Everyone else is
going to sell.
You are going to
sign an MoU.
Semicon India is written for exhibitors and investors. If you run a college, a polytechnic or an ITI, almost none of the official programme is aimed at you — and yet these are the only three days of the year when ISM officials, plant HR heads, equipment vendors and six national delegations are all in one building. This is what to do with them.
Three days is a lot of access and very little time
The 2026 edition closed on 19 September with more than 51,000 registrations and cumulative footfall of around 40,000 — over 600 exhibitors including roughly 300 international participants, representatives from 52 countries, 18,000 sqm of floor, 12 state booths, and — the part that concerns you — a dedicated Workforce Development Pavilion. The 2025 edition, for comparison, drew 350 exhibitors from 48 countries.
The Prime Minister inaugurates on 17 September, under the theme “Transform Tomorrow: Silicon to Systems — Building the Ecosystem”. MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan has framed this edition around two things: three of the twelve Semicon 1.0 projects now in commercial production, and Semicon 2.0’s six pillars.
Pillar 6 is talent. Its ₹1,000 crore training centre provision is approved and its operational guidelines have not published. If they land at or around this event, the institutions holding a signed industry MoU on 20 September are in a different queue from everyone else.
The single mistake to avoid
Treating this as a conference to attend rather than a set of meetings to hold. The keynotes will be recorded and published. The people standing at the CG Semi or Kaynes booth on Thursday afternoon will not be reachable again until next September.
What to carry — and what to leave behind
Carry this
- One page. Your programme concept: cohort size, duration, NSQF level targeted, what your lab already has, what you need. One page, not a prospectus.
- A specific ask. “Will you take six trainees for a two-week floor attachment?” beats “we’d like to collaborate.”
- Your existing assets, honestly listed. A physics lab with a laminar flow bench is worth naming. So is 4,000 sqft of unused workshop.
- Authority to commit. Whoever attends should be able to say yes to a pilot without a board meeting.
- A draft MoU. Two pages, unsigned, ready to leave behind. Almost nobody does this, which is exactly why it works.
Leave this at home
- The institutional brochure. It goes in a bin at the venue. Everyone knows this and everyone brings one anyway.
- A placement-record pitch. Nobody at an OSAT booth cares about your IT placements.
- Requests for donations or CSR. This reframes you as a beneficiary rather than a supply partner, and the conversation ends there.
- A design-programme proposal. C2S already covers design at 320 institutions expanding to 500. You will be competing with a funded, functioning scheme.
- Vague timelines. “Next academic year” reads as “never”. Name a month.
Three days, hour by hour
Times below are indicative — the detailed agenda publishes close to the event. The sequence is what matters: policy on Day 1, industry on Day 2, commitments on Day 3.
Inaugural session
The Prime Minister inaugurates. Expect the CEO roundtable and nine-or-so global CXOs, as in 2025. This is where any Semicon 2.0 implementation announcement would surface. Sit through it and note exactly what is said about Pillar 6 — you will quote it for the next twelve months.
Walk the Workforce Development Pavilion before it fills
360 sqm. Small enough to cover properly in ninety minutes on Day 1 while everyone else is still in the plenary. Map who is there, collect cards, book Day 2 slots. Do not pitch on the first pass — you are building a target list.
State pavilions
Gujarat, Odisha, Assam, UP, Punjab and others run their own desks. State semiconductor policies stack on top of central schemes, and a state officer is far more accessible than an ISM one. If your institution is in a state with a semiconductor policy, this is your highest-yield hour.
Write the day up before you sleep
Names, roles, what was promised, who to chase tomorrow. By Saturday you will not remember which of the four people at the Kaynes booth said the useful thing.
Plant operators, before the crowd
Micron, Kaynes Semicon, CG Semi, Tata Electronics. Ask for whoever handles hiring or plant HR, not the marketing lead on the stand. The question that opens the conversation: “What roles are you struggling to fill locally, and what would a candidate need to be interviewable?” That is a question they want to answer.
Equipment and materials vendors
Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA and the tooling companies. Two things to ask about: refurbished or end-of-life equipment donation programmes for training labs, and whether their India training curriculum is licensable. Lam’s Semiverse deployment with IISc shows this is a route they will take.
Country pavilions — see the map below
Six national delegations, each useful for something different. Most institution visitors walk past these entirely because they read as trade-and-investment stands. They are also training-system stands. Booth 1127 — Brain Domain and BDUni — is on the way; we will be there through the afternoon.
The hackathon and startup areas
Worth thirty minutes. The SEMICON India Hackathon has KLA and Applied Materials engineers mentoring teams to working prototypes. If you want a read on where industry attention actually sits versus where the funding is, this is it.
Go back to your three best conversations
Not all twenty. Three. Return to the stand, remind them of the specific ask, and try to leave with either a signed MoU, a named follow-up date, or a site visit invitation. Anything vaguer than that is a card, not a lead.
ISM and MeitY desks
By Day 3 the queues thin. The single most valuable question you can ask: “When Pillar 6 training centre guidelines publish, what will the eligibility criteria most likely include?” Even a partial answer shapes your proposal months before the notification.
Photograph every card and back it up
Sounds trivial. Lost cards are the single most common way a good event produces nothing.
The six country pavilions, read for talent
Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Singapore, Malaysia and Sweden. Each is there for trade and investment. Each is also a working example of a training system India is trying to build, and delegations are usually willing to talk about how their own workforce pipeline is organised — a conversation nobody else at the event is asking them for.
Netherlands
ASML’s home ecosystem. Ask about technician training models — the Dutch system pairs vocational institutes directly with equipment makers, which is the exact structure Pillar 6 is trying to fund.
Japan
Specialty chemicals, photoresists, electronic-grade gases — three of the segments where India imports 85–90%. Also the source of the quality-discipline training culture that OSAT floors run on.
Korea
Advanced packaging and memory. Korea industrialised its workforce pipeline alongside its fabs within a single generation — the closest analogue to what India is attempting.
Singapore
Arguably the most directly relevant pavilion for an Indian institution. Singapore built a world-class assembly and test sector on a technician workforce trained through polytechnics. That is your model, already proven.
Malaysia
Fifty years of OSAT, built on local technician training in Penang. If you want to know what your programme looks like at maturity and what it took, this is the delegation to ask.
Sweden
Wide-bandgap and power electronics — a NITI Aayog priority segment and where CDIL in Mohali is expanding. Narrower relevance, but almost no competition for their attention.
Booth 1127 — Brain Domain & BDUni
I will be at Yashobhoomi across all three days with the Fidus team, and our partner Brain Domain Semiconductor Solutions is exhibiting at booth 1127 with BDUni, its semiconductor talent development arm. Brain Domain is an ISTCian venture, founded by Sandeep Sharma of the 1986 batch — so if you are from a technical institution, that stand is a conversation worth having rather than a stall to walk past.
If you want a second pair of eyes on a programme concept, or an introduction to someone we have already spoken to on the floor, come and find us. Bring the one-pager, not the prospectus.
The fortnight after decides whether it was worth going
Almost every institution that attends an event like this comes back energised and does nothing for six weeks. By then the contact has forgotten the conversation and the moment has passed. The follow-up window is roughly fourteen days.
Within 48 hours — email every card
Short, specific, and referencing the actual conversation. “You mentioned you are hiring test technicians at Sanand and struggling to find candidates who have handled equipment. Here is the two-week attachment we discussed.” Not a template.
Within one week — convert one to a call
One is enough. A thirty-minute call with a plant HR lead is worth more than twenty polite email replies, and it is the step that turns an event contact into a working relationship.
Within two weeks — send the draft MoU
Even if nobody asked for it. A two-page document with names in it forces a decision and gives them something to route internally. Vague goodwill routes nowhere.
Within a month — start Phase 1 regardless
Do not wait for the Pillar 6 notification. When applications open, an institution with one running cohort of twenty is in a different category from one with a proposal. That gap cannot be closed retrospectively.
Three days of access.
Most institutions waste them.
Free 45-minute session on your programme concept, funding route and who to target at the event — before you travel, or at the venue. No charge, no obligation.