Lam Research, ISM and IISc Target 60,000 Fabrication Engineers — Simulation First, Cleanroom Later
ISM has partnered with Lam Research on a large-scale training programme in nanofabrication and process-engineering skills, explicitly aimed at augmenting the workforce for ATMP and advanced packaging. Delivery runs through Semiverse Solutions, Lam's virtual fab simulation platform, deployed nationally with IISc as training partner. The stated target is 60,000 semiconductor fabrication engineers over ten years.
The arrangement is tripartite: Lam Research contributes the Semiverse Solutions platform, with software licences valued at roughly $29 million; the Indian Institute of Science trains the trainers; ISM funds infrastructure and national deployment. Semiverse is a virtual fab environment that lets students run process steps — deposition, etch, lithography — without physical equipment.
The design logic is the same one behind C2S. Chips to Startups put EDA tools from Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens, Renesas, Ansys and AMD into 315 institutions and has trained roughly 67,000 engineers against an 85,000 ten-year target, with student designs fabricated and tested at the Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali. Semiverse applies that model to fabrication rather than design.
Under Semicon 2.0, the C2S institutional footprint expands from 315 to 500.
Simulation solves the capital problem — a virtual fab costs a licence rather than a cleanroom — and it solves it at national scale, which nothing else in the Pillar 6 toolkit does. It does not solve the employability problem on its own. Process logic learned in software does not transfer to gowning discipline, particle control, or recognising a wire-bond machine drifting out of spec by sound. The C2S precedent is instructive here: what made it credible was the SCL Mohali tape-out, the physical step at the end. A fabrication programme without an equivalent hands-on terminus produces graduates who understand a process they have never run. For institutions, that is the opening: the layer that pairs simulation with real hours on real hardware, near the plants that are hiring.