Don't Build From Zero: Why India Should Join Europe's Open Silicon Ecosystem Now

India's semiconductor conversation is usually framed around fabs, process nodes and billions of rupees of investment.

Those things matter. But there is another resource that may matter even more in the long term: people who know how to build the hardware and software that go into those fabs.

India already has a large and capable software workforce. It has experience in programming, simulation, verification, cloud infrastructure, embedded software and mathematical modelling. What India has historically lacked is the same depth of accumulated industrial experience in semiconductor design, reusable hardware IP, verification, advanced packaging and hardware-software co-design.

That gap creates an unusual opportunity.

Across Europe, a collection of open-source and publicly supported projects is beginning to build exactly those foundational layers. RISC-V processors, accelerators, interconnects, memory systems, hardware abstraction, software-defined systems, open government workspaces and advanced FD-SOI process technology are developing in parallel.

India does not need to wait until all of these capabilities exist domestically before participating.

It should join the learning process now.

Europe Is Building More Than Individual Open-Source Projects

At first glance, Europe's digital-sovereignty efforts can look fragmented.

France has been developing open government and workplace software. Germany has been funding critical open-source infrastructure. The Netherlands is pursuing digital autonomy for government and developing DAWO, an open government workplace based around NixOS, with components covering the operating system, fleet management, AI, cloud, identity and collaboration software. The Dutch government has explicitly identified digital autonomy, open source and reducing strategic dependencies as policy objectives.

At the hardware level, projects such as RIGOLETTO are developing open RISC-V-based platforms.

And beneath that, Europe is investing in semiconductor technologies such as FD-SOI.

Individually, these projects are useful.

Together, they begin to resemble something much more important: the foundations of a sovereign computing stack.

RIGOLETTO Is Particularly Interesting

RIGOLETTO is not simply another attempt to design a RISC-V processor.

Its stated objective is to create a complete open RISC-V hardware platform that European chipmakers, Tier-1 suppliers and automotive manufacturers can share and extend. The project covers processor cores, AI and machine-learning accelerators, interconnects, memory hierarchies and peripheral subsystems, while also concentrating on standardisation and interoperability. It is scheduled to run from July 2025 to July 2028 and involves 72 partners.

That is important because a processor by itself is not a computing platform.

A usable platform requires:

• CPU cores
• accelerators
• memory systems
• interconnects
• peripherals
• security
• firmware
• compilers
• operating-system support
• drivers
• verification
• development tools
• standards

RIGOLETTO is therefore attacking the much harder problem of making open hardware usable as an ecosystem.

That is precisely the direction India should be watching.

The Most Important Part May Be What Happens After 2028

RIGOLETTO's July 2028 end date should not be interpreted as the end of the knowledge it creates.

The European open-hardware ecosystem is already creating mechanisms for projects to feed into one another. The Eclipse Foundation reports that the European Unified RISC-V IP Access Platform, launched in January 2026, brings together verified RISC-V artifacts from projects including TRISTAN, ISOLDE and RIGOLETTO into a common collection.

That is a crucial development.

A publicly funded research project can disappear from the headlines when its grant ends. But its engineers, code, IP, documentation, verification environments, standards work and relationships can continue.

The real output of a project such as RIGOLETTO is therefore not merely a collection of processor designs.

It is a population of people who now know how to build industrial-grade open hardware.

That knowledge can move into the next project.

And then the next one.

That is how an ecosystem forms.

India Should Not Wait for the Ecosystem to Come to India

This creates a strategic choice for India.

India could attempt to construct the entire foundation independently:

• learn RISC-V from scratch
• develop processor architectures
• develop accelerators
• build verification expertise
• develop interconnects
• create hardware abstraction layers
• develop compilers
• write drivers
• learn safety certification
• develop semiconductor IP
• build design flows
• learn hardware-software co-design

Or India could participate in open international projects where much of that learning is already happening.

The second approach is not avoiding learning.

It is learning by doing.

Software May Be India's Bridge Into Hardware

This is where India's historical strengths become relevant.

India has not traditionally been a leading semiconductor manufacturing power. It has, however, developed enormous capabilities in software engineering, simulation, verification, embedded programming, mathematical modelling and large-scale IT systems.

Open hardware changes the boundary between those disciplines.

A modern chip designer does not simply draw transistors and send them to a factory. Much of the work happens through software:

• hardware description languages
• simulation
• formal verification
• test generation
• logic synthesis
• physical-design automation
• power analysis
• timing analysis
• compiler development
• firmware
• drivers

The boundary increasingly looks like this:

Software → simulation → hardware description → verification → synthesis → physical design → silicon.

That is a much more approachable learning path than simply telling a software engineer to become a semiconductor process engineer overnight.

Open PDKs Make the Bridge Even Shorter

The Google-SkyWater programme demonstrated an important part of this model.

Google and SkyWater worked on an open PDK for SkyWater's 90nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator process, following the earlier SKY130 open-silicon effort. Google explicitly described open PDKs and manufacturing shuttles as mechanisms for developers and researchers to explore different power, performance and area trade-offs and to build real silicon.

The significance is larger than the particular 90nm process.

An engineer can move from:

software and simulation → RTL → verification → physical design → fabricated chip.

That is an educational pipeline.

It allows people who were previously separated from physical hardware by several layers of industry to begin crossing those boundaries.

India should be paying close attention to this.

Europe Is Also Developing the Other Half: FD-SOI

There is an equally interesting development happening in Europe around FD-SOI.

The FAMES pilot line is developing advanced FD-SOI technologies at 10nm and 7nm, targeting areas such as energy-efficient computing, RF, sensors, embedded memory, edge AI and other applications. Its open-access programme already provides a 10nm FD-SOI pathfinding PDK for digital-circuit evaluation, including standard-cell libraries, SPICE models and physical-verification tools.

FAMES also provides access pathways for technologies including 10nm and 7nm FD-SOI, embedded non-volatile memory, RF components, 3D integration and power-management technologies.

This does not mean that RIGOLETTO is an FD-SOI project.

It is not.

Nor should we assume that every European RISC-V processor will be manufactured using FD-SOI.

The more interesting observation is that Europe is developing open hardware and advanced low-power semiconductor technology at the same time.

Those two developments could eventually reinforce one another.

Why FD-SOI Is Particularly Interesting for India

India does not need advanced semiconductor technology only for supercomputers.

It needs enormous numbers of efficient chips for ordinary things:

• smart meters
• air conditioners
• refrigerators
• washing machines
• water purifiers
• robot vacuums
• industrial controllers
• automotive electronics
• cameras
• sensors
• wearables
• communication equipment
• edge-AI devices
• robotics

FD-SOI's attraction is therefore not simply that it can produce a fast processor.

Its attraction is that it can be part of an energy-efficient computing strategy.

That is precisely the type of technology India could deploy at enormous scale.

The Bigger Opportunity: Hardware Becomes More Software-Defined

This may be the most important insight of all.

Open hardware does not make physical hardware disappear.

Instead, it makes more of the hardware architecture accessible through software, reusable IP and programmable interfaces.

A processor core becomes an IP block.

An accelerator becomes an IP block.

An interconnect becomes an IP block.

A memory controller becomes an IP block.

A peripheral becomes an IP block.

Software then determines how these pieces are used, combined and optimised.

Hardware begins to acquire some of the characteristics of software:

• reuse
• modularity
• versioning
• testing
• repositories
• interfaces
• community contributions
• forks
• improvements
• reference implementations

This is extremely favourable to countries with large software communities.

India should not underestimate that advantage.

The Missing Step Is Participation

India's response should not simply be to create an "Indian RIGOLETTO."

That would miss the point.

The first step should be participation.

Indian universities should participate.

Indian startups should participate.

Indian semiconductor designers should participate.

Indian software engineers should participate.

Indian researchers should participate.

And individual developers should be encouraged to participate.

Not merely as users.

As contributors.

The Difference Between Consuming and Learning

There is a major difference between downloading an open-source processor and contributing to the project that develops it.

The first provides a component.

The second provides knowledge.

Consider an Indian engineer contributing to an open RISC-V project.

Initially, that engineer might work on a software tool.

Then a compiler optimisation.

Then a driver.

Then hardware verification.

Then an accelerator.

Then perhaps an entire subsystem.

After several years, the engineer has crossed a boundary that previously separated software engineering from hardware engineering.

Multiply that by thousands of engineers.

Now the country has something much more valuable than a collection of imported IP blocks.

It has human capital.

2028 Should Be a Milestone, Not a Deadline

RIGOLETTO's July 2028 completion date is therefore useful as a strategic marker.

India should not wait until July 2028 and ask:

"Can we get the finished technology?"

It should ask today:

"How many Indian engineers can participate before the project finishes?"

The objective should be to emerge from this period with people who understand:

• RISC-V architecture
• processor design
• AI accelerators
• memory systems
• interconnects
• hardware verification
• software-defined systems
• Linux integration
• drivers
• firmware
• hardware security
• automotive and industrial requirements

Then those people can carry that knowledge into industries that European projects may not be targeting directly.

From Cars to Computers

RIGOLETTO is primarily focused on automotive computing.

That does not mean its knowledge has to remain inside automobiles.

A processor architecture does not know whether it is controlling a vehicle or a washing machine.

An AI accelerator does not inherently care whether it is processing automotive sensor data or performing computer-vision inference in a robot.

An interconnect does not care whether it connects automotive subsystems or components in a laptop.

The underlying knowledge can move.

That creates a potential path for India:

European automotive open hardware → Indian engineers → Indian adaptation → Indian consumer hardware.

And the consumer hardware market is enormous.

Gen4 Could Be the Indian Reference Platform

This is where our earlier Gen4 concept becomes less speculative.

Gen4 does not need to begin as an entirely Indian invention.

It could be an Indian integration and evolution of a much larger open ecosystem.

Imagine a platform containing:

• RISC-V CPU cores
• vector processing
• open GPU technology
• NPU acceleration
• hardware video engines
• security hardware
• standard interconnects
• modern memory controllers
• Linux support
• LLVM tooling
• Mesa graphics support
• AI runtimes
• open firmware

The first implementation might use a relatively mature process.

Later implementations could migrate to more advanced nodes.

The architecture and software ecosystem should survive the process transition.

That is the real meaning of "build once, use everywhere."

28nm Does Not Have to Be the End

India's semiconductor journey could therefore look very different from the simplistic race toward the smallest possible transistor.

One possible progression could be:

28nm → mainstream volume computing

22nm/FD-SOI → efficient edge and embedded computing

14/16nm → stronger mainstream computing

7nm → high-performance mainstream and edge computing

The exact nodes and dates will depend on economics, technology transfer, domestic manufacturing capability and international partnerships.

The important thing is that the knowledge accumulated between the nodes does not disappear.

India Should Not Build Everything

This is where the idea connects directly with the earlier doctrine of India Must Learn, Not Just Consume.

Learning does not mean manufacturing every component domestically from day one.

India can use European semiconductor technology.

It can use American EDA tools.

It can use Japanese materials and equipment.

It can use Taiwanese and Korean manufacturing expertise.

It can use global open-source software.

It can participate in RISC-V projects around the world.

None of that is inherently incompatible with technological sovereignty.

The problem begins when India remains permanently unable to understand, modify, maintain or replace the critical layers on which it depends.

Participation changes that equation.

Don't Build From Zero

India often approaches technological sovereignty as if the choices were:

Build everything ourselves or remain dependent on everyone else.

That is a false choice.

There is a third option:

Join the global open technology commons, learn from it, contribute to it and eventually build domestic capabilities on top of it.

That is not dependency.

It is apprenticeship.

And apprenticeship is exactly what India needs in areas where it has historically had less hardware experience.

The Software Engineer Can Become a Hardware Engineer

This may ultimately be the most important consequence.

A young Indian engineer who begins today with Linux, Python, C++, Verilog, simulation or RISC-V does not have to remain a software-only engineer.

Open hardware can provide a gradual path:

software → simulation → RTL → verification → FPGA → ASIC → silicon.

The engineer learns by crossing each boundary.

The knowledge compounds.

Eventually, the distinction between "hardware engineer" and "software engineer" becomes less rigid.

That is precisely the type of hardware-software co-design talent that India will need if its semiconductor manufacturing ambitions are to mature into a complete technology ecosystem.

India's Opportunity Is Not to Copy Europe

India should not attempt to reproduce every European programme.

Europe has its own industrial structure, automotive industry, semiconductor companies, research institutions and strategic priorities.

India has different strengths and requirements.

India has a huge software workforce.

It has an enormous domestic market.

It has a growing electronics-manufacturing ecosystem.

It is building semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

And it has millions of potential developers who could participate in open technology.

The objective should therefore be connection rather than duplication.

Europe Can Be the Classroom; India Can Become a Laboratory

This does not mean Europe teaches and India merely learns.

The relationship should eventually become circular.

India can contribute software.

India can contribute verification.

India can contribute IP.

India can contribute hardware designs.

India can contribute deployment experience.

India can contribute new applications.

India can eventually contribute manufacturing capacity.

And Indian engineers can take what they learn into areas that are particularly important for India:

• affordable laptops
• desktops
• development boards
• smart appliances
• smart meters
• robotics
• automotive electronics
• agricultural technology
• edge AI
• home servers
• industrial automation

The Real Shortcut Is Human Capital

There is a temptation to think of technology transfer as receiving a machine, a licence or a PDK.

But the most valuable technology transfer is often invisible.

It is the engineer who learns why a design failed.

The researcher who learns how an accelerator should be verified.

The developer who learns how hardware should expose an interface to Linux.

The designer who learns how a memory hierarchy affects real workloads.

The team that learns how to turn an academic processor into industrial-grade IP.

Those people carry the knowledge wherever they go.

That is why India's participation should begin before the European projects are finished, not after.

From Participation to an Indian Open Consortium

Eventually, India may still want the larger institution we have discussed before: an open Indian hardware-and-software consortium.

But it should not begin by trying to hire thousands of people and recreate everything from scratch.

It can begin organically.

Indian contributors join international projects.

Indian universities teach the technologies.

Indian companies commercialise components.

Indian researchers develop new IP.

Government funding supports critical open infrastructure.

Those people and organisations gradually form a network.

Eventually, that network can become an Indian open technology consortium.

By then, it would not be an organisation assembled from nothing.

It would be an organisation assembled from experience.

The Larger Vision

Europe's current efforts may therefore represent something larger than European digital sovereignty.

They may be early building blocks of a global open computing ecosystem.

RISC-V provides an open architectural foundation.

Open hardware projects provide reusable IP.

Open PDK initiatives connect designs to silicon.

FD-SOI provides another path toward efficient computing.

Linux and other open-source projects provide the software foundation.

Government projects such as DAWO demonstrate that open technology can extend into real institutional infrastructure rather than remaining a hobbyist exercise.

The pieces are still fragmented.

They are still incomplete.

Some projects will fail.

Some technologies will be replaced.

Some organisations will change direction.

That is normal.

The important thing is that the knowledge and interfaces can remain open enough for the next generation to build upon them.

India Should Be There While the Foundation Is Being Poured

India does not need to wait until the open hardware ecosystem is mature.

It should participate while it is immature.

That is when contributions matter most.

That is when standards are still being shaped.

That is when relationships are being formed.

That is when engineers gain foundational experience.

And that is when India can move from being a future customer to being a present contributor.

By 2028, when RIGOLETTO reaches the end of its current project period, the most valuable Indian outcome should not be a PDF explaining what RIGOLETTO achieved.

It should be a generation of Indian engineers who can say:

"I helped build it."

From Learn to Build

This is the natural continuation of the doctrine:

India Must Learn, Not Just Consume.

Learning does not mean refusing outside technology.

It means using outside technology as a route toward deeper capability.

India does not have to build every foundation alone.

It needs to know which foundations matter, participate in building them, and eventually become capable of extending them independently.

That is why India's semiconductor strategy should not begin and end at the fab.

The fab needs designers.

Designers need IP.

IP needs software.

Software needs hardware interfaces.

Hardware needs verification.

Verification needs tools.

Tools need developers.

Developers need communities.

Communities need sustained funding.

And the entire ecosystem needs products that people actually use.

That is where our earlier Gen4 idea eventually fits: not as an isolated "Indian chip", but as a reference platform demonstrating that open hardware, open software, domestic manufacturing and real-world products can work together.

Own the Ordinary, Rent the Extraordinary

India does not need to win every semiconductor race.

It does not need to manufacture every processor.

It does not need to replace every proprietary application.

It does need to understand the foundations beneath the ordinary technology on which its society depends.

That means learning how to build processors.

Learning how to build accelerators.

Learning how to connect hardware and software.

Learning how to manufacture.

Learning how to maintain open infrastructure.

Learning how to turn research into reliable products.

And learning how to contribute those improvements back to the global commons.

The opportunity emerging in Europe is therefore not something India should watch from the sidelines.

It is a classroom, a laboratory and a community being built in real time.

India should enter while the doors are open.

Not to copy Europe.

Not to become dependent on Europe.

But to learn alongside Europe, contribute alongside Europe and eventually build capabilities that neither India nor Europe could have created as quickly alone.

Because the ultimate goal is not to own every extraordinary technology.

It is to ensure that ordinary technology is never beyond our understanding.

Don't build from zero.

Join the commons. Learn the foundations. Contribute to them. Then build on them.

That is how a software nation can begin becoming a hardware nation.

And that may be one of the fastest routes India has to genuine technological sovereignty.

Beyond Desalination: Designing India’s Sovereign Water and Crop Grid

A follow-up to “What’s Missing Isn’t Water—It’s Vision: Designing India’s Sovereign Crop Grid”

🧭 The Question Has Changed

In September 2025, I asked a relatively simple question: what if India stopped thinking of desalination merely as a way to produce drinking water and started treating it as strategic infrastructure?

The idea was deliberately ambitious. India has an enormous coastline, large areas of water stress, declining groundwater reserves and agricultural regions where the choice of crop is increasingly constrained by water availability.

But there is an important problem with the original argument.

Desalinated water is not free water.

It requires energy, treatment infrastructure, intake and discharge systems, pipelines, pumping, maintenance and capital. Therefore, simply producing desalinated water and sending it into conventional agriculture would often make little economic sense.

That changes the question.

The question is no longer “How can India use desalination to grow more crops?”

The better question is: “Where does a cubic metre of desalinated water create the greatest strategic value?”

That is the beginning of a much more interesting idea: a sovereign water and crop grid.

🌊 Desalination Should Be a Node, Not a Crop Irrigation Scheme

India's coastline is often cited as being around 7,500 kilometres long. More recently, the government has adopted a substantially larger figure of more than 11,000 kilometres following a new GIS-based measurement methodology.

The exact number is less important than the underlying fact: India has an enormous interface with the sea.

That creates an unusual strategic opportunity.

Instead of imagining a desalination plant as a machine whose sole purpose is to produce drinking water, we can imagine it as the centre of a regional water system.

A desalination node could potentially serve:

• municipal drinking water
• industrial water requirements
• high-value agriculture
• protected cultivation
• nurseries and seed production
• aquaculture
• strategic water reserves
• selected ecological restoration projects
• groundwater management where technically appropriate

This is a much stronger model than simply saying, “Let's desalinate seawater and irrigate farms.”

The desalination plant becomes a regional freshwater node.

The surrounding economy is then designed around the availability, cost and strategic value of that water.

💧 What Can 100 MLD Actually Mean?

A 100 MLD desalination plant produces approximately 100 million litres of treated water per day.

That is approximately:

• 100,000 cubic metres per day
• 36.5 million cubic metres per year if operated continuously

At first glance, that sounds enormous.

But agriculture can consume enormous quantities of water as well.

If the same water is used indiscriminately for a thirsty, low-value crop, the economics can quickly become unattractive. The plant may produce millions of cubic metres of water but create surprisingly little additional economic value.

Therefore, the old assumption that a 100 MLD plant automatically equals a fixed number of hectares of farmland should be discarded.

The actual agricultural area depends on:

• crop water requirements
• local rainfall
• soil characteristics
• evapotranspiration
• irrigation efficiency
• mulching and moisture management
• growing season
• salinity
• water losses during distribution

In other words, 100 MLD is a water supply figure, not a farmland figure.

That distinction is essential.

🌾 So Which Crops Should Receive Desalinated Water?

This is where the original “Sovereign Crop Grid” idea becomes more interesting.

We should not simply select crops because they are drought tolerant.

A drought-tolerant crop already has an advantage precisely because it needs less irrigation. Using expensive desalinated water to grow it may not always be the best use of that water.

Instead, crops should be evaluated using several criteria:

• water productivity
• economic value per unit of water
• nutritional or food-security value
• climate resilience
• salinity tolerance
• soil impact
• storage life
• export potential
• employment generation
• strategic importance

This produces a very different crop hierarchy.

🌴 Tier One: High-Value Perennial Crops

Some desalinated water may be most valuable when used to establish long-lived orchards rather than annual field crops.

Dates remain an interesting candidate for parts of western India, particularly regions with appropriate climate and soil conditions.

Date palms have significant tolerance to heat and saline conditions compared with many conventional crops, and the fruit has a high value-to-weight ratio.

But there is an important correction to the original article: dates should not simply be described as a “low-water crop.” Mature date production can require substantial irrigation, depending on climate, soil, density and management.

The argument for dates therefore isn't that they require almost no water.

The argument is that they may generate relatively high economic value from land that has limited conventional agricultural options.

Other fruit and tree crops could also be evaluated depending on location.

The principle is:

Use desalinated water to unlock productive possibilities that would otherwise be severely constrained by local water quality or availability.

🌱 Tier Two: Protected and Controlled Agriculture

This may actually be more important than conventional open-field agriculture.

Greenhouses, shade houses, hydroponic systems and other forms of protected cultivation can dramatically change the relationship between water and crop production.

Instead of applying water across an enormous open field and accepting substantial evaporation and drainage losses, water can be delivered directly to the crop environment.

Potential candidates include:

• vegetables
• leafy greens
• seed production
• nursery plants
• specialty herbs
• high-value flowers
• medicinal and aromatic plants where appropriate

This is where desalinated water begins to make more economic sense.

Instead of spending energy to produce freshwater and then wasting much of its value through inefficient irrigation, the system attempts to extract as much economic output as possible from every cubic metre.

🍄 Mushrooms Are an Interesting Special Case

Mushrooms deserve a place in the discussion because they demonstrate why “agriculture” should not automatically mean large fields.

Mushroom production can take place in controlled environments with relatively small land requirements.

The crop is essentially converting controlled inputs into a high-value food product rather than depending on enormous areas of irrigated soil.

That makes containerised or climate-controlled agriculture an interesting component of a coastal water-and-food industrial cluster.

The same principle applies to seed production and nurseries.

Sometimes the highest-value agricultural use of water is not producing the final food crop at all.

It may be producing the seedlings, planting material or high-value inputs that enable thousands of hectares elsewhere to become productive.

🌾 What About Millets?

Millets remain extremely important—but probably not for the reason we might initially assume.

Millets are attractive because they are relatively drought tolerant and can play an important role in food security and climate resilience.

However, this creates an interesting paradox.

If a region can already grow millet using rainfall or limited freshwater, using expensive desalinated water to grow millet may not be the best economic allocation.

Instead, desalinated water could be used to support the food system around millet.

• seed multiplication
• processing
• storage
• value-added foods
• irrigation during critical drought periods
• soil restoration and crop rotation

In other words, millet may belong in the sovereign crop grid, but not necessarily as the primary consumer of desalinated water.

🌸 What About Saffron?

Saffron is another fascinating example because it has extremely high economic value relative to its physical volume.

Controlled-environment saffron production, including hydroponic or indoor approaches, has attracted interest because it can decouple some aspects of production from traditional geography.

But this does not mean India should build enormous desalination plants simply to grow saffron indoors.

Indoor agriculture has its own energy requirements.

Once again, the correct question is not:

“Can we grow saffron with desalinated water?”

It is:

“Does the complete energy-water-land system produce enough value to justify itself?”

Saffron could therefore be a niche component of the system, particularly where high-value controlled agriculture is already economically justified.

🌵 The Forgotten Category: Salinity-Tolerant Crops

One of the most interesting opportunities may be crops that can tolerate conditions that make conventional agriculture difficult.

Instead of fighting the environment completely, the crop grid could deliberately match crops to environmental conditions.

This could include selected salt-tolerant crops, halophytes, fodder species and other plants suited to marginal environments.

That changes the philosophy of agricultural development.

Rather than asking:

“How do we make this land behave like Punjab?”

we ask:

“What productive ecosystem naturally fits this land?”

That is a much more sustainable starting point.

🌱 Can Desalination Become a Soil Revival Strategy?

This was one of the most provocative ideas in the original article.

And the answer is:

Potentially yes—but not simply by pouring desalinated water onto degraded soil.

Soil degradation has many causes:

• salinity
• sodicity
• erosion
• loss of organic matter
• compaction
• nutrient depletion
• poor drainage
• overgrazing
• repeated monocropping

Water alone cannot solve these problems.

However, reliable freshwater can become one component of a soil-rehabilitation programme.

🧂 The Salinity Problem

This requires particular care.

Irrigation can actually make degraded soils worse if drainage is inadequate. Water evaporates, while salts remain behind. Repeated irrigation can therefore increase salt concentration in the root zone.

Desalinated water is attractive because it begins with very low salinity compared with seawater or many degraded groundwater sources.

But low-salinity irrigation water does not magically remove existing salts.

To reclaim saline soils, water must be combined with appropriate drainage and soil-management practices so that accumulated salts can be moved away from the root zone.

That means a genuine soil-revival project may require:

• freshwater application
• drainage
• soil amendments where appropriate
• organic matter
• salt-tolerant pioneer crops
• mulching
• cover crops
• careful irrigation scheduling
• monitoring of soil electrical conductivity

The desalination plant is therefore not the soil-revival system.

It is one component of the system.

🌿 The Real Soil-Recovery Opportunity

Imagine a degraded agricultural zone where groundwater has become increasingly saline.

A sovereign water project could establish a controlled freshwater supply while simultaneously changing agricultural practices.

Instead of immediately attempting maximum crop production, the first phase could focus on rehabilitation.

1. Map soil salinity and groundwater quality.
2. Improve drainage where required.
3. Use carefully controlled freshwater to manage the root zone.
4. Introduce suitable cover crops and salt-tolerant species.
5. Increase organic matter.
6. Reduce unnecessary soil disturbance.
7. Introduce efficient irrigation.
8. Monitor soil conditions over several seasons.
9. Gradually introduce higher-value crops where the soil recovers.

Now desalination is doing something much more interesting than simply replacing groundwater.

It is helping create a controlled transition from degraded land to productive land.

💧 Water Should Have a Hierarchy

A sovereign water grid should not distribute water equally simply because equal distribution appears fair.

Different sources and qualities of water should have different uses.

A possible hierarchy could look like this:

1. Drinking water and essential public needs
2. Critical drought resilience
3. High-value agriculture
4. Protected cultivation
5. Industrial requirements
6. Soil rehabilitation
7. Lower-value conventional agriculture where other water sources are insufficient

This doesn't mean the poorest farmer should be denied water because a greenhouse produces more money.

It means that the system should recognise that different water uses produce different forms of value.

Food security, employment, ecological recovery, industrial production and export revenue are all legitimate objectives.

A sovereign system should optimise among them rather than pretending they are interchangeable.

⚡ The Energy Question Cannot Be Ignored

There is one issue that the original article did not give enough attention to: energy.

Desalination is fundamentally an energy-consuming process.

Therefore, a serious sovereign desalination strategy must be connected to India's energy strategy.

That creates another interesting possibility.

Coastal desalination nodes could potentially be integrated with:

• solar generation
• wind generation
• grid infrastructure
• energy storage
• industrial demand

Instead of thinking about water and electricity as completely separate infrastructure systems, India could design water-energy-industrial clusters.

Surplus renewable electricity could support water production when economically appropriate, while reliable water could support industrial and agricultural activity.

This is where the idea starts moving beyond agriculture.

🏭 The Coastal Sovereign Water Cluster

Imagine a hypothetical coastal district.

Instead of building a desalination plant in isolation, the region receives an integrated infrastructure node containing:

• a modular desalination plant
• renewable-energy generation
• water storage
• municipal water connections
• industrial water connections
• protected agriculture
• high-value orchards
• soil-rehabilitation zones
• agricultural processing
• cold storage
• food-processing facilities
• water-quality monitoring

Now the desalination plant isn't merely producing water.

It is enabling an economic ecosystem.

This could create jobs not only on farms but in engineering, construction, maintenance, food processing, logistics, research, water management and renewable energy.

🧂 And Then There Is Brine

There is another reason why desalination should not be treated as a magic solution.

Every desalination plant produces concentrated reject water, commonly called brine.

Its management must be part of the project from the beginning.

Coastal location does not automatically mean that brine can simply be discharged into the ocean without consequences.

Outfall design, dilution, local marine conditions, monitoring and environmental regulation all matter.

A sovereign water strategy therefore has to be a water-and-brine strategy.

Waste streams should be treated as engineering problems rather than ignored until the plant is operational.

🗺️ Stop Thinking in Terms of “Desalination Plants Every 150 km”

The original article proposed a conceptual deployment of modular 100 MLD plants at regular intervals along India's coastline.

The idea was useful as a thought experiment, but the better model is now clear.

India should not build desalination plants according to a ruler.

It should build them according to need.

A national water map could identify locations where several conditions overlap:

• severe water stress
• high population growth
• industrial demand
• agricultural potential
• degraded groundwater
• renewable-energy potential
• existing transport infrastructure
• proximity to suitable coastal intake locations
• manageable environmental impact

Those locations become candidates for desalination nodes.

Some nodes may be primarily municipal.

Others may be industrial.

Others may support high-value agriculture.

And some may deliberately be designed around ecosystem and soil recovery.

🌾 The Sovereign Crop Grid

The original idea of a “Sovereign Crop Grid” can therefore be upgraded.

It shouldn't be a list of crops that India wants to grow.

It should be a decision system.

Every region receives a profile containing:

• water availability
• water quality
• soil type
• soil salinity
• rainfall
• temperature
• evapotranspiration
• energy availability
• transport access
• market access
• labour availability
• crop water productivity
• economic value
• food-security value
• ecological impact

The system then recommends a portfolio rather than a single crop.

One region might receive:

• dates
• millets
• fodder
• soil-rehabilitation crops

Another might receive:

• greenhouse vegetables
• seed production
• flowers
• nurseries

A third might receive:

• mushrooms
• controlled-environment crops
• food processing
• cold storage

And another region may receive almost no desalinated agricultural water at all because its existing freshwater can be used more efficiently elsewhere.

🧠 The Principle: Don't Maximise Water Use. Maximise Water Value.

This may be the most important lesson from revisiting the original article.

A successful water strategy should not attempt to consume as much water as possible.

It should attempt to generate the greatest useful outcome from every unit of water.

That outcome could be:

• a litre of drinking water
• a kilogram of food
• a rupee of agricultural income
• a tonne of industrial output
• a restored hectare of degraded soil
• a secure groundwater reserve
• a new job
• a more resilient community

This is why the phrase “water productivity” may ultimately be more useful than “water availability.”

🇮🇳 From Water Security to Sovereignty

There is a larger reason to think about this.

India's future water problem will not necessarily be a simple shortage of water.

It may instead be a problem of timing, geography, quality, energy and allocation.

Rain may fall in one location while another location is experiencing drought.

Groundwater may exist but be too saline.

A city may have sufficient water today but face severe demand growth twenty years from now.

A farmer may have land but lack reliable irrigation.

An industrial cluster may have electricity but insufficient water.

A degraded landscape may have potential but require years of careful rehabilitation.

Sovereignty means having enough infrastructure and institutional capacity to respond to these differences deliberately.

Desalination can therefore be one part of a much larger sovereignty architecture.

🌱 The Bigger Opportunity: Rebuild the Landscape

Perhaps the most interesting version of the original idea is not about producing more agricultural output.

It is about changing what is considered economically possible in water-stressed regions.

Imagine a district that today depends heavily on uncertain rainfall and increasingly stressed groundwater.

Over twenty years, a carefully designed programme could potentially combine:

• desalinated water
• rainwater harvesting
• groundwater monitoring
• efficient irrigation
• soil rehabilitation
• salt-tolerant agriculture
• high-value protected cultivation
• renewable energy
• agricultural processing
• better storage and logistics

The objective would not be to turn the desert into Punjab.

The objective would be to create a productive ecosystem that is appropriate for the desert.

That distinction is crucial.

🔥 What the 2025 Article Got Right

The original article's numbers may have been too optimistic and its crop assumptions too simple.

But its central intuition remains valid:

India should think about water as strategic infrastructure rather than merely as a resource to be consumed.

The mistake would be to interpret that as a justification for massive desalination everywhere.

The stronger interpretation is almost the opposite.

Because desalinated water is expensive and energy-intensive, we should become much more intelligent about where every cubic metre goes.

🧪 The Next Step Should Be Simulation

This idea is now mature enough to be tested rather than merely discussed.

Take one real water-stressed coastal region.

Give it a hypothetical 100 MLD desalination plant.

Then simulate several competing strategies:

1. Conventional field agriculture
2. Millet-based agriculture
3. Date orchard development
4. Protected horticulture
5. Mixed agriculture and soil rehabilitation
6. Municipal-first water allocation
7. Municipal + industrial + agricultural allocation

For each scenario, calculate:

• water consumed
• energy consumed
• capital expenditure
• operating cost
• food produced
• economic output
• employment
• soil condition
• groundwater impact
• carbon impact
• brine-management requirements
• resilience during drought

Only then can we answer the question properly.

Not:

“Can desalination provide enough water?”

But:

“What is the highest-value future we can build with the water we can produce?”

💬 Final Thought

Desalination is not a miracle.

It cannot replace rainfall, eliminate groundwater depletion, repair every degraded soil or make every agricultural crop economically viable.

But it can change the boundary of what is possible.

The real opportunity is not to cover India with desalination plants.

It is to strategically place freshwater production where it can unlock something larger: secure cities, resilient industries, high-value agriculture, productive landscapes and eventually healthier soils.

Perhaps the most important unit in India's future water economy will not be the litre.

It will be the value created per litre.

And that brings us back to the original question.

India may not simply need more water.

It needs a better way to decide what its water is worth.

Learn and Grow, Don't Just Consume

India's groupings — BRICS, the EU, the Quad, or any that follow — must be judged by one question: what do we learn from them?

Context: Four days ago, the 18th BRICS Summit concluded in New Delhi — India's fourth turn as chair, under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." The leaders of China, Russia and Iran sat in our capital while our trade deficit with China stands at an all-time high. This essay is about how to hold both of those facts in one head without becoming either a nationalist or a naïf. It is the thesis statement of this entire blog — the piece that says what all the hardware detail was for.

Every discussion of Indian foreign policy eventually becomes an argument about identity. Are we a BRICS power or a Western-leaning one? Are we Global South or a US partner? Are we multi-aligned or fence-sitting? These arguments are unresolvable because they are category errors. A country is not its groupings. A country is what it can make — and make increasingly well with each passing decade.

So this essay proposes a single test to replace all the identity arguments, and then applies it ruthlessly — to BRICS first, because the summit just left town, and then to everyone else.

The test: does this relationship make India learn and grow, or does it only make India consume?

I. The Summit in the Mirror

Start with what actually happened. Eleven full members, ten partner countries, roughly half the world's population represented in the room. The chair's theme — resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability — is unimpeachable. And yet the two facts that frame India's relationship with this grouping went unmentioned in the photo-ops.

First: China is not a partner inside BRICS; it is the gravitational center. One country accounts for roughly 70% of the bloc's combined GDP. When BRICS speaks, the mouth is collective but the voice is Beijing's. Second: the economic relationship between India and the grouping's dominant member is not exchange — it is flow. In the fiscal year that just ended, China became India's largest trading partner again, with $151 billion in bilateral trade, and India's exports to China were $19.5 billion while imports were $131.6 billion. The deficit: $112 billion. An all-time high, up from $99 billion the year before, and from $44 billion five years ago.

Trade deficits are not inherently shameful — America ran deficits while building the world's largest economy. But look at what India buys with that $131 billion. It is not consumer trinkets. 98.5% of it is industrial goods. China supplies 43% of India's electronics imports, 40% of its machinery and computer imports, 44% of its organic chemicals — including the active pharmaceutical ingredients our generic drug industry feeds on. These are not purchases. They are dependencies. Each component India imports to assemble into something else is a small lease payment on someone else's capability.

And what flows back? What does India learn from this relationship? Here is the uncomfortable answer, and it is not a moral complaint but an accounting one: nothing that compounds. China sells India finished goods and protected intellectual property, and has never transferred a process technology to India — not one. There is no Chinese Dholera. There is no Chinese-assisted RISC-V program. There is no joint fab venture. The relationship, in strictly industrial terms, is that of a supplier to a customer — and the supplier is careful never to teach the customer to be a competitor. This is not villainy. This is exactly what India would do in China's position. It is simply what the test of "learn and grow" reveals: with respect to the bloc's largest member, India only consumes.

Russia, the other founding anchor, is a different story with the same ending. Historically, the Soviet Union and Russia were India's single greatest source of technology transfer — licensed Su-30 production, the BrahMos joint venture, cryogenic engines before politics intervened. That inheritance deserves respect, and the discount on crude is real money. But look at the direction of travel: Russia's technological base is sanctions-hollowed, its semiconductor industry is generations behind, its flagship co-development projects with India have collapsed or stalled, and its remaining leverage is energy and a Security Council vote. A partner whose technology is depreciating cannot be the pillar of a learn-and-grow strategy, whatever sentimental capital exists. Imports from Russia actually fell this past fiscal year. The market is already answering the question diplomacy has not.

II. The Thesis

Strip the emotion from it and the strategy writes itself:

Reduce the import of things that are finished.
Import, aggressively and from anyone who sells, the things that make things — tools, process knowledge, licenses, know-how.
Do this until no single country holds a chokepoint on India's critical inputs.
Do it with friends, with rivals, with frenemies. The seller's feelings do not matter. The buyer's learning does.

Every country that ever climbed from poor to rich did exactly this, and no country that did the opposite ever did. It is the most consistently successful economic strategy of the last two centuries, hiding in plain sight because each practitioner pretended it was something else — national revival, socialism, self-reliance, open markets. Underneath the ideology, the machine was the same.

III. The Proven Path

Japan, after 1868, sent students and engineers to every Western power with a checkbook and a notebook, bought machines and curricula wholesale, and called the doctrine "Western technique, Japanese spirit." Within two generations it was defeating a Western navy at sea.

Korea, in the 1970s and 80s, was poorer per capita than Ghana. Its champions licensed what they could not invent — Samsung's early DRAM designs licensed from an American firm, Hyundai's memory partnership with Texas Instruments — absorbed the process, and iterated past the teachers. Today Samsung is the teacher, and the licensing flows the other way.

Taiwan, in 1976, sent a government research team to America to bring back CMOS process technology, then did it again at company scale: when TSMC was an unknown startup with no customers and no credibility, Philips of the Netherlands took an equity stake in exchange for technology and manufacturing know-how. That stake, made to help a company no one believed in, became one of the most profitable investments in corporate history — and Taiwan became the indispensable nation of the semiconductor age.

China, from the 1990s, ran "market for technology" joint ventures at industrial scale, required transfer as the price of access, recruited diaspora engineers back by the tens of thousands, and when doors were closed, walked through windows. Its high-speed rail went from imported Kawasaki and Siemens trains to the world's largest domestic industry in fifteen years. Its semiconductor effort took longer and cost more, but the pattern held: the goal was never to buy chips. It was to become a country that makes chipmaking tools.

Notice what is absent from every one of these stories: dogma about groupings. Japan learned from the very powers it distrusted. Taiwan's foundational technology came through a Dutch company. Korea learned from Japan — a former colonizer. China's great technology partner of the 1990s and 2000s was America, its strategic rival. The practitioners of learn-and-grow did not ask whether the seller shared their values. They asked whether the purchase transferred capability. That is the whole of the doctrine, and the rest is commentary.

IV. India's Own Two Stories

India has run this experiment twice, once failing and once succeeding, and the difference between the two runs is the most important policy lesson this country owns.

The failure was the License Raj. From the 1950s, India pursued import substitution as dogma: protect domestic producers from foreign competition indefinitely, and capability would somehow follow. It did not follow. Protected from both competition and consequence, Indian industry had no reason to absorb anything, and the symbol of the era is the Ambassador — a 1956 Morris Oxford produced with minor changes until 2014 — while Japan was building Toyota and Korea was building Hyundai. The lesson is precise and uncomfortable: protection without discipline produces consumption of another kind — the consumption of one's own complacency. India did not fail at import substitution because it protected industry. Korea protected industry more aggressively than India did. India failed because it protected industry unconditionally, asking nothing in return.

The success was ISRO. In the early 1990s, India contracted with Russia's Glavkosmos for cryogenic engine technology — the one piece of the launch vehicle stack India lacked. The United States, enforcing non-proliferation rules, pressured and sanctioned the deal until the technology transfer was killed. India's response was not to find another seller. It was to build the cryogenic engine itself. Twenty years of patient work later, the indigenous upper stage flies routinely. The denial became the forcing function — and this is the deepest insight in the story: a learn-and-grow nation converts even refusal into capability. The sanctions India fought were, in the longest view, the finest technology-transfer program ISRO ever ran.

Between these poles sits Maruti-Suzuki — forty years of joint venture that genuinely transferred manufacturing culture, quality discipline and supplier ecosystems to India, and became the largest carmaker in the country. It proves the other half of the thesis: when a partner does teach, India learns as well as anyone. The problem is never the capacity to learn. It is the discipline to demand it.

V. The Discipline That Makes It Work

East Asia's practitioners added the ingredient India's first attempt lacked: conditionality. Korea and Taiwan gave their champions protection, cheap capital and a captive market — and attached expiry dates and export targets. Firms that failed to learn lost the protection. The state was an investor, not a patron: it bought capability and demanded returns.

Any Indian version — and the sovereign computing ecosystem sketched in this blog's earlier posts would be exactly that — must be built with the discipline wired in from day one. If the government mandates Indian hardware for its employees, that mandate must carry milestones: domestic value-addition that rises on a published schedule, components that localize tier by tier, and eventually, export performance. A mandate without a learning curve is not a strategy; it is the License Raj with better branding. The point of protecting a market is to create the space in which learning happens — and the moment learning stops being the condition of protection, the policy has become its own objective and must be dismantled.

VI. The Three Tiers of Substitution

"Reduce end-product imports" is the right instinct but too blunt a tool, because India's dependency is mostly not end products — it is components. The $131 billion of Chinese imports are overwhelmingly inputs that feed India's own factories. Tariffing them without a plan would simply tariff India's own manufacturing. The strategy therefore has to cut the problem into three tiers, each with its own instrument:

Tier	Examples	Instrument	Time Horizon
End products	Laptops, phones, finished electronics, servers	Substitute directly — domestic SoCs on domestic nodes, government procurement preference, the mandate	2028–2032
Components & industrial inputs	Display panels, PCBs, memory, power ICs, connectors, chemicals	Build domestically tier by tier — fab matures from 55/90nm through 28nm to 22nm FD-SOI; open-silicon IP fills the catalogue	2028–2035
Tools, process & knowledge	EDA licenses, lithography equipment, process transfer, IP licenses, research association, engineering talent	Import aggressively — forever. Never substitute this tier; even the US imports its lithography from the Netherlands and its leading-edge chips from Taiwan	Permanent

The third tier is where dogma does the most damage, in both directions. The protectionist who wants to substitute tools ends up with the Ambassador — a country that makes its own bad versions of yesterday's machines. The free-trader who happily imports finished goods while neglecting tool imports ends up with India's present — a brilliant services economy riding on imported hardware. The first refuses to learn; the second refuses to grow. The synthesis is a nation that buys capability the way a serious company buys R&D: on purpose, with budgets, with absorption plans.

VII. Pragmatic, Not Dogmatic: Groupings as Instruments

Now the question the summit forces: what should India do with BRICS?

The honest answer is that this is a genuinely contested question among serious people, and both camps have real arguments.

The exit camp says: the bloc's largest member dominates it economically, has never transferred a technology to India, actively enables India's principal strategic threat, and the grouping's expansion — Iran's membership, the partner-country category sweeping in Belarus, Cuba, Kazakhstan — tilts it toward the sanctions-resistance club that India has no business cosplaying membership of. Meanwhile, association carries costs: Washington has already threatened hundred-percent tariffs over BRICS de-dollarization talk, and India has trade friction of its own to manage without inheriting bloc baggage. Exit would clarify. Let BRICS become what its center of gravity pulls it toward, and let India stand apart from it.

The engagement camp says: BRICS has no defense clause, no common market, no binding commitments — the cost of the membership is nearly zero, while the chair is worth holding. Exit would hand Global South convening leadership to China outright, removing the one in-room counterweight at precisely the moment India is chairing the table. The forum has delivered things India wants — formal backing for its Security Council aspirations, counter-terrorism language, a development bank — and blocking the bloc's anti-Western framing from inside has value the outside cannot replicate. India's line, in the formulation diplomats actually use, is that BRICS should be non-Western but not anti-Western — and staying is how that line is enforced.

Both camps are arguing about identity. The learn-and-grow test dissolves the argument, because it does not ask whether BRICS is good or bad. It asks: what does India learn here?

Applied honestly, the answer for BRICS today is: little, in industrial terms — nothing from China, nothing from Russia that depreciates slower than it erodes. But not nothing at all: the chair is a stage; the members include Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, the Gulf states and much of Africa — markets, resource partners, and buyers of precisely the finished electronics India will eventually make at Dholera. A pragmatic chairing of BRICS treats the grouping as a sales channel and a diplomatic stage — never as a supplier of capability, because it has none to sell that India should want. That is not friendship and it is not hostility. It is what every serious power does with every grouping: extract the value, refuse the baggage.

And the same test, applied without sentiment to everyone else:

• The European Union — currently the world's densest concentration of learn-and-grow opportunity for India. The FTA is essentially done. Association with Horizon Europe, the €93.5 billion research program, is in formal negotiation. The TTC has explicit semiconductor, HPC, quantum and 6G cooperation tracks. Europe is open-sourcing its public sector onto the very stack this blog has been speccing — Linux, LibreOffice, Nextcloud — and its silicon research (the eProcessor, the 22nm FD-SOI ecosystem) is open-licensed. India should learn from Europe with both hands.
• The United States — the deepest technology pool on earth, the source of EDA tools and the RISC-V ecosystem's commercial muscle, and currently courting India as the counter-China pillar. The learn-and-grow exposure is enormous and the window is open precisely as long as India is seen as a counterweight rather than a competitor. Front-load it.
• Taiwan and Japan — the quietest and most important thread. India's fab exists because of a Taiwanese process transfer (PSMC), and its deepest manufacturing-culture transfer came from a Japanese joint venture (Suzuki-Maruti, forty years running). Both want geographic hedging of their own; both are willing to teach. These are the relationships to deepen without publicity.
• Russia — a relationship to manage with respect and clear eyes: energy at a discount, legacy defense spares, a Security Council vote, and no future in technology transfer. Consume less, sentiment less, and let the arithmetic do the negotiating.

None of this requires choosing a bloc. It requires a spreadsheet.

VIII. The Frenemy Window

One more timing point, and it is the most perishable fact in this essay. India is currently courted by every side at once — the US wants its counterweight, Europe wants its market and talent, Russia wants any market at all, Japan and Taiwan want their hedge. This four-way courtship is a temporary geopolitical condition, not a permanent feature of the world. The historical pattern is unambiguous: the moment a rising power is reclassified from counterweight to competitor, the tool taps get restricted. It happened to Japan in the 1980s and it is happening to China today.

The frenemy window argues for front-loading: sign the process licenses, the research associations, the equipment contracts and the university partnerships now, while every seller has its own reasons to want India to succeed. Capability, once imported, cannot be un-imported — sanctions arrived too late for ISRO's cryogenic engine precisely because the learning had already happened. The same logic, run in reverse, is the whole game: get the knowledge inside the border before the world's mood changes.

IX. What This Looks Like in Silicon

Every post in this series has been an application of this thesis without naming it, so let the thesis name them:

• The Dholera fab is a learn-and-grow transaction — a Taiwanese process transfer that converts a $112 billion component dependency into a domestic capability, tier by tier, node by node.
• The open-silicon catalogue — the CPU cores, the GPU, the NPU, the NVMe and display controllers, every block from the earlier survey — is learn-and-grow in its purest form: technology transfer with no counterparty, no export control, no negotiation. Open source is the one channel where the frenemy question never even arises, which is precisely why it anchors this blog's hardware roadmap.
• The eProcessor relationship — European research, openly licensed, validated on the exact 22nm process generation Dholera will eventually run — is learn-and-grow with a willing teacher, acquired for the price of participation.
• The modular laptop strategy — start at mature nodes, ship a real product, swap the compute module as the fab climbs — is learn-and-grow sequenced for a country: learn on cheap silicon, grow into expensive silicon.
• The Ubuntu + LibreOffice + Nextcloud stack is learn-and-grow software: consume nobody's finished product, adopt everyone's open capability.

The mandate proposed in an earlier post — Indian hardware for Indian government employees — is the demand-side instrument that makes the whole machine turn. But per Section V, it must carry learning curves and expiry dates, or it will be remembered as this generation's License Raj. That is the difference between a sovereign ecosystem and a subsidy farm, and the difference will be decided by whether the discipline is written into the design.

X. The Goal: No Chokepoint, Not Autarky

A final calibration, because "self-sufficiency" is the word that ruins these debates. Literal self-sufficiency does not exist at any level of the technology stack and never has. The United States imports its leading-edge chips from Taiwan and its lithography from the Netherlands. Taiwan imports its equipment from America. Japan imports its rare earths from China. The entire system is a lattice of mutual dependencies; the only question is which dependencies can be weaponized against you.

So the goal must be stated precisely: no single country above roughly 30% of any critical input category. Not zero imports — dispersed imports. Not self-reliance — chokepoint-immunity. A country that cannot be coerced through its supply chain can afford any ideology it likes about its groupings, because the groupings no longer decide anything material. That is the finish line. Everything in this essay is just the route.

The summit has left Delhi. The photographs will be forgotten in a week; the deficit will not. A pragmatic nation does not ask which club it belongs to — it asks what each relationship teaches, and it grades every one of them, every year, on that single question. Learn and grow, or merely consume: that is the whole of the test. India has run both programs before. One gave it the Ambassador. The other gave it a Mars mission for less than the cost of a Hollywood space film. The difference was never ability. It was the refusal to confuse belonging with building.

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Sources and data referenced in this essay: Government of India trade data for FY2025-26 as reported by the commerce ministry (bilateral trade with China of $151.1 billion, deficit of $112.16 billion); Global Trade Research Initiative analysis of DGCI&S data on India-China sectoral dependence; official BRICS 2026 chairship materials (Government of India / PIB) on membership, chairship theme and summit schedule; public reporting on the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, September 12-13, 2026; European Commission releases on the India-EU Trade and Technology Council, the India-EU FTA, and Horizon Europe association negotiations; historical accounts of Japanese industrialization, the Korea-Texas Instruments and Hyundai memory partnerships, the RCA-ITRI technology transfer of 1976-77, the Philips-TSMC investment of 1987, the Glavkosmos cryogenic engine episode and ISRO's indigenous cryogenic program, and the Suzuki-Maruti joint venture. Contested characterizations (including China's dominance of BRICS and the merits of exit versus engagement) are argued positions, presented here as the author's assessment, not established fact.

The Open Silicon Decade (Compressed): How Dholera, RISC-V and Open Hardware Could Change Indian Computing by 2030

A compressed, long-form version of the original essay (https://thesovereignpulse.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-open-silicon-decade-how-dholera.html) — designed as a durable reference point for the open-silicon story unfolding around India’s semiconductor ecosystem.

What if we look back from 2030?

Imagine it is December 2030.

India's semiconductor industry is no longer described primarily as an ambitious national project. Chips are being designed, fabricated, packaged and deployed at meaningful scale. Dholera is no longer just a construction site or symbol of semiconductor sovereignty. It is one node in a larger Indian design-and-manufacturing ecosystem.

And somewhere in that ecosystem, a curious thing has happened.

A meaningful share of the silicon running Indian products did not begin life inside the walls of a proprietary semiconductor company.

Some of it began on GitHub.

A RISC-V processor core. An accelerator. A GPU architecture. A video codec. A camera ISP. A PCIe controller. An NVMe controller. A security subsystem. A SoC interconnect. A complete RTL-to-GDS flow.

Engineers combined these building blocks, modified them, verified them, added proprietary pieces where necessary, and eventually turned them into masks and silicon.

That is the possibility worth examining today.

The most interesting consequence of Dholera may not be that India finally has a domestic semiconductor fab. It may be that India acquires a domestic silicon development loop — a loop in which open hardware, Indian university research, RISC-V, commercial IP, EDA tools, manufacturing, packaging and software increasingly reinforce one another.

There is no guarantee that this happens.

But the ingredients are beginning to exist.

Dholera is the manufacturing anchor

The starting point is the planned Tata Electronics semiconductor fab at Dholera, Gujarat, being developed in partnership with Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, or PSMC.

The current official description is important because it establishes the boundary between what is real today and what remains a future possibility.

Tata describes the facility as a 300mm fab with planned capacity of up to 50,000 wafers per month, initially targeting analogue and logic chips across the 28nm to 110nm range. Its intended markets include automotive, computing and data storage, wireless communication, IoT and other applications. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

That is already strategically significant.

But this article is interested in a slightly different question:

What happens if, during the second half of this decade, India's manufacturing and design ecosystem begins moving toward 22nm-class open-silicon designs?

That is a scenario, not a current Dholera commitment.

Likewise, discussion of FD-SOI should not be mistaken for an announcement that Dholera will become a 22nm FD-SOI fab. The present public technology plan is 28nm–110nm. Any future move to 22nm FD-SOI would require substantial process-development, PDK, IP, SRAM, device, materials and manufacturing work.

But the distinction matters because 28nm, 22nm and FD-SOI are not merely numbers on a roadmap.

They determine which kinds of computing architectures become economically attractive.

The real opportunity is the stack

It is tempting to frame semiconductor sovereignty as a race to build an Indian processor.

That is too narrow.

A modern chip is not just a CPU core.

A practical SoC needs memory controllers, interconnects, caches, DMA engines, interrupt controllers, timers, security, boot ROM, debug, storage interfaces, PCIe, USB, Ethernet, display interfaces, accelerators and often analogue or RF components.

Then comes the software:

• boot firmware
• device drivers
• operating-system support
• compilers
• debugging tools
• performance libraries
• AI frameworks
• graphics drivers
• applications

And beneath all of that is the manufacturing layer:

• PDKs
• standard-cell libraries
• SRAM compilers
• IO libraries
• physical-design flows
• verification
• timing closure
• packaging
• testing

This is why open silicon is potentially much more important than an open CPU.

Open silicon allows developers to assemble a technology stack.

RISC-V supplies an open instruction-set architecture. Projects such as SHAKTI, CVA6, BlackParrot, Ibex and VexRiscv provide processor implementations. Vortex explores open GPGPU architecture. Coral NPU and NVDLA explore neural acceleration. Fudan's OpenASIC projects demonstrate open video-processing hardware. Infinite-ISP addresses image processing. OpenTitan addresses hardware security. LiteX and related cores provide SoC infrastructure. OpenROAD and similar projects attack the physical implementation problem.

No single project solves the semiconductor problem.

Collectively, however, they begin to resemble a toolkit.

RISC-V is the critical common language

One clarification is essential.

RISC-V is not a processor.

It is an open instruction-set architecture.

That distinction is enormously important.

An ISA defines the language understood by a processor. Different organisations can build radically different CPUs that implement the same RISC-V ISA.

That means an Indian company does not have to design an instruction-set architecture from scratch merely to own its processor technology.

It can build a processor compatible with a global open standard and differentiate elsewhere: microarchitecture, cache hierarchy, vector engines, security, accelerators, packaging, power management, software or application-specific features.

India's Digital India RISC-V, or DIR-V, programme has already positioned RISC-V as an important component of the country's indigenous processor strategy, including projects such as SHAKTI and VEGA.

The strategic advantage is therefore not simply that RISC-V is royalty-free.

It is that RISC-V makes processor development composable.

SHAKTI proves that India can go beyond RTL

The most important Indian project in this story is arguably SHAKTI from IIT Madras.

SHAKTI is not merely a research CPU. Its stated objective is an open-source processor ecosystem spanning processors, SoCs and peripheral IP, with its components released under a three-part BSD licence. Its processor family ranges from embedded designs to higher-performance application and enterprise-oriented processors. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

The most important historical evidence is even more concrete.

SHAKTI's RISECREEK test chip was fabricated on Intel's 22nm FinFET process. The chip used a 64-bit RISC-V C-Class processor, was packaged in BGA, and successfully booted RISC-V Linux. The reported design closed at 350MHz and contained approximately 370,000 SoC gates. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

That fact changes the conversation.

India has already demonstrated that an open Indian processor design can travel from university research to physical silicon at 22nm.

The question for the 2030s is no longer whether this is technically possible.

The question is whether such capability can become repeatable, commercial and scalable.

The 22nm lesson

SHAKTI's 22nm tapeout is particularly interesting because it provides a bridge between open hardware and the sort of process technology often associated with modern embedded computing.

But one should not make the simplistic argument that a previous 22nm tapeout means Dholera can automatically fabricate the same design.

A chip design is tightly coupled to its process technology.

The PDK, standard cells, SRAM macros, IO cells, PLLs, memory compilers, design rules and physical-design methodology all matter.

A design that works on Intel's 22nm process does not automatically drop into a hypothetical Dholera 22nm process.

What the SHAKTI result demonstrates is something more fundamental:

Indian teams already understand the path from open RTL to real silicon at a relatively advanced node.

That institutional knowledge may ultimately be more valuable than the individual chip.

The FD-SOI wildcard

There is another technology worth watching closely: FD-SOI.

GlobalFoundries' 22FDX platform is perhaps the best-known example.

Unlike FinFET, 22FDX is a planar, fully depleted silicon-on-insulator technology. GlobalFoundries designed it to combine performance, power efficiency and cost advantages, particularly for IoT, mobile, RF, networking and edge applications. The company highlighted 0.4V operation, body-bias control and substantial power and die-size advantages relative to older 28nm technologies. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

The technology has also been used commercially at significant scale. GlobalFoundries said its 22FDX platform had shipped more than 350 million chips by 2020 and had generated billions of dollars in design wins. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}

Why does that matter to India?

Because it demonstrates that 22nm does not necessarily mean FinFET complexity.

FD-SOI can be attractive for chips where power efficiency, analogue integration, RF, embedded intelligence and cost matter more than absolute leading-edge density.

It is particularly interesting for the sort of computing that India is likely to need in enormous volumes:

• industrial controllers
• automotive electronics
• wireless devices
• edge AI
• IoT
• smart cameras
• routers
• storage controllers
• microservers
• embedded computers

But FD-SOI is not a simple upgrade to ordinary bulk CMOS.

A hypothetical Dholera transition would require SOI wafers, new process integration, device models, PDKs, standard cells, SRAM, analogue IP, RF IP, libraries and qualification infrastructure.

So the right way to describe FD-SOI is not “the obvious next node for Dholera.”

It is better described as a strategically interesting branch of the possible Indian semiconductor roadmap.

Europe provides another piece of the puzzle

India does not have to build this ecosystem alone.

Europe has been developing its own open-computing infrastructure, and the connection is increasingly interesting.

The European eProcessor project demonstrated an open RISC-V ecosystem with a 64-bit out-of-order processor, accelerators and Linux-capable FPGA prototypes. Most importantly, the project resulted in an ASIC fabricated at GlobalFoundries' 22nm process. European reporting described it as a first European out-of-order RISC-V processor fabricated in silicon at 22nm. :contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}

That creates an interesting India-Europe axis.

Europe brings deep semiconductor expertise, research institutions, equipment companies and advanced chip-design capability.

India brings a huge engineering workforce, growing electronics demand, RISC-V programmes, university research and an emerging manufacturing base.

The Netherlands is particularly significant because of ASML and the wider Dutch semiconductor ecosystem.

Tata Electronics and ASML announced a strategic partnership in 2026 covering lithography tools, fab ramp-up, training, local skills and R&D infrastructure for Dholera. :contentReference[oaicite:6]{index=6}

That relationship should be viewed as more than an equipment transaction.

It connects India to one of the most sophisticated semiconductor ecosystems on Earth.

And it creates a plausible pathway for collaboration between Indian universities, European research institutions, equipment companies and Indian manufacturing.

The accelerator layer is where things become interesting

Once a RISC-V CPU becomes relatively accessible, the next question is obvious:

What do you put beside it?

This is where open accelerator projects become important.

Coral NPU

Google's Coral ecosystem provides an important distinction between proprietary silicon and open architecture.

The original Coral Edge TPU is a proprietary Google accelerator. But Google's newer Coral NPU architecture is explicitly intended as open-source IP for silicon partners. It is RISC-V based and released under Apache 2.0. The published architecture targets scalar, vector and matrix computation, with a design point aimed at roughly 512 GOP/s and low-power operation at 22nm. :contentReference[oaicite:7]{index=7}

This is precisely the kind of IP that could become useful in an Indian SoC ecosystem.

A domestic chip does not necessarily need a gigantic GPU.

It may need a modest CPU plus a highly efficient neural accelerator.

NVDLA and Gemmini

NVIDIA's NVDLA project provides another example of open accelerator architecture. It is designed as a configurable deep-learning accelerator with RTL, simulation and verification infrastructure.

Berkeley's Gemmini takes another approach, providing a configurable systolic-array accelerator generator suitable for machine-learning workloads.

These projects illustrate an important future model:

The processor may become the coordinator while specialised accelerators handle the workloads that actually consume most of the energy.

The open GPU problem

The GPU is considerably harder.

There are open graphics and compute architectures, but GPUs are not merely collections of arithmetic units. A usable GPU requires memory management, command processing, compiler infrastructure, APIs, drivers, graphics pipelines and years of software optimisation.

That is why Vortex is so interesting.

Vortex is an open-source RISC-V GPGPU architecture with simulator, RTL and FPGA implementations. Its ecosystem has expanded substantially, including graphics functionality, tensor-oriented features, memory-management capabilities and software-stack work. Recent versions have also added more conventional graphics-pipeline functionality and Vulkan-related infrastructure. :contentReference[oaicite:8]{index=8}

It should not be confused with a drop-in replacement for an AMD or NVIDIA gaming GPU.

But it demonstrates something important:

The architecture of a programmable parallel processor can exist outside the traditional proprietary GPU ecosystem.

Could an open GPU reach 1 TFLOPS?

This is one of the more interesting thought experiments for 2030.

Suppose an open GPU architecture currently demonstrated primarily through FPGA implementations is scaled substantially using a suitable ASIC process.

At a high level, 1 TFLOPS of FP32 performance requires roughly one trillion floating-point operations per second.

That is no longer an absurd number for an ASIC.

But it would be a mistake to translate “1 TFLOPS” directly into “gaming GPU.”

Gaming performance depends on far more than arithmetic throughput.

• memory bandwidth matters
• cache architecture matters
• texture performance matters
• rasterisation matters
• driver maturity matters
• Vulkan/OpenGL support matters
• shader compilation matters
• CPU performance matters
• game-engine compatibility matters
• anti-cheat and application compatibility matter

A 1-TFLOPS open GPU could therefore be a fascinating accelerator without being a competitive gaming GPU.

Nevertheless, the trajectory matters.

If open GPU architectures become sufficiently mature by 2030, India could theoretically build SoCs containing a RISC-V CPU, an open vector unit, a neural accelerator and a programmable GPU — all assembled around an open architecture rather than licensed as a monolithic proprietary design.

Video is another surprisingly important opportunity

One of the most interesting projects outside the better-known RISC-V world comes from Fudan University's ASIC and video-processing research ecosystem.

Fudan's OpenASIC work includes open H.264 and H.265 hardware IP. Its xk265 project, for example, provides RTL for an H.265 encoder and targets applications including 4K video. Fudan's research group has also demonstrated silicon-proven video-processing hardware. :contentReference[oaicite:9]{index=9}

This is strategically important because video codecs are exactly the sort of functionality that benefits from hardware acceleration.

A domestic camera, surveillance system, automotive computer or media appliance does not need a gigantic general-purpose CPU to encode and decode video.

It needs dedicated hardware.

And that hardware can sit next to a RISC-V CPU.

The camera could become another open-silicon domain

India's electronics ecosystem is already deeply involved in smartphones, cameras, automotive electronics and surveillance.

That makes image processing another logical target.

Projects such as Infinite-ISP demonstrate that an open-source image signal processor can be developed for ASIC and FPGA use.

The implications are considerable.

A future Indian smart-camera SoC could potentially combine:

• SHAKTI or another RISC-V CPU
• an open ISP
• a neural accelerator
• video encode/decode hardware
• security hardware
• LPDDR or other memory interfaces
• Ethernet or wireless connectivity

That is much more commercially plausible than attempting to build an Indian equivalent of the entire smartphone application-processor industry on day one.

Storage is another missing piece

The open-hardware ecosystem also contains work on storage.

IIT Madras has previously demonstrated an open NVMe controller implementation capable of running on Xilinx FPGA platforms. OpenSSD projects have similarly explored open SSD controller firmware and hardware platforms.

The significance is easy to underestimate.

Storage controllers are everywhere.

They sit inside SSDs, servers, embedded systems and data-centre infrastructure.

They are exactly the kind of specialised silicon where an open design could be valuable if the verification, NAND interface and firmware ecosystem mature sufficiently.

In other words, open silicon does not have to begin with glamorous processors.

Some of the first successful products could be extraordinarily boring.

And that is a good thing.

The boring IP may be the most valuable IP

Every SoC needs infrastructure.

Projects such as LiteX provide SoC-building infrastructure and a large ecosystem of interfaces. LitePCIe provides PCIe functionality. LiteSATA handles SATA. LiteSDCard handles SD-card interfaces. Other open projects cover Ethernet, HDMI and additional peripherals.

These are not headline-grabbing technologies.

But they reduce the amount of proprietary engineering that has to be recreated for every chip.

That is exactly what an ecosystem needs.

Open hardware becomes powerful when developers stop having to reinvent the same blocks repeatedly.

The objective is therefore not to find one miraculous open-source processor.

It is to create a library of reusable, verified building blocks.

Connectivity remains difficult

Wireless is a particularly important warning.

OpenWiFi demonstrates that open FPGA-based digital/baseband implementations of Wi-Fi are possible. But a commercially deployable wireless chip also needs RF circuitry, analogue components, calibration, power management, packaging, certification and a mature software stack.

Similarly, an open HDMI implementation does not eliminate all commercial licensing and compliance considerations associated with HDMI products.

USB, PCIe and Ethernet are much more approachable than an entire cellular modem.

This distinction matters because open hardware enthusiasts sometimes underestimate the non-digital parts of semiconductor design.

Opening the RTL does not automatically open the entire chip.

RF, analogue, memory, PHYs, SerDes and certain interface technologies remain major barriers.

Security could become an open layer

OpenTitan is perhaps the clearest example of why hardware security belongs in this discussion.

It is an open-source silicon Root of Trust platform designed to provide secure boot, cryptographic functionality and hardware security infrastructure.

For India, the significance is strategic.

A domestic SoC does not merely need an open CPU.

It needs to establish trust in the boot chain, firmware, keys and security-critical hardware.

An open security architecture makes independent verification possible in ways that are much harder with completely opaque proprietary subsystems.

What would a 2030 open-silicon stack actually look like?

The most useful way to think about the opportunity is as a layered stack.

Layer	Examples	2030 role
ISA	RISC-V	Common processor architecture
CPU	SHAKTI, CVA6, BlackParrot, Ibex, VexRiscv	Application, embedded and control compute
Vector	Ara and related PULP work	SIMD/vector workloads
GPU	Vortex and other research architectures	Parallel compute and potentially graphics
NPU	Coral NPU, NVDLA, Gemmini	AI inference
Video	Fudan OpenASIC	H.264/H.265 acceleration
ISP	Infinite-ISP	Camera/image processing
Storage	IITM NVMe, OpenSSD	SSD and data-storage controllers
Security	OpenTitan	Root of Trust
SoC infrastructure	LiteX and related cores	Interconnect and peripheral integration
Interfaces	LitePCIe, LiteSATA, LiteSDCard, Ethernet, HDMI	Peripheral connectivity
Wireless	OpenWiFi	Open digital/baseband experimentation
Physical design	OpenROAD, OpenLane	RTL-to-GDS implementation
Verification	Verilator and open verification ecosystems	Simulation and validation
Software	Linux, Zephyr, Ubuntu	Operating systems and applications

The table is not a claim that every component is production-ready.

That distinction is essential.

Some projects are mature enough for commercial use. Some have silicon evidence. Some are FPGA-proven. Some remain primarily research projects.

The opportunity lies in moving projects upward through the maturity ladder.

The maturity ladder

Open silicon should be evaluated through several stages:

1. Concept — architecture and research paper.
2. RTL — synthesizable implementation exists.
3. FPGA — hardware has been demonstrated on programmable logic.
4. ASIC synthesis — physical implementation is feasible.
5. Tapeout — design has become silicon.
6. Functional silicon — fabricated chip actually works.
7. Production — repeatable manufacturing exists.
8. Product — customers buy it and software supports it.

This is the discipline the open-silicon movement needs.

A GitHub repository is not a chip.

An FPGA demonstration is not a production SoC.

A tapeout is not a product.

And a working chip without drivers is not a computing platform.

The real achievement will be moving open projects through the entire chain.

That is where Dholera becomes strategically important

A domestic fab changes the economics of experimentation.

Without a domestic manufacturing base, an Indian university or startup can design silicon but remains dependent on foreign foundries for fabrication.

With a domestic fab, the possibility emerges of a more integrated loop:

Research → RTL → verification → physical design → tapeout → Dholera → packaging → software → product.

That loop could be extraordinarily valuable.

It would allow Indian universities to work on real manufacturing constraints rather than purely theoretical architectures.

It would allow startups to prototype application-specific chips without building an entire semiconductor manufacturing operation.

It would allow the government to fund reusable IP rather than repeatedly funding isolated chip projects.

And it would allow the manufacturing ecosystem to learn which open IP is actually robust enough for commercial silicon.

The EDA problem is just as important

Open hardware is meaningless if designers cannot turn RTL into manufacturable layouts.

This is why OpenROAD matters.

OpenROAD is an open RTL-to-GDS flow intended to automate and simplify the physical implementation process.

It does not eliminate commercial EDA tools. Nor should it be portrayed as a magical replacement for Synopsys, Cadence or Siemens EDA.

But it demonstrates that more of the chip-design toolchain can become open and reproducible.

That matters for universities.

It matters for startups.

It matters for experimentation.

And eventually it matters for national capability.

India should therefore think about semiconductor sovereignty at two levels:

• manufacturing sovereignty — the ability to fabricate domestically
• design sovereignty — the ability to create, modify and verify the IP used in those chips

Neither is sufficient alone.

Software will determine whether the hardware matters

This may ultimately be the most important point in the entire argument.

Hardware is useless without software.

RISC-V has already gained substantial software support, and Linux is central to making application-class RISC-V hardware practical.

Canonical has been expanding Ubuntu support for RISC-V and describes the architecture as an important open platform for future computing. Current Ubuntu documentation supports riscv64, with newer releases aligning with increasingly capable RISC-V platform profiles.

That creates an opportunity for India.

Imagine a 2030 Indian RISC-V workstation or development board that boots Ubuntu, runs GCC and LLVM, supports containers, compiles mainstream software and exposes open accelerator APIs.

It does not have to beat an Apple M-series processor or an AMD Ryzen CPU on every benchmark.

It simply needs to be good enough, open enough and available enough to create a developer ecosystem.

Once developers target the platform, hardware improvement becomes much easier to justify.

Could there be an Indian RISC-V laptop?

By 2030, this is entirely plausible as an ecosystem experiment.

A hypothetical Indian laptop SoC could contain:

• a multi-core RISC-V CPU
• a vector engine
• a modest GPU
• a neural accelerator
• video decode/encode
• display controllers
• PCIe
• USB
• security hardware
• memory controllers

The first generation would probably not compete directly with the best x86 or ARM laptop processors.

But that is not the correct benchmark.

The first benchmark should be whether the platform can support real Indian developers and institutions.

Can it run Linux?

Can it compile software?

Can it browse the web?

Can it run development environments?

Can it support AI inference?

Can students inspect the hardware?

Can startups modify the SoC?

Can a government department deploy it without depending entirely on a foreign processor roadmap?

If the answer becomes yes, the strategic value is already substantial.

And smartphones?

Smartphones are a much harder target.

A modern smartphone application processor integrates an extraordinary amount of IP: CPU, GPU, NPU, ISP, video, display, memory, modem, security, power management and high-speed interfaces.

The cellular modem alone is a massive challenge.

Therefore, “India will build a fully open smartphone chip by 2030” is not a sensible baseline assumption.

A more credible path is incremental:

1. embedded controllers
2. industrial SoCs
3. automotive controllers
4. edge-AI chips
5. storage controllers
6. network processors
7. development boards
8. servers and accelerators
9. eventually, more integrated consumer SoCs

The semiconductor industry is built through accumulated competence.

It is rarely created by jumping directly to the hardest possible product.

What India should actually build

This leads to a policy conclusion that is different from the usual semiconductor narrative.

India should not try to build the Indian CPU.

It should try to build the Indian open silicon ecosystem.

That means funding infrastructure rather than only flagship chips.

Imagine a national programme with the following components:

• open RISC-V cores
• open accelerator IP
• open peripheral IP
• open verification infrastructure
• PDK access for universities and startups
• standard-cell and SRAM libraries
• reusable chiplets
• shared test-chip programmes
• shared MPW shuttle runs
• commercial-quality documentation
• Linux and compiler support
• long-term maintenance funding

The objective would be to create something closer to an open semiconductor commons.

A university team could build a new accelerator.

A startup could integrate it into an SoC.

A design house could optimise the physical implementation.

A fab could manufacture it.

An OS vendor could support it.

And a product company could commercialise it.

That is an ecosystem.

The biggest mistake would be to confuse openness with free

Open-source hardware does not mean semiconductor development becomes cheap.

Verification remains expensive.

Physical design remains difficult.

Packaging remains expensive.

Wafer runs cost money.

High-speed PHYs are difficult.

SRAM is difficult.

Analogue design is difficult.

RF is difficult.

Certification is difficult.

Software maintenance is difficult.

The economic advantage of open silicon is therefore not “free chips.”

It is shared development.

One organisation builds a verified component. Others can use it.

One university develops a compiler backend. Others benefit.

One company validates an interconnect. Others do not have to start from zero.

That is how software ecosystems achieved extraordinary leverage.

The long-term question is whether some of that leverage can move downward into hardware.

Why 2030 is a useful deadline

2030 is close enough to force realism and far enough away for ecosystems to compound.

By then, today's research repositories will have had several years to mature.

Today's FPGA projects could become ASIC projects.

Today's ASIC projects could become products.

Today's university researchers could become startup founders.

Today's students could become the engineers designing the next generation of Indian SoCs.

And today's Dholera fab could have evolved from a first manufacturing operation into a platform around which additional design and manufacturing capabilities have accumulated.

The most important metric in 2030 should therefore not be:

“How many chips did India manufacture?”

It should be:

“How many complete semiconductor products can Indian engineers take from architecture to working silicon?”

That is a much more meaningful measure of technological sovereignty.

The 2030 scorecard

If we were writing the retrospective in 2030, the open-silicon experiment should be judged on a few simple questions.

Question	What success would look like
RISC-V	Multiple Indian commercial processors and SoCs
SHAKTI	Production-grade processors beyond academic demonstrations
AI	Domestic RISC-V SoCs with competitive edge-AI accelerators
GPU	Open programmable graphics/compute silicon with usable software
Video	Open codec IP used in commercial products
ISP	Open image-processing blocks integrated into camera SoCs
Storage	Open controller technology reaching commercial SSD/storage products
Security	Open Root-of-Trust technology deployed at scale
EDA	Open flows routinely used for research and selected production designs
Software	Linux/Ubuntu and developer tooling treated as first-class RISC-V platforms
Manufacturing	Dholera supporting repeated domestic tapeouts and commercial production
Ecosystem	Universities, startups, fabs and global technology companies sharing development

The deeper geopolitical significance

Semiconductor sovereignty is often presented as a competition between countries.

But the more important competition may be between closed dependency and technological optionality.

India will continue to use processors designed abroad.

It will continue to use ARM-based systems.

It will continue to buy x86 servers.

It will continue to use NVIDIA GPUs and proprietary networking hardware.

None of that contradicts semiconductor sovereignty.

Sovereignty does not mean refusing foreign technology.

It means having alternatives when strategic circumstances require them.

An Indian company that can design a RISC-V SoC has more options than one that cannot.

An Indian university that can modify a processor has more options than one that can only buy it.

A country with domestic fabrication has more options than one completely dependent on overseas fabs.

A country with domestic packaging and testing has more options than one dependent on foreign assembly.

And an ecosystem that can combine open IP with proprietary IP has more options than one locked into a single vendor.

Optionality is the real meaning of sovereignty.

The Dholera opportunity is therefore larger than the fab

The most important question surrounding Dholera is not simply whether the fab produces 50,000 wafers a month.

It is what happens around those wafers.

Does India create enough chip designers to keep the fab busy?

Does it create PDK and IP expertise?

Do Indian universities tape out chips regularly?

Do startups use domestic manufacturing?

Do Indian companies develop reusable IP?

Does software arrive early enough to support new hardware?

Do European and American technology companies participate in the ecosystem?

Do Dutch semiconductor institutions deepen collaboration with Indian universities?

Does ASML's involvement become a pathway for training and R&D rather than merely equipment supply?

Do Indian companies learn to qualify and manufacture increasingly complex products?

These are the questions that determine whether Dholera becomes a fab or becomes an ecosystem.

The most interesting future may not be one giant Indian chip

It may instead be thousands of smaller decisions.

A university chooses RISC-V instead of a proprietary architecture.

A startup adopts an open accelerator.

An engineer contributes a verified PCIe block.

A research team develops a better vector unit.

A government programme funds an MPW shuttle.

A fab develops a better design-enablement flow.

A software company adds another layer of Linux support.

A packaging company develops a better module.

A product company takes all of it and ships something.

Then another company reuses part of that work.

That is how ecosystems compound.

From GitHub to GDSII to Dholera

There is a powerful mental model hiding underneath all of this.

For much of the history of computing, the chain was:

Proprietary architecture → proprietary IP → proprietary fabrication → proprietary software.

The emerging open-silicon model offers another possibility:

Open ISA → open RTL → open verification → open physical-design tools → domestic fabrication → open software.

It will not be completely open.

It does not need to be.

The most practical future is likely to be hybrid.

Open processor cores alongside proprietary PHYs.

Open accelerators alongside licensed memory technology.

Open software alongside proprietary applications.

Domestic manufacturing alongside globally sourced equipment.

Indian design alongside European, American, Taiwanese and Japanese IP.

That is not a weakness.

It is how the modern semiconductor industry actually works.

Conclusion: The open silicon decade

India's semiconductor story is often told as a race to build a fab.

That is only the first chapter.

The more consequential story could be what India chooses to build around that fab.

Dholera provides the manufacturing anchor.

RISC-V provides an open architectural foundation.

SHAKTI demonstrates that India can take an open processor into real silicon.

European projects such as eProcessor demonstrate that open out-of-order RISC-V designs can reach 22nm silicon.

22FDX demonstrates that 22nm FD-SOI can deliver a compelling combination of power, performance, RF integration and cost for the right applications.

Coral NPU, NVDLA and Gemmini show how open acceleration could evolve.

Vortex demonstrates the possibility of open programmable parallel computing.

Fudan's OpenASIC projects show what open video hardware can look like.

Infinite-ISP points toward open imaging.

IIT Madras and OpenSSD projects point toward open storage.

OpenTitan addresses security.

LiteX and related projects address the infrastructure that makes SoCs possible.

OpenROAD attacks the physical-design barrier.

Linux and Ubuntu provide the software foundation.

And the emerging Tata-PSMC-ASML ecosystem connects Indian manufacturing to some of the world's deepest semiconductor expertise. :contentReference[oaicite:10]{index=10}

None of these pieces, individually, creates technological sovereignty.

Together, however, they suggest something much more interesting.

India may not need to invent every component of the semiconductor industry.

It needs to become capable of assembling, modifying, improving and manufacturing enough of the stack that it retains meaningful choice.

That is the opportunity.

And if the story works, then by 2030 we may look back at the present moment not as the beginning of India's semiconductor manufacturing era, but as the beginning of something broader:

India's open silicon era.

The journey could be as simple to describe as four steps:

GitHub → RTL → GDSII → Dholera → silicon.

But the consequence could be much larger.

Because once engineers can repeatedly make that journey, India stops being merely a consumer of computing architectures.

It becomes a participant in creating them.