution. It signals readiness, not just potential.
It would be inaccurate to say India no longer needs the US or Taiwan tomorrow. That is not what this launch means, and it would be unfair to the real achievement to overstate it.
What this launch means is that India has now built the first serious rungs of a ladder it previously did not own at all. The design kit and the test engine are tools. Turning those tools into a full manufacturing ecosystem will require a Silicon Photonics fabrication facility on Indian soil, something that MeitY's Secretary himself acknowledged needs to follow. The India Semiconductor Mission is expected to support further development under its next phase.
Prof. Bijoy Krishna Das has confirmed that later this year, the centre will begin enabling silicon photonics multi-project wafer fabrication runs with full testing, packaging, and module characterisation. That is the next step from design to actual production.
The honest answer is that the chips coming out of this technology pipeline will eventually sit inside the devices and infrastructure that run daily life. Faster internet. More efficient AI tools. Better defence systems. Cheaper, more powerful electronics built with Indian intellectual property rather than licensed foreign components.
India has spent decades being a brilliant mind in global technology while someone else owned the factory floor. What IIT Madras has built is a small but real piece of that factory floor, the kind that cannot be sanctioned away or made unavailable by a supply chain disruption on the other side of the world.
That is what this launch is actually about. Not just a chip. The beginning of not having to ask permission to build one.
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